A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CUSTOMER INTERACTION VIA SOCIAL MEDIA OF SMALL-SCALE FASHION
RETAILERS:FOCUS ON UNITED KINGDOM AND U.S.A
INTRODUCTION
Digital media has been mainstream in our everyday
lives and more importantly, in the way we handle
business over the past decade (Ahmad, et al., 2015).
Social media has been a strong competitor to
traditional media because of the ease of use and
instantaneous ability to pass information to a massive
number of users (Wikström & Ellonen, 2012).In
modern times, we find traditional print media playing
a game of catch-up by adopting social media features
to avoid losing their share in the market (Wikström &
Ellonen, 2012). Research shows that adolescents and
teens engage twice as much with digital media over
the past decade than in decades past, with a 32% rise
from 2006-2016 and reduced time spent on
traditional media (Twenge, et al., 2019) With this
information, it is safe to infer that conventional media
is on a steady decline (Twenge, et al., 2019)
.
RESEARCH PROBLEM
The rationale for this research will be:
• To look into the ability of social media to
influence customer decision.
• To compare the retail fashion business between
U.S.A and United Kingdom
• To look into why the retail fashion industry social
media business in U.S.A is more influential than in
the United Kingdom
RESEARCH AIM
To compare micro fashion retail businesses in these
two locations to Identify similarities and differences
in how these types of companies use social media to
grow their business. Evaluate what impact these if
any have on overall business performance
differences
RESEARCH QUESTION
How do micro fashion retail firms use social media
outlets to interact with customers and promote brand
reputation in U.S.A and United Kingdom?
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES:
• To identify how fashion retailers use social media to
engage with their customers.
• To identify how fashion retailers use social media to
manage their customer relationship.
• To evaluate the impact of customer engagement via
social media on sales
• Compare the use of social media to influence
customer relationship management in the United
Kingdom and U.S.A.
LITERATURE REVIEW
SMALL-MEDIUM ENTERPRISES:
• Small-medium scale enterprises are categorised as
businesses with under 250 employees (Ayandibu &
Houghton, 2017)
• They are considered essential in that they help push
the economy forward and require little capital (Aremu
& Adeyemi, 2011).
• In the U.K., 99.9% of the business population
comprises of S.M.E's with a 1.9% (113,000) increase in
the past year (Barton, 2020).
SOCIAL MEDIA:
• Social Media sharing sites like Instagram and
Facebook have been very influential in the upheaval of
trends and designs in the fashion industry (Park, et al.,
2016).
• With over a quarter of the world's population using
their platforms and 2.5bn monthly active users (J.
Clement, 2020) media sharing platforms like these are
the best place to reach the largest audiences (Baird &
Parasnis, 2013)
• Consumer culture has also evolved over the years.
They now have the power to influence decisions of
S.M.E.'s and large organisations alike with little as a
"post" via social media sites like Twitter and in some
cases, affect significant change (Henninger, et al., 2017)
Reference s
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