Perceived Social Media Marketing Activities and Its Impact on Customer Retention and Consumer Attitude

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: pass, , course: Ph.D in Business, language: English, abstract: This study aims to contribute to an improved understanding of the nature and dimension of perceived social media marketing activities in the UK retail clothing industry. This thesis embraces the major perceived social media marketing activities of clothing retailers which namely: entertainment, interaction, trendiness, customization and word of mouth. It also investigates if there¿s an existence of relationship between social media marketing activities and customer retention as well as the relationship between customer retention and consumer attitude. Social Exchange theory and Ranaweera and Prabhu's (2003) holistic approach were the major theories used in this research.; two factors is identified in this study because of time limitation that determines customer retention and the rest of the factors has been recommended for further research: customer satisfaction and customer trust.

Social media marketing activities has become vital for organisations in an online environment. Although the role of social media marketing activities has been examined in an online marketing environment, their existence and significance in predicting customer retention has not been explored. This research examines the impact of social media marketing on customer retention and particularly focuses on the activities UK clothing companies¿ uses and their impact on customer retention and consumer attitude.

The data were collected through online questionnaires from over 220 retail clothing customers in London and United Kingdom. Over-all, the strategy for evaluating the psychometric properties of the measurement is split into two parts: measurement model calibration and measurement model validation which involve Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). All intended hypotheses are tested using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM).