interactive marketing

Interactive marketing can significantly improve brand awareness as Social media enables very specific targeting of difficult to reach groups and allows consumers to learn from and teach others about a brand, as well as expressing their commitment to a brand (Keller 2009). Furthermore from a marketer’s perspective, if dealt with correctly, creative consumers can be a gold mine of ideas as they can identify opportunities that can become sources of revenue (Berthon 2007). A brand embracing the creative consumer is Starbucks, who have launched their own community website called ‘mystarbucksidea.com’ where consumers can submit their own ideas for new coffee creations and the most popular ones get chosen to be made in Starbucks stores. The social media activities of brands such as Starbucks provides opportunities to elevate brand value by creating a platform to exchange ideas and information with creative consumers which in turn positively effects brand awareness (Kim 2012; Kucuk 2007), hence reinforcing the importance of this new two-way communication between brand and consumer.

Another area that’s covered in the literature is the emergence of User-Generated content (UGC) especially on platforms such as the video-sharing site Youtube. UGC in the form of videos can vary across a spectrum of creativity, ranging from informal discussions about a product/service all the way up to the promotion or demotion of brands through self-created advertising videos which then go viral (Berthon 2008). An example of such a video is ‘United Airlines breaks guitars’ (Sonsofmaxwell 2009) which was created and uploaded by an angry customer; it now has over 13 million views on Youtube and has no doubt increased United Airlines brand awareness, but for all ...

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...etween consumer to consumer online, it is even more essential for brands to build an interactive community on Social media so that their brand is positively shared and liked amongst consumers.

This process of consumers ‘sharing’ product information with one another through Social media has led to a level of consumer ‘informedness’ never seen before. Clemens (2008) says consumers now know far more about the availability, attributes and prices of brands and so this consequently empowers consumers even more. Winer (2009) continues by saying how this has led to an improvement and in consumer rights and thus consumerism in general. For example websites such as ‘TripAdvisor’ (tripadvisor.co.uk) allows people to read thousands of holiday reviews submitted by other consumers; therefore it is regarded as a much more trustworthy review than one on a company’s own website.