Paper info

Social media in industrial marketing – empirical exploration

Aino Toppi, Pauliina Ulkuniemi, Saila Saraniemi and Minna Mäläskä

The paper was published at the 28th IMP-conference in Rome, Italy in 2012.

The present study focuses on corporate brand communication through social media in industrial markets. In the present study we develop a model that gives a holistic view of corporate brand communication of an industrial company in social media. Social media in its many forms has been widely studied within the consumer contexts. However, the role and relevance of the social media in industrial marketing remain unexplored. Our study focuses on examining the social media as a two-way communication process, where the customers are activated to participate, as well. Our research is strongly driven by our qualitatively conducted empirical case study. We have done extensive scanning of industrial firms present in the different social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We looked for industrial firms that actively exploit social media in their communications in unique and interesting way. As a result of this scanning process we selected a firm providing energy-efficient and environmentally friendly LED lighting solutions to industrial customers. Netnographic methodology was adopted because of its effectiveness and ability to analyze computer-mediated communications which are in the centre of the present study. The present study contributes to the existing theory on industrial social media marketing by describing how social media can be exploited in creating derived demand. The study shows that social media messaging targets not only the business customers but also the end-users i.e. the customer’s customers reaching a much larger audience.