Social media engagement strategy: Investigation of marketing and R&D interfaces in manufacturing industry

Abstract

Research shows that effective marketing and R&D interface is pivotal in a company's new product development performance and future competitiveness. The increased popularity of social media promised to enhance interaction, collaboration, and networking between the two functions. However, there is limited knowledge regarding the key activities, infrastructure requirements, and potential benefits of social media in the marketing and R&D interface.This study aims to advance the current understanding of social media engagement strategies, which facilitates improved marketing and R&D interfaces and ultimately NPD performance for manufacturing companies. Based on a multiple-case study in two manufacturing companies, this study first presents the role of social media in facilitating improved marketing and R&D interface within a B2B context. Second, it presents the adoption process of the social media engagement strategy for an evolving marketing and R&D interface. The adoption process is divided into three phases, namely coordination, cooperation, and coproduction, to provide detailed insights regarding full-scale social media engagement.Taken together, the study provides novel insights into industrial marketing management literature by exemplifying the role of social media and proposing a systematic social engagement strategy for improved marketing and R&D interface in the manufacturing industry.

The digital marketing capabilities gap

“…Perceived usefulness and ease of use motivate B2B firms to adopt social media (Siamagka, Christodoulides, Michaelidou, & Valvi, 2015), and higher communication quality is an expected outcomes of social media use (Wang, Pauleen, & Zhang, 2016). Moreover, organizational social media use has been conceptually and qualitatively linked to co-creating value (Trainor, 2012), interfirm cooperation (Chirumalla, Oghazi, & Parida, 2018), and network creation (Quinton & Wilson, 2016). However, although all studies on the organizational level expect positive effects of social media use, no study so far has quantified a potential organizational performance effect for B2B firms.…”

Social Media Adoption, Usage And Impact In Business-To-Business (B2B) Context: A State-Of-The-Art Literature Review

“…The next group of studies looked at social media use by B2B companies (Andersson et al 2013;Bernard 2016;Bolat et al 2016;Denktaş-Şakar and Sürücü 2018;Dyck 2010;Guesalaga 2016;Habibi et al 2015). B2B companies use social media for enhancing and managing customer relationships (Andersson and Wikström 2017;Bolat et al (2016); branding (Andersson and Wikström 2017;Bolat et al 2016), sensing market (Bolat et al 2016) and co-production (Chirumalla et al 2018). Additionally, it was mentioned that some of the B2B companies use social media as a recruiting tool, and tool which helps to collaborate globally (Andersson and Wikström 2017;Dyck 2010).…”

“…The study proposed the B2B social media strategy framework, which includes six components of a social media strategy: 1) monitoring and listening 2) empowering and engaging employees 3) creating compelling content 4) stimulating eWOM 5) evaluating and selecting channels 6) enhancing brand presence through integrating social media. Chirumalla et al (2018) focused on the social media engagement strategies of manufacturing companies. By using semi-structured interviews (36), observations (4), focus group meetings (6), and documentation, the study developed the process of social media adoption through a three-phase engagement strategy which includes coordination, cooperation, and co-production.…”

Research on Marketing Strategy Innovation of Xi’an Small and Medium-sized Private Enterprises in the Era of New Media and Artificial Intelligence

“…MARKETING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE New media refers to the media which disseminate digital text, sound and image information based on computer information processing technology, by various modern communication means, such as, broadband, wireless, cable, satellite networks, etc. [2]. New media are unlikely to prove qualitatively different from the old ones.…”