A Study of Effect of Social Media on Buying Behavior of Customers with Respect to Online Branding & Brand Perception

Recent years have witnessed the rise of new media channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Twitter, which enable customers to take a more active role as market players and can be reached by almost everyone, anywhere and anytime. These new media threaten long established business models and corporate strategies, but also provide ample opportunities for growth through new adaptive strategies. Online branding and other social media networks have a growing role in marketing, which has important implications for how consumers, channels, and companies perform. In social media settings, consumers provide online feedback about products, and this feedback is visible to other agents, including other consumers, channel partners, competitors, and investors. This paper introduces a new ‘‘pinball'' framework of new media's impact on relationships with customers and identifies key new media phenomena which companies should take into account when managing their relationships with customers in the new media universe. For each phenomenon, we identify challenges for researchers and managers which relate to: (a) The understanding of consumer behavior (b) The use of new media to successfully manage customer interactions (c) The effective measurement of customers' activities and outcomes.