The Research On Firms' Social Marketing Strategies Under The Perspective Of Relationship

The development of information technology has made social media prosper.On one hand,firms can establish social accounts on social media to make connections with consumers.On the other hand,the firms can take advantage of social capital among consumers to do marketing campaign.However,the academic research still lags behind practical terms.Meanwhile,the firms are lack of theoretical support.Based on the theory of social capital,marketing management,game theory and two-sided market,the impact of the relationship between firms and consumers and the influence of the relationship among consumers is quantitatively studied.After defining the social marketing,the values transferring mechanism in social environment is analysed.Then the influential factors are categorized.For the firms,channel strategies and promotion strategies are discussed.For the social platforms,pricing strategies are studied.Firstly,the optimal sharing bonus in sharing reward programs is worked out by the nested Stackelberg game model.Then the impact of social relationship between customers and impression effect is discussed.The results show that the stronger the social relationship is or the higher bonus is,the more efforts the inductors will make to persuade the inductees.In addition,the firms should take the social relationship into consideration when setting the optimal sharing bonus.The stronger the social relationship is,the less the sharing bonuses should be offered,and the higher expected profits will be.However,if the inductors care the impression,the firms have to offer more bonuses.Secondly,the optimal design of sharing reward program is studied.Three reward strategies including solely reward the inductors,solely reward the inductees and reward both the inductors and the inductees are discussed.Meanwhile,the comparison of profits is made between direct marketing and sharing reward program.The main results show the reward choice of the strategy is relied on price and relationship among users.If the relationship is weak,the impact of discount is stronger than the impact of sharing.And it is reasonable to reward the inductee only.It is on the contrary if the relationship is strong.And it is suitable to reward the inductor only.The main factors which have influence on whether adopting direct marketing or sharing reward program are market penetration and social relationship.Thirdly,the channel strategies on social media are studied.On the background of single channel and dual channel,Stackelberg game models are constructed to explore the impact of relationship between firms and consumers on information service provision and pricing strategies.Some results are found.In the single channel,(i)whoever has stronger social relationship should provide more service.(ii)If the information service is provided by the retailer,the manufacturer has no need to enhance the wholesale price.(iii)Both the manufacturer and the retailer can benefit more from providing information service,and the one who offer information service will benefit less from it than the one who doesn‘t offer information service.(iv)The whole supply chain will obtain more profits if the information service is provided by the one who holds stronger social relationship.In the dual channel,(i)whoever has stronger social relationship with customers should provide more information service.(ii)When the manufacturer provides the service,she will charge a higher direct price than the wholesale price.(iii)When the retailer provides the service,the direct price is equal to the wholesale price,and the manufacturer has no need to enhance the wholesale price.(iv)Both the manufacturer and the retailer can benefit more from the information service provided by themselves.(v)Each in the whole dual-channel supply chain will be more profitable when the manufacturer provides the information service.Fourth,the impact of the relationship between retailers and consumers on channel coordination issue is discussed by Stackelberg game.The results show that each one in the channel will benefit more after coordination.Both substitutability between retailers and the level of social relationship have an impact on channel coordination strategy.When the substitutability is low,manufacturers have no willing to coordinate.And it is possible to occur that the profits of manufactures and retailers with coordination are smaller than those without coordination.If the relationship is too strong or too weak,the social media retailers will get fewer profits.On the contrary,the traditional retailers will get more profits on the same condition.Each one in the channel can enhance its profits when it satisfies to some condition.Finally,the pricing strategy of social media platform on different market environment is studied by two-sided market and theory.Considering two types of users on the platform,which are sharing-type and browsing-type,a game model is constructed.The results show that the monopoly platform can enhance the price as the ratio of sharing-type user increases.However,as the ratio of sharing-type increases,the competition of two platforms becomes much fiercer.As a result,the price will decrease if there are two duopoly social media platforms.Moreover,if merchants are multi-homing,the trend of the price will differ at three stages with the the ratio.The less disparity of the benefits vendors enjoy from interacting with users,the more profits can be achieved when the platform is monopolistic or merchants are multi-homing.More and more firms begin to utilize social media to do marketing campaign.No matter the social platforms or the firms,the relationship among consumers should be taken into consideration when making social marketing strategies.The main results are testified by simulation,which show practically useful.