Research Activity @ ABS

From Obama’s success to the Arab spring, from Kolaveri Di in India to Gangnam style, social media is omnipresent. We no longer go to the news, news finds us; we no longer visit merchandise, merchandise find us; social media has shrunk the globe beyond imagination. Social media is based on the combined notion of influence and participation – tools that synchronize their voice with the company’s voice and that combined voice affects the next customer. The development of social media networks have made it feasible for the customers to speak to thousands of other customers concerning a particular brand or a company.

Growing popularity of Facebook has made it a value-adding marketing channel for the small and medium sized businesses. As a marketing medium characterized by low cost and minimum risk it attracts small scale entrepreneurs to utilize this new platform i.e. brand fan page of Facebook as a business communication tool for reaching out to customers.

Considering the significance of Facebook as social media marketing platform for businesses and the lack of understanding of this area, a research was conducted by Ms. Chetna Kudeshia (Assistant Professor – Asian Business School) wherein she conducted a research to identify the significant relationship between brands “liked” on the Facebook fan pages and brand love, word of mouth, and purchase intention from potential buyer perspective. The research was conducted taking five popular small scale entrepreneur backed firms on the basis of the number of likes on their fan pages. The study reveals a positive relationship between “liked” brands on Facebook fan-page and brand love. Further, the study finds that liking the fan pages is essentially converted into WOM, and it results into purchase proposition.

The Paper which is titled “Spreading love through fan page liking: A perspective on small scale entrepreneurs” by Ms. Chetna Kudeshia (Assistant Professor – Asian Business School) has been published in an International Journal – Computers in Human Behavior, Elsevier in Vol. 54 (2016),pp. 257-270. The link for the paper is: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215300819

This is another feather in the cap in the research area at Asian Business School.