THE STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING ON PURCHASE INTENTION: A CASE STUDY OF BLUESEED DIGITAL COMPANY. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Business Management BSc cohort 16 Student’s name: Bui Duy Thuan Student ID: 2124783 Supervisor: Anupam Mazumdar Date: 1st May 2023 Abstract Social media marketing is becoming increasingly popular and important nowadays. Blueseed Digital company is a digital marketing agency that helps clients to promote products. There is lots of competition in this industry.
This research aims to investigate the impact of social media marketing on purchase intention in Viet Nam in the case study of Blueseed Digital company. Additionally, the study also explores factors of social media marketing that influence the purchase intention of the customers. From this, the study suggests appropriate strategies for Blueseed Digital company to improve social media marketing to target customers and catch their attention. This study was qualitative research.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 6 participants in Ho Chi Minh city, in Viet Nam. Thematic analysis was used to analysis the interview transcripts of the participants. The research findings indicated that social media marketing influenced the purchase intention of customers. The results showed that four themes of social media marketing had impact on purchase intention, including ―Content of the advertisement,‖ ―Information of the product in the advertisement‖, ―Electronic word-of-mouth‖ and ―Interaction between brand and customers‖.
The theme ―Content of the advertisement‖ had three subthemes to explain more about this theme. The study suggests some strategies to improve social media marketing of Blueseed Digital company to affect purchase intention of the customers. This study provides a valuable contribution to this field of academic resources. Also, the study offers new insight for future studies in this topic.
Keywords: social media, social media marketing, purchase intention, Blueseed Digital company. ii Acknowledgement First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Anupam Mazumdar. His support and guidance throughout this dissertation's project were great contributions and valuable to me to complete this study. I would also like to express my gratitude to Mr.
David Ratcliffe and Ms. Pham Thi Tuyet Trinh for providing support to help me conduct the study. Also during the research period, I could not have done it without the supports of tutors and staffs from Ho Chi Minh University of Banking and University of Bolton. I am so grateful for the staff of Blueseed Digital company for supporting me to collect data for the research.
I cannot thank you enough for my participants, who spent their time sharing their ideas with me in the interview. Finally, I also want to thank my family and friends, who always love, support, and encourage me to do this study. iii Table of content Abstract. iii List of tables and figures.
vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .1 Overview of social media marketing .2 Overview of Blueseed Digital company .4 Research aim and objectives. 6 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .3 Social media marketing .5 Theory of Planned Behavior.1 The research of Angella Jiyoung Kim and Eunju Ko (2010) .2 The research of Mai Ngoc Khuong and Tran Thi Huong (2016) .3 The research of Bader M. 19 iv CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY .2 Branches of philosophy .8 Techniques and procedures.1 Data collection method .3 Data collection approach .4 Data analysis technique .5 Reliability and validity .2 Description of the sample.1 Theme 1: ―Content of advertisement‖ .2 Entertainment in advertising .3 Right time for advertising .2 Theme 2: Information of the product in the advertisement .3 Theme 3: Electronic word-of-mouth .4 Theme 4: Interaction between brand and customers .1 Discussion of the findings .2 Contribution of the study .3 Implications of the study.4 Limitations of the study .5 Recommendation for future research. 66 Appendix 1: Research ethics checklist form.
66 Appendix 2: Interview questions. 73 Appendix 3: Interview transcript of coder. 76 Appendix 4: Interview transcript of marketer. 80 Appendix 5: Interview transcript of sales manager.
84 Appendix 6: Interview transcript of digital marketing agency. 88 Appendix 7: Interview transcript of IT help desk manager. 92 Appendix 8: Interview transcript of student. 95 vi List of tables and figures Figure Figure 1: Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991).
13 Figure 2: Research model of Kim and Ko (2010). 16 Figure 3: Research model of Mai and Tran (2016). 18 Figure 4: Research model of Almohaimmeed (2019). 19 Figure 5: Research onion model (Saunders et al.
20 Figure 6: Thematic map. 36 Table Table 1: Demographic information of participants. 35 vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Overview of social media marketing Social media is becoming more and more popular nowadays. It has become an alternative communication tool between people around the world (Gautam and Sharma, 2017).
In recent years, the number of users on social media platforms are enormous. According to Dixon (2023), the number of users of Facebook in the world in the fourth quarter of 2022 was approximately 2.96 billion monthly active users. In Viet Nam, from the report of the Ministry of Information and Communication of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam (2022), in September 2022, Facebook had the highest number of users in the country with 75.6 million active users, followed by Zalo, a local social media platform, with 74.1 million active users. With a huge user base and the rapid growth of social media platforms, marketers now can have more options to approach target customers that can reach a million people in a few seconds.
As a result, social media has changed the world of marketing (Dash et al. Felix et al. (2017) stated that social media marketing is the concept that uses social media together with other channels to create value for stakeholders to achieve the goals of the organization. Social media marketing had an effect on customer engagement (Barger et al.
Also, Du et al. (2017) stated that an opinion of a person may change due to social networking sites. The contents in social media marketing are various and flexible to catch the attention of customers. However, sometimes, it can be annoying that people ignore social media advertisements (Liu et al.
This 1 demands marketers to understand more about aspects of the customer as well as social media marketing to have an effective marketing campaign. Many studies about social media marketing were conducted thoroughly. Nevertheless, the research about the influence of social media marketing on purchase intention was little and the related studies in Viet Nam were rare. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of social media marketing on purchase intention in Viet Nam.2 Overview of Blueseed Digital company Blueseed Digital Joint Stock Company is a marketing agency that focuses on social media marketing, content marketing, data-driven service, etc.
The company is established in 2014. Blueseed Digital became Vietnam’s top 1 Video Ad Network and Vietnam’s top 2 multi-platform Ad Network that reached 9 million video users in 2015. Blueseed Digital became partner with Google, Facebook, Tiktok, etc. The company is an expert in digital marketing that has customers from various industries like the banking industry, delivery services industry and soft drink industry, … The company already has in-house marketing.
This allows the company to implement detailed plans from the beginning of the process to finally evaluate and report the results to the client.3 Problem statement Blueseed Digital company is a marketing agency that helps clients (brands) promote products/ services to attract their target customers. The company was very successful in working with small brands and organizations. However, Blueseed Digital company currently faces a big challenge. The company struggled with normal and luxury brands, 2 in social media marketing field.
The support of the company was no longer as effective for the clients as it used to be in the past. With this problem, the company can lose its clients in this sector to competitors. For the company, the most important thing is what factors affect purchase intention in social media marketing and why it happened. There are a lot of theory and empirical studies about the influence of social media marketing on purchase intention (Kim and Ko, 2010; Balakrishnan et al., 2014; Mai and Tran, 2016; Gautam and Sharma, 2017; Laksamana, 2018; Almohaimmeed, 2019).
However, nearly no research uses qualitative research and is conducted in Viet Nam market.4 Research aim and objectives This research aims to investigate the influence of social media marketing on purchase intention of customers in Viet Nam to help firms understand and improve the quality of social media marketing plans. To do it, the following one will be the objectives: 1. To explore the factors of social media marketing that affects purchase intention of customers. To evaluate the impact of social media marketing on purchase intention.
To propose recommendations for improving social media marketing of Blueseed Digital company 1.5 Research question After the research objective is the research question. What factors of social media marketing affect the purchase intention of customers? 2. What is the impact of social media marketing on purchase intention? 3 3. What could be done to improve the social media marketing of Blueseed Digital company? 1.6 Research scope The research was conducted to analyze the impact of social media marketing on purchase intention.
In terms of space: The interview is conducted for people who have interacted with social media, in Ho Chi Minh city, in Viet Nam. In terms of time: This research is carried out in 5 months from December 2022 to April 2023 1.7 Research significance Academic contribution: Previous studies were lack of qualitative research and not analyzed in Viet Nam market. This research was qualitative research and conducted to explore the impact of social media marketing on purchase intention. Also, it builds an appropriate research model that is suitable for the situation of Viet Nam.
This research contributes and enriches academic research about social media marketing. In addition, the research results become a resource for future studies in this topic. Practical contribution: This study explores the factors of social media marketing that affect the purchase intention of customers in Ho Chi Minh city, in Viet Nam. In addition, this study evaluates the impact of social media marketing on purchase intention.
From the results of this 4 study, the author suggests some appropriate implications and strategies. This supports Blueseed Digital company to provide better products and services to help clients catch the attention of target customers.8 Research structure This research contained five chapters: Chapter 1: Introduction In this chapter, the author will present background information, the reasons for choosing this topic, then discuss research objective, research question and research scope. Also, the author will provide research contributions and research structure. Chapter 2: Literature review In chapter two, the author will conduct a critical literature review about the concepts and roles of social media, social media marketing and purchase intention.
Then, it reviews about the theoretical base and previous studies, related to this topic. Chapter 3: Research methodology The third chapter will present and make justifications for the choices, including the research philosophy, research approach, research strategy, research choice, time horizon, technique, procedure and research ethics. Chapter 4: Findings In chapter four, the author will demonstrate the results through thematic analysis. From this, the author discusses and evaluates the impact of social media marketing on purchase intention.
5 Chapter 5: Conclusion and Recommendation Chapter five will summarize the findings to make a conclusion and some recommendations. Also, in this chapter, the author will show the academic and practical contribution as well as limitations of this research for future research.9 Conclusion In chapter one, the author demonstrated the overview of the research topic about the impact of social media marketing on purchase intention, problem statement, research aim, objectives, research question, significance and the structure of the study. In the next chapter, the author would discuss the literature review of this study. 6 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.