Building brand awareness through social media influencers

Abstract

Nowadays social media are used by a large amount of consumers specially to look for information from someone else and to manifest themselves by showing their point of view. These online platforms offer an opportunity to actively interact with other consumers, and to be part of the social communities that can influence the way of acting of their members: companies no longer represent the sole source of communication for their products. Within this context, new online strategies such as electronic word of mouth represent the right way to influence a consumer during its purchase decision process and increase the awareness about a brand. Thus, the purpose of this research is understanding how the electronic word of mouth, as the one driven by influencers, can affect the consumers’ decisions and could be the right tool to be used by a firm to rapidly spread the awareness of a brand; in fact people listen to the influencers because they are seen as peers and so trusty sources of information, respect to the traditional form of advertising driven just to bring sales. Finally, in order to validate that the influencer approach can be a very useful tool, the focus will shift on the analysis of primary and secondary data of a new product from Ferrero: Grand Ferrero Rocher, since it was launched in Germany in 2015 and it still have problems connected to a very low awareness.