Research Paper Example on Influence of Advertising on Millennial Technology Purchases

Introduction

Businesses have benefited a great deal from advancements in information technology. Increasingly, businesses find easier ways to advertise products and services, sell to a global consumer base, and receive and respond promptly to customer feedback. Advertising is effective when done over mediums consumers can easily access. Millennials are an important subset of consumers, and modern businesses recognize the fact that they have grown side by side with and experienced the exponential growth in online environments, which they continue to experience. Businesses require interactive digital technologies to access millennials as their consumers. Increased diversification of technologies has led to the development of universal homogeneity among millennials.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The way that millennials perceive advertising is critical for the decision-making process in advertising companies. Attitudes and levels of usage of digital platforms differ between developed and developing countries (Moreno et al. 2017). Such information permits the understanding of market behaviour dynamics. Besides forecasting future market trends, consumer perceptions about information technology also allow businesses to understand customer perceptions of technology brands. This study determines if advertising over social media (Facebook) is an effective way to communicate product quality, and the correlation between social media advertising and intension to purchase amongst millennials.

Social media platforms are presently important advertising mediums due to their effectiveness. Businesses increasingly find social media platforms as critical tools for accessing a globalized market where consumer power continues to increase. Consumer attitudes and perceptions of social media advertising has attracted numerous studies (Dabija, Bejan, and Tipi 2018; Rodney and Wakeham 2016). There is a consensus among these authors that digital advertising can be enhanced to allow success in brand awareness, customer-business communications. Hall, Towers, and Shaw further observe that social media advertising allows businesses to track behavioural and attitudinal changes among different consumer subsets.

Extant studies on the attitudes and behaviours of millennials towards social media advertising present more research gaps than the insights. Bolton et al. (2013) observed that most studies focused on the behaviours and attitudes of student populations whose attitudes and behaviours were likely to change over time. The most recent study by Leljak and Dobrinic (2019), for instance, research on the attitudinal and behavioural responses among millennials to advertising. The study focused predominantly on traditional products and services. Hence, there is a gap in as far as the study, the relevance of social media advertising to technology products is concerned. The present study examines how Facebook advertising influences millennials’ intention to purchase technology products. A broad spectrum of millennials was surveyed, including those seeking employment and young working adults drawn from urban and rural settings.

Research Questions

Given the existing research gap, this empirical investigation seeks to pursue several research objectives: Foremost, the study will determine whether digital advertising influences the attitudinal and behavioural component of millennials regarding technology purchases. In general, advertising is a multi-layered process that begins by attracting customers. Once the product is visible to the customer, business then follows the product and service knowledge and awareness with persuading the customer to like the product or service. Next, the customer is made to consider the product or service as their preference, which should lead to the intention to purchase, and the ultimate purchase decision. Digital marketing processes follow a similar strategy. However, as key social media platforms that provide the digital marketing medium to become saturated, it is crucial to determine how businesses fight for marketing space. In this regard, the study will seek to answer the following research questions:

1. Does advertising through Facebook impact on intention-to-purchase technology products among millennials?
2. What is the impact of advertising through Facebook on technology purchases among millennials?

Literature Review

Product promotion should lead to customer action in the sense that they convert a potential customer from having an interest in the brand and purchasing it. The customer should be able to act within a short time of interacting with the advertisement message (Dierks 2017). Thus, the advertising is intended to have a clear and specific call to action, which provides an explicit explanation to the audience. A detailed breakdown of how the brand addresses customer needs is necessary to convert interest to purchase. The marketing process does not end with the purchase. The acquisition of a product or service marks another critical stage. The customer should exhibit satisfaction in the product or service. There should be mechanisms that allow for the evaluation of customer satisfaction trends. Businesses must offer after-sales services and support so that they can collect such information. Social media is efficient in this regard and permits the analysis of customer satisfaction trends.

Traditional Marketing

Traditional media, which includes television, radio, print, outdoor, in-store, and promotional literature, was expensive in the sense that they required many resources to circulate, and was not accessible to most small businesses. New advertising strategies address most of the limitations. Websites can also act as the medium for promoting other products and services. However, considering the many websites that have been created over time. Businesses can make their websites more visible across search engines by ranking them higher using search engine optimization. There is also search engine marketing, where companies can buy adds on search engines that appear on pages when potential customers make web searches. Banner advertising also allows businesses to display their brands that, when customers click, direct them to parent sites. There is also email marketing, which involves sending newsletters and product promotions to customer email addresses. However, all these approaches, though relatively new, are not practical. The growth of information technology has seen a shift from information sources with consumers preferring digital platforms that allow duplex interactions as opposed to traditional platforms.

Transition to New Advertising Mediums

There has been an exponential growth in internet consumption, accompanied by improvements in speeds and transactional capacity. At the start of the current millennium, there were under 5 million internet users across the globe (Hall 2017). By mid-2012, this number had grown to about 170 million (Hall 2017). This growth is hugely due to the increase in the volume of portable devices that enhance convenience and efficiency. The growth of the internet into the present 4G communication has been accompanied by an exponential growth in the number of internet users, who engage through social media platforms. Also, the larger percentage of the world’s population is under 30 years (McCormick 2016). However, the amount of revenue allocated to advertising that targets millennials remains low. In the past, this has been because social media posts attracted less traffic as most directed potential customers to embedded websites. Increasingly, social media platforms are investing more time and resources on research and development so that they can take advantage of the big data that is made available through consumer online traffic patterns. There are many social media platforms that differ in the way that consumers interact between each other and how they interact with businesses.

Social Networking Websites and Apps

Videos and social networking platforms have become more relevant in advertising as the digital space opens for marketing optimization. There is a great power that videos and photos have on the digital space. Videos sent over social media sites such as Facebook helps businesses better communicate their product specifications, functioning, and maintenance. Social media sites such as YouTube are essential for such communication. They also allow the creation of online communities that help get feedback and collect design and specification ideas. Businesses can customize products based on customer needs using such feedback. Social media also allows for consumer-consumer and business-consumer communication. Increasingly, social media is incorporating features that permit the collection of user data and help to tailor advertisements based on consumer preferences. Such relationships are intended to help brands improve the translation of ad views to purchases. These social media platforms differ in the size of audience they contain, with Facebook having the largest audience base that is available for businesses.

Growth of Social Media

A review of social media activity indicates that there has been a significant increase in click-through rates across major social media platforms. There has been an increase in the volume of advertising content on social media platforms in the past ten years. The conversion rate for product and service offers advertised over the digital platform has increased significantly, with marketing departments aligning their advertising strategies towards digital marketing. According to Leljak and Dobrinic (2019), the perceptions and attitudes of college students towards social media advertising have continued to shift towards the positive end of the spectrum. Whereas five years ago, most college students were either indifferent to or did not respond to social media advertising, this trend has changed progressively. Social media platforms also record increased income per session from advertising due to the vast presence of consumers on the platforms and increased communication activity. Social media platforms introduce consumers to information about products, and allow them to interact with such information in di...