What are the secret ingredient companies can find using research + social media?

Understanding customers is crucial for service marketing research and an essential requirement for successful service business practice (Gummesson et al., 2014). Customers are becoming more active online these days, and a variety of online platforms can provide important information about their thoughts, experiences, and habits.

Online consumer data opens up new possibilities for creating tailored, high-quality services (Heinonen and Medberg, 2018). This article will show how netnography as a tool may assist researchers, marketers, and business decisions in making better use of such data.

            First of all, let's understand what Netnoghaphy is. 

Have you ever heard about this terminology? Maybe not, but you may know when we explain the meaning. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ethnography is a descriptive study of a particular human society or the process of making such a study. Besides that, Netnography uses ethnography combing to the online communication (as social media, communications and connections that people build online with each other), in other words, (Inter) net + (eth) nography. As a result, the researcher decides to pay close attention to context.

 

                                                             (Harrison Hayes, 2013)

                                                                                   

Customers' online presence was confined to virtual groups of enthusiasts discussing similar interests and developing their cybercultures when Robert Kozinets created netnography. Netnography is authentic, discreet, efficient, powerful, relevant, spontaneous, unforced. Since its inception more than two decades ago, netnography has been used to grow business, management, and consumer research sectors and has evolved into a word encompassing a growing number of research activities.

BigData can analyze and collect some insight from virtual communities. However, netnoghaphy considers social media not just as a research site or tool but also as an ongoing marketing intelligence and insight generation system. Social media research is human research in a netnography. Netnography is a type of cultural inquiry that seeks to understand people better. Netnography entails retaining an anthropological interest with the human and being socially grounded, epistemologically self-critical, and axiologically attentive to concepts of societal improvement.       

Netnography consists of six components:

• Research Planing
• Entré
• Data Collection
•  Interpretation
• Ensuring Ethical Standards
•  Research Representation    

6. 

This technique guides the research to the actual conversation about a brand and its products. In other words, an honest perspective from who buys from you in real-time. Netnography offers several benefits over other research methods (Heinonen and Medberg, 2018). The unique value is that it excels at telling stories, comprehending complicated social phenomena, and assisting researchers in generating themes from the consumers' perspectives. (Kozinets, 2002). Consumer interactions and representations of their behaviours, experiences, perceptions, and assessments occur at many times. For example, how they felt about a brand yesterday, how they encountered the brand today in-store, how they will assess the branded product once purchased, and comments made on social media and an image uploaded on Instagram.

The presence of the researchers influences and disrupts the normal, routine activities of everyday life when using these traditional approaches. As a result, netnography is more realistic, objective, and unobtrusive than focus groups or interviews, as well as faster, easier, and less expensive than conventional ethnography. (Kozinets, 2002).

Netnography has been used to investigate a variety of issues linked to consumer culture and consumer behaviour. For example, Thanh and Kirova (2018) used netnography to examine the wine tourism experience using the experience economy model, considering 825 original reviews posted on TripAdvisor by tourists who visited Cognac (France). The results show that the experiences are globally positive. Another example is Kozinets' (2010) research of online coffee enthusiasts who visited Starbucks and Peet's, among others, which resulted in the creation of an insider language rich in local jargon regarding java that could be utilized to interact with local users.

Marketers may benefit from netnography. Even small or large businesses may improve their understanding of client trends happening today and incorporate them into future product developments. The key is not to use it for information but to develop a strategy to use social media to increase brand exposure effectively. Consumers are using newsgroups, chat rooms, e-mail list servers, personal World Wide Web pages, and other online formats to exchange ideas, establish communities, and connect other consumers who are viewed as more objective information sources and reading advertising and corporate websites (Kozinets, 2002). Netnography offers a range of new insights decision-makers increase innovation (Hayes, 2013), providing: community management, competitive analyses, choice-making, brand perception.

 

•         A real case of using the Netnography:  

Kozinets (2010)

For millions of people, the sight or scent of Campbell's soup evokes memories of comfort, warmth, family, and childhood. However, refining its designs for its online community, Campbell's Kitchen, brand managers realized that typical surveys and focus groups that inform them weren't giving the insight they needed. Campbell's soup was a non-player online.

There appeared to be a missing component. So the soup conglomerate looked to the new science of netnography to see whether it might give tools for understanding how the Internet was altering their consumers' day-to-day habits and decisions. The findings provided Campbell's with a set of significant recommendations that assisted the firm in creating a responsive new version of the site. The unique monthly visits increased from 120,000 before the major relaunch in October 2008 to more than one million by January 2009. Interactions grew in number, emotional depth, and thematic range.

      Can the beverage industry take some advantages as well? 

Absolutely! Big companies already highly use these techniques to benefit the business. Drinks consumers are an engaged group and love to find more people to talk about the choices, even for coffee, wine, beer or passionate about the specific brand.

In conclusion, Netnography is a perfect ingredient designed to understand social interactions via digital communications. Compiling data on the Internet provides a new perspective of customers' opinions without directly ask it – based on observation, online interaction is possible to produce qualitative data. This technique can understand trends and what your customers care about, resulting in precise insights into the developments of new products and strategies.

  

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Author - Manuella Ferro

MSc. Digital Marketing, Dublin Business School

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Focus Keywords: #Netnography #BeverageIndustry #DigitalAgency #SocialMediaReserach #NetnographyinBeverageIndustry #Agencyforbeverageindustry #Netnographybeverage #ResearchSocialMedia #SocialMediaCommnity #DrinksCommunity

Reference: 

 

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Lugosi, P. and Quinton, S. (2018). More-than-human netnography. Journal of Marketing Management, 34(3-4), pp.287–313. Available at: https://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=2fee0e06-7c0b-4a64-a8d4-fd07e53c14ff%40sessionmgr4008 [Accessed 28 Jun. 2021].

Marketing Science Institute (2016). Netnography: Social Media for Cultural Understanding. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLC_sw4a1mM [Accessed 28 Jun. 2021].

Thanh, T.V. and Kirova, V. (2018). Wine tourism experience: A netnography study | Vo Thanh, Tan; Kirova, Valentina  | download. https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-business-research. Available at: https://booksc.org/book/67156378/6d052c [Accessed 28 Jun. 2021].

V. Kozinets, R. (2010). Netnography: The Marketer’s Secret Ingredient. MIT Technology Review. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/10/14/199923/netnography-the-marketers-secret-ingredient/ [Accessed 28 Jun. 2021].