A critical realist analysis of social media marketing on Facebook : a case of Brownsense

Abstract

The study is conducted in South Africa, a developing country in which Small and Micro Enterprises (SMEs) have the potential to contribute to socio-economic development. The study also takes place at a time when SMEs can harness the advantage of social media marketing which has been enabled by the proliferation of social media platforms. Social media platforms provide access to large audiences which, for a long time had been prohibitively expensive for smaller companies with small revenues. The study looks at the performance of SMEs from a marketing perspective. It is informed by findings from literature review, which indicates that there are very few studies with an explicit philosophical underpinning in marketing. The dominance of quantitative research has been flagged as a concern in the field of marketing (Hunt, 1994). A lot of research in marketing is quantitative, and undertaken without an explicit philosophical underpinning and thus the researchers “seem to take a positivist position without perhaps realising it” (Easton, 2010:118). This study therefore argues for the need for qualitative studies and studies with an explicit philosophical underpinning. The study used grounded theory with a critical realist underpinning. The open nature of the grounded theory enabled the development of a framework for analysing marketing promotions which constituted the 4Ps, the Shostack (1977) product-service continuum and the Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) model. The Shostack (1977) product-service continuum contributed to enabling the components of a product to be revealed using a tangibility spectrum. In this study products were thus broadly characterized on a spectrum ranging from goods on one end, characterised by a dominant tangible core to services on the other end which were initially classified as predominantly intangible. However Shostack’s critique of intangibility being one of several characteristics of services led to the service end of the continuum classified as having a dominant service core. For products with a dominant tangible core, the data revealed that the nature of products contributes to the number of comments, for example the nature of car tyres is such that consumers make an enquiry based on tyre sizes and this increases the number of comments. On the other hand, products like chicken do not require specification, and as such consumer comments reflected a move towards intention to purchase. The data thus revealed that the nature of products may render the quantification of comments an unreliable measure of the success of a promotion. Products with a dominant services core were further classified as having characteristics beyond intangibility. The data revealed that these products need several pictures to demonstrate the perceived outcome of the service. In posts where the perceived outcome was not demonstrated by pictures even on hybrid products the comments reflected a need for more pictures to demonstrate the service component. The use of the AIDA model in the analysis revealed that the success of a promotion falls at different levels, with the Attention being the lowest level and the purchase being the highest or ultimate level, notwithstanding objectives of the promotion. Analysis of the Promotions “P” categorized the level of engagements into 3, the low, the medium and the high engagements. A major finding from this analysis was that high engagement cannot be automatically assigned a universal success. This finding exposes the use of an extreme positivist philosophical underpinning without realizing it. The use of a qualitative analysis in this study showed that a post with high engagement can constitute a large number of comments asking about a missing component of the marketing mix for example price, and as such the high level of engagement reflects that the price was missing in the promotion and yet creates the illusion of success.