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Introduction
In the recent past when the Chinese smartphone maker “OnePlus” pitched its high specificity, relatively low-priced smartphone, “OnePlus 6”, it took the entire smartphone market by a storm. The marketers executed a well-conceived idea of scarcity marketing which made the smartphone highly desirable by millions of smartphone users across the globe. The idea was to make the product an exclusive one, which could be procured via a referral mode only. This strategy coupled with efficient marketing communication via different channels, especially the social media, helped in inciting a sense of brand passion for the newly launched smartphone among millions of users and finally skyrocket its sale within just a few days of the product launch. The idea behind the activities carried out by the marketers as mentioned above is mainly to generate a strong desire and passion for a particular brand. Brand passion refers to the customer’s intense feeling for the brand. It is characterized by various senses of motivations, such as uniqueness and social identity (Keh et al., 2007).
Social media, the most popular communication platform in the modern era, provides a very conducive platform to the marketers for connecting with the existing as well as the prospective customers. At present, most of the companies today constantly keep on advertising their products or services and engage with their target customers in social networking sites like Facebook, microblogging websites like Twitter, and video sharing websites like YouTube. Consumer engagement using virtual communities are “specific interactive experiences between consumers and the brand, and/or other members of the community” (Brodie et al., 2013). As per independently published reports, the main purpose of marketers to advertise via social media is to generate brand awareness (Nielsen, 2013). According to the same report, marketers use social media as a branding tool in conjunction with other traditional channels. Dedicated budgets for paid social media advertisements are being allocated by big corporations to maximize their footprint in the social media and they are looking forward to increasing the budget in years to come.
Conceptually, social media marketing activities can be categorised into firm-created content (FCC) and user-generated content (UGC). FCC in social media are initiated by the marketers, such as the banner advertisements on social networking sites; brand fan...