How has the internet changed consumers over the past 10 years and how marketers can adapt?

Nowadays, 2.4 billion people around the world have access to the internet and therefore to a variety of social media platforms which enables consumers to connect and communicate with others, share, consume and create content about topics of their personal interest (Blazevic, et al., 2013). The purpose of this article is it to develop a theoretical framework of how the digital revolution, which is characterized by the development of the internet, has changed the roles between consumers and companies regarding to the information provision and procurement over the last years. The analysis will be done by reviewing existing literature and by comparing the communication behavior before the and after the advent of the internet has taken place. Furthermore, this article highlights the major opportunities and challenges that have emerged and provides suggestions of how marketers can adapt this changes to their existing marketing strategy in order reach the company goals by using company examples.

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How has the Internet changed consumer over the past 10 years and how can marketers best adapt?

With the new media landscape we face a new era of consumer involvement that for the companies needs attention to. The new way of approach is the use of social media such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other Web 2.0 platforms. As said this is where the consumers are, contributing, sharing and accessing constantly on the overall World Wide Web. This new thing is not only for shaping the consumers but also to empower them in the fields of internet marketing. For the marketers this means that if they can through social media influence the consumers’ perception and behavior then marketers can reap the commercial gains as long as companies are willing to adapt to the behavior of their consumers (Akar and Topcu, 2011).

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Your Brand under Attack: Negative electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and online Firestorms in Social Media Part 2

Although the importance of this topic seems to be extremely high, research is still in its infancy. There is a wide variety of academic articles available that describe the changing paradigm of word-of-mouth, yet there is only limited literature available that examines how brands can deal with negative electronic word-of-mouth and online firestorms within the social media context. This may be connected to the fact that its emergence, its development and its consequences happened in a rather short period of time. However, from popular press articles, Thomas et al. (2012) gathered and analyzed a variety of company examples. Thereby, they identified five general coping strategies, delay, respond, partner, legal action, and censorship, which will be illustrated with cases below. 

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Your Brand under Attack: Negative electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and online Firestorms in Social Media Part 1

In 2012, just 39 cents were enough to trigger an ‘online firestorm’ that broke over McDonald's Germany. What happened was that the leading fast-food brand had raised the price of its cheeseburger by exactly that amount. As a consequence, many consumers expressed their unhappiness about the price increase by communicating their displeasure on McDonald’s Facebook wall (Frickel, 2012). This in itself does not seem to be unusual within the highly-connected online world in which many companies manage their own social media presences and respond to or interact with consumers. However, it becomes unusual if the number of ‘likes’ and comments on one critical social media comment rise to exorbitant levels. Within 48 hours 81,000 users clicked on the ‘like’-button and 6,800 users commented. The company responded one day later and announced that the price for the cheeseburger would not be raised in most restaurants (Frickel, 2012).

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Social Media Marketing for Building a Strong E-loyalty

In the past few years, we have seen radical changes and advances on the Internet, which has brought new opportunities and challenges in not only our lifestyle but also various business over the world. The Internet has a great power beyond imagination. Especially, The Internet is more meaningful when it comes to business performances. It is not optional anymore but mandatory to make use of the Internet in business perspective.

The start of the digital marketing is probably from the advent of web 2.0. People started to use the terminology, web 2.0, to illustrate a new platform whereby content and applications are not created and issued by individuals anymore, but instead are continuously updated and changed by all users on the Internet where people can easily access (Kaplin & Haenlein, 2010).

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