Title: Social Media: Strategy for Brand Building 1.

Introduction Marketing managers have predicted that 2010 will be the year when social media are integrated in the organizations and really start to become useful for companies and become important tools in the communication (Carlsson 2010). Others have argued that it is crucial for marketers to look to the Web for new ways of finding customers and communicating with them, rather than at them, that it is vital to create a dialogue with the customers, and various kinds of social media are the most promising way to reach new customers (Weber 2009) At the same time, one of the most prominent names in research about branding and related subjects, David Aaker, has said that with the multitude of new medias developing, it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to raise awareness for their brand. The only way forward in managing this complexity, is for companies to be able to coordinate messages and their marketing efforts across all medias (Aaker 1996) The combination of coordinating your branding messages across all medias including the social media, the great impact that social media (as an example the social network Facebook with more than 400 million active users) has for both individuals and companies, the speed with which things move in this domain, and the relative scarcity of existing research about this area all are reasons why this study was initiated. With regards to the discussion above, this study will be about how social media influences branding. Research Objectives The following research questions will guide the study and literature review: 1. What are the perceived values and advantages of social media for organizational strategies of branding and marketing? 2. What are the documented advantages of social media within organizational branding or marketing strategies? 3. Are there structured strategy suggestions for smaller organizations developing social media strategies? 4. What documentation exists regarding the success of social media marketing, alone or with grassroots marketing efforts? Background of the Study Organizations compete in a globally competitive market and must focus on developing methods of reaching customers that appeal to a new generation and utilize the advantages of mass media. Social networking, websites, text messaging, and online advertisements are amongst the most recent forms of brand building used by organizations to appeal to their consumer markets ( ). It is the responsibility of an organization to be available to

their customers, and potential customers, in a place where these customers expect to find their information. Brand recognition meet these challenges, and the challenges of brand recognition by developing a presence in popular media channels that consumers in their markets use (Bisel 1). Social media has transformed customer interaction into a project that can occur any time of the day, any day of the week, and every day of the year. Organizations have 24/7 access to their consumers even when they do not have a 24/7 staff. Nutley (2010) said What we do now goes beyond the traditional launch that ramps up and tails off. Its a 365-day approach and online facilitates that (43). Branding and media projects had a short-lived lifespan, in some cases this was even true of media used for advertisements; however, using online sources like Facebook and Twitter can cost as little as nothing and include functionality that is easy to schedule and change daily or even hourly as needed. Organizations benefit from reaching customers with messages that are updated, timely, and interesting, a process which benefits small businesses by providing simplified organizational autonomy for marketing, rather than trying to make changes with the bigger marketing organizations or local advertising resources. However, while many organizations are quickly becoming part of the growing social media market, it is not very clear how useful this market really is for smaller businesses. Kraft can reach across the country, opening their arms to all cheese lovers through Facebook and Twitter, even if the message is creative or utilitarian, but a smaller local car repair shop may be challenged as what point this same tool would server for themselves do people in California care about what car repair shop sales are in Idaho? Smaller organizations are geographically confined and evidence based research in social media is rarely relevant to their conditions and situations. Organizations have identified public relations and automation advantages and success with social media on a larger scale, such as with Apple or Starbucks, this research will be developed to identify small business applications. Statement of the Problem It seems clear that we are currently living in the midst of the boom of the use of social media. Social networks such as Facebook with some 400 million active members represent a larger community than most individual countries. But research is somewhat lagging behind this rapid development, and it is difficult to find relevant up to date studies on how social media are to be part of the branding process, how this relates to the strategy that companies have with the use of social media- if they are to be used to strengthen the brand, increase sales, find new customers, recruit more competent staff, to improve the support-function, to be part of the product development and/or to improve the internal communication (Carlsson, 2010). Also the question of how companies create brand equity through brand awareness has been debated with the upsurge of social media. Traditional marketers such as Aaker, claim that brand awareness is about the strength the brands presence has in consumers minds (Aaker 1996).

Social media guru Weber is of the opinion that brand awareness is to be measured not in brand recall but by dynamic measures such as customer word-of-mouth (Weber 2009). These are the contents that will be looked into in this thesis. With regard to this, the research problem of this study can be formulated as: To increase the understanding of the role of social media for the creation of brand awareness Significance of the Study The study will be infinitely important to the small organization, Umbra Kittle, by providing evidence based information that includes the ability for the organization to hold the marketing team accountable for social media brand and communication based activities within reasonable budgets. Additionally, other organizations can use the information found in this research to determine if social media is the best choice for their company to implement at this time in their strategic growth. Marketing specialists such as Shih, Smith, and Andrew (2010) list recommended practices for organizations delving into social media, including codes of conducts for employees and periodic audits, but there is no roadmap into the world of social media. Creating guidelines and expectations or potential expectations allows a business to evaluate their success during the growth. Cullers (2010) found that social media branding and strategies could be traced back to marketing strategies as early as 1913, with the Converse Catalog statement Our company was organized in 1908 fully believing that there was an earnest demand from the retail shoe dealer for a rubber shoe company that would be independent enough not to follow every other company in everything they do" (1). This consumer minded strategy for development has not always been embraced by organizations; however, many studies and many theorists feel that the most effective way to reach any market is through clear and creative media and messages that appeal to their target market in mediums that the market expects them to be when needed. Social media is perceived as being that market, even Converse has a Facebook page; however, the true impact of this for small businesses who have often relied heavily on local advertisements and grassroots marketing, is unknown. Scope and Limitations of the Study Scope Internet marketing is inexpensive when examining the ratio of cost to the reach of the target audience. Companies can reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional advertising budgets. The nature of the medium allows consumers to research and to purchase products and services conveniently. Therefore, businesses have the advantage of

appealing to consumers in a medium that can bring results quickly. The strategy and overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns depend on business goals and cost-volumeprofit (CVP) analysis. Internet marketers also have the advantage of measuring statistics easily and inexpensively; almost all aspects of an Internet marketing campaign can be traced, measured, and tested, in many cases through the use of an ad server. The advertisers can use a variety of methods, such as pay per impression, pay per click, pay per play, and pay per action. Therefore, marketers can determine which messages or offerings are more appealing to the audience. The results of campaigns can be measured and tracked immediately because online marketing initiatives usually require users to click on an advertisement, to visit a website, and to perform a targeted action. Limitations However, from the buyer's perspective, the inability of shoppers to touch, to smell, to taste, and "to try on" tangible goods before making an online purchase can be limiting. However, there is an industry standard for e-commerce vendors to reassure customers by having liberal return policies as well as providing in-store pick-up services.

2. Conceptual Framework The aim of this chapter is to, based on the introduction and the literature review, formulate the research questions which will enable the data collection and the analysis of this to be done in a proper way to solve the research problem. Review of Related Literature DEFINITIONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA Wikipedia defines social media as: media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. They support the democratization of knowledge and information and transform people from content consumers to content producers (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media. Retrieved 100420). Social media are distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film. They are relatively inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information, compared to industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information.

Social media technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media. Retrieved 100420). Weber uses the term social web instead of social media, and defines the social web as the online place where people with a common interest can gather to share thoughts, comments and opinions. It includes social networks such as MySpace, Gather, Facebook, BlackPlanet, Eons, LinkedIn, and hundreds more. It includes branded web destinations like Amazon, Netflix and eBay. It includes enterprise sites such as IBM, Best Buy, Cisco and Oracle. The social web is a new world of unpaid media created by individuals or enterprises on the web and they include: -Reputation aggregators: sear ch engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask and Live. They aggregate sites with the best product or service to offer and usually put things in order of reputation. -Blogs: online journals where people can post ideas, images, and links to other web pages or sites. Some appear on personal or corporate sites, while others are hosted on Blogger, BlogHer (for women), Weblog, Tumblr, and other blogging sites. (Weber 2009) -Microblogs: Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access (http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76460. Retrieved 2010-04-25. http://blog.twitter.com/2009/10/theres-list-for-that.html. Retrieved 2010-04-25). -Topic-specific e-communities are generally advertising supported although some are free. Hewlett Packard for example has communities on its website, and there are communities involving sports such as KayakMind for people who enjoy kayaking. Password-protected e-communities are growing especially quickly. -Social networks are places where people with a common interest or concern come together to meet people with similar interests, express themselves and communicate. In addition to the ones abovementioned are also for example Xanga, Stumbleupon. Some sites are devoted specifically to image-sharing, such as Flickr, and some to video-sharing, YouTube serves 10 billion videos a month to U.S. viewers alone (Weber 2009). SOCIAL MEDIA AND MARKETING According to Weber, marketing to the social web means to adopt a completely new way of communicating with an audience in a digital environment. Instead of continuing as

broadcasters, marketers should become aggregators of customer communities. It is not about broadcasting marketing messages to an increasingly indifferent audience. Instead, when marketing to the social web marketers should participate in, organize and encourage social networks to which people want to belong. Rather than talking at customers, marketers should talk with them (Weber 2009). The task of aggregating customers is done in two ways: by providing compelling content on your web site and creating retail environments that customers want to visit, and by going out and participating in the public arena (Weber 2009). Marketing to the social web is not only for the largest multinational corporations; it may be easier and more effective, argues Weber (2009), for a relatively small or medium-size company to take maximum advantages of the social media. Also the way of segmenting changes radically with the advent of the social web. Demographics like gender, age, education and income, lifestyle factors have become less relevant, and what really counts is segmenting according to what people do and feel- their behavior as well as their attitudes and interests. The goal for the marketer is to identify groups of customers within the larger market that can be reached and affected through the marketing (Weber 2009). Harris and Rae (2010) have looked at the role of social networking in establishing an integrated marketing strategy. They argue that online communities have evolved considerably since the early days of news groups and chat rooms. For example Cisco has put forward a customer community which allow customers to help themselves to technical support information via web communities. After Cisco put the technical support function online, customers began to compete with each other to answer queries that had been posted by other customers. This strategy contributes towards the creation of a community of people with similar interests who will trust and act upon the recommendations of others in the group (Harris and Rae 2010). Harris and Rae claim that businesses are recognising the potential of generic online social networking such as Facebook and Myspace for the development of their brands and to build relationships with key customers, but that this is a very recent trend in the UK (which the data comes from) and that it is difficult at this stage to draw conclusions on how successful companies have been in using social networks in the marketing work (Harris and Rae 2010) SOCIAL MEDIA AND BRANDING Weber compares the traditional way of looking at brand equity (which will be examined in section number 2.7) in terms of brand recall- and points to that in the era where social networks have become an important media channel, brand equity is a living thing and should be measured not in terms of brand recall but by dynamic measures such as customer word-of-mouth.

A strong brand ought to be based on the dialogue you have with your customers and prospects- the stronger the dialogue- the stronger the brand. The social web allows companies to have these kinds of dialogues more efficiently and less expensively than in the past (Weber 2009). Webers (2009) view on how the blog should be used as a marketing tool, is that through this means of communication it is not possible to control your message. But you can present your view on a specific matter, and by that you are able to become part of the conversation. Blogs can be used for different reasons. For small start-up companies, to have a blog is a way for an executive in the firm to talk about the industry, to talk about the market space, to establish credibility, to get the search engines going. All this helps not only with customers, it helps with media and PR efforts since reporters and writers look through the blogs all the time for people to quote and interview. Blogs are used as references (Weber 2009). If then you are an executive and want to raise your profile and the companys profile, a blog is a great way to help secure speaking engagements, contributed articles, and quotes in major media. All of that adds credibility, which eventually can lead to the interest of new customers, who may be used to buying other brands, products or services but may feel more comfortable with you. An executive may also want to blog to get a feel for what is taking place in the field, and get a direct line with your customers (Weber 2009). BRAND STRATEGY Brand strategy can be defined as follows: Long-term marketing support for a brand, based on the definition of the characteristics of the target consumers. It includes understanding of their preferences, and expectations from the brand (http://www.businessdictionary.com. Retrieved 100424). The brand and marketing consultancy Prophet.com defines the following parts in a branding strategy: build a brand positioning, manage your brand portfolio, build your brand architecture and naming, consider the possible brand extensions (http://www.prophet.com. Retrieved 100424) Kapferer identifies branding strategy as the term used for decisions on: the number of brand levels to be implemented; one, two or even three and the role of the corporate in the product value communication; should it be absent, strongly present or hardly present. He also considers the relative weight of these brands, and the graphic arrangement of their coexistence on all the documents, packaging and products but also industrial sites, offices and business cards of salespersons and managers as well as the degree of globalisation of the architecture as bearing elements of the branding strategy (Kapferer 2008). BRAND EQUITY AND BRAND AWARENESS

In marketing it has for a long time been considered that brands add value to a product, but it was not until the large wave of mergers and acquisitions in multinational corporations with large and well-known brands in the 1980s that this value was measured inthe asset value of companies. Besides the traditional way of considering asset value and net income, also goodwill was to be included (Elliott and Percy 2007). Even if accepted accounting procedure did not permit considering the added value of a brand name on the balance sheet, it was nevertheless being counted as part of the net value of the firm. The term brand equity stems from this context. There exist many definitions of brand equity, defined mainly from two perspectives, either as financial considerations or as consumer perceptions of a brand. Here are some examples: A set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and symbol, that add to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or to firms customers (Aaker 1991) There is also a close connection between brand awareness and brand positioning. For a brand to be successful, it is not enough to reach brand recognition, a brand must occupy a salient position (top-of- mind recall or dominant recall) within the target audiences consideration set (Elliott and Percy 2007). A brand must be positioned in its marketing communication in such a way that when the need for such a product occurs, that brand comes to mind. Then the brand must be linked to a benefit that provides a motivating reason to consider it. It is this link between the brand and the benefit that lies at the root of building positive brand attitude, which in turn builds positive brand equity (Elliott and Percy 2007). Considering the great importance that brand awareness has to create brand equity, and that recent studies are questioning the traditional way of looking at brand awareness, taking into account how it is affected by social media, this is the aspect of branding that this study will focus on, and the approach will be to look at brand awareness in the way that Aaker has done. Research Paradigm (Conceptual Framework) Considering that the use of social media to create brand awareness and ultimately to create brand equity in the forms of increased sales is a very recent trend, we need to find answers to the following research question of an exploratory character: Research question 1: What is the purpose of using social media to create brand awareness? Carlsson (2010) claims that social media can be very valuable for creating long term relations and for building brand awareness. There are a variety of social media activities that can be initiated to build brand awareness according to Carlsson (2010), the using of a company blog for example gives the possibility to spread the corporate philosophy and to

show the soul of the company. It gives the possibility for fans to further spread the company culture. YouTube or Facebook may be used in the same way. Social media also give the possibility to position the company or the brand within a specific category. With regard to the arguments presented by Carlsson, I will be looking at what purposes company X, which constitutes the case study in this thesis, has by using social media to create brand awareness. Research question 2: How can the social media activities used to create brand awareness be described? As mentioned in chapter 1, many professionals within marketing predict that in 2010, social media will really become integrated in the operations of companies and truly become important tools in the communication. Carlsson (2010) is of the opinion that it is not a good enough reason to be active in social media simply because everybody else is. The early stage of development of this media leads to the assumption that there might be a discrepancy between what the goal is of using social media to create brand awareness and how it is actually used in reality to create brand awareness. Therefore the case study will deal with this matter, and I will ask company X how they actually use social media activities to create brand awareness. Research question 3: What advantages are there in using social media to create brand awareness Weber (2009) argues that the social media offers the company a possibility to create dialogue with the customer, social media may lead to creating the strongest brand awareness possible, word-of-mouth-, the stage in which the customer recommends the brand to another person. In this thesis, an investigation will be made concerning whether or not the company X in the case study can distinguish any advantages in using social media to create brand awareness, and if so, how these advantages are built up. Research question 4: What disadvantages are there in using social media to create brand awareness? Aaker (1996) is of the opinion that the growing number of media makes it increasingly difficult for companies to create brand awareness. Getting involved in social media brings with it an opening up of the company and increased transparency (Carlsson 2010). Each company should consider, before becoming involved and active in social media, how open the company wants to be, which type of information the company wants to share and why. It is also important to create understanding and acceptance internally for the use of social media. It is necessary to find the balance between what feels good for the company and what is interesting for the reader. A too strict information policy probably leads to that the contents are not interesting and that nobody reads them. Questions that may arise with the starting up of getting involved in social media are: what risks does the openness entail? What happens if competitors imitate us and make use of our openness? What if somebody steals our companys ideas? (Carlsson 2010) Considering the above-mentioned issues, the last research question deals with if the

company in the case study can identify any disadvantages in using social media to create brand awareness, and if so, what these disadvantages these are. Research Hypothesis Social media is more effective way of brand building as compare to traditional method. Operational Definition of Key Variables In studying how social media influences branding, we need to look at what social media is, what it is composed of and what existing literature says about the correlation between social media and branding. Branding per se is a vast and widespread area, where opinions diverge concerning the basic definitions, such as brand equity for example. We need to clarify which parts of branding that we will focus on in this context. SOCIAL MEDIA What is social media? Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p 60) define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Web 2.0 is platform on which social media is based (Carlsson 2010). Social media can take many different forms, including social networks, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, micro blogging, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Weber, 2009). Weber also includes search engines in the definition of social web, and describes them as reputation aggregators with the task of aggregating sites with the best product or service to offer and usually put things in order of reputation (Weber 2009). Weber approaches the question of branding in the social web. He defines this as the dialogue you have with your customer, and claims that the stronger the dialogue is, the stronger the brand is, and vice versa. Actually he questions the very core concept of traditional marketing and branding, and means that rather than broadcasting messages to audiences and target groups, in the era of social web that we live in today, branding and marketing is about participating in social networks to which people want to belong, where dialogue with customers and between customers can flourish. (Weber 2009) According to a study made in 2010 in the United Kingdom amongst 30 companies (which are early adopter business and perhaps not representative of the mainstream UK businesses), the importance of participating in social networks in order to develop the brand and build relationships with key customers is in fact recognized by the companies. It is argued that online communities will play a key role in the future of marketing because they replace customer annoyance with engagement, and control of the content with collaboration. The authors of this study, Harris and Rae, claim that the prosperous businesses of the future will be those who embrace the social media and who see change as an opportunity. (Harris and Rae 2010)

BRAND AND BRANDING What is brand and branding and why do we need to look into this more deeply? According to Czinkota and Ronkainen (2010), brands are important because they shape customer decisions and ultimately create economic value. Brand is a key factor behind the decision to purchase in business to consumer operations, and thanks to strong brands, it has been showed possible to charge a 19 percent higher price. (Czinkota and Ronkainen 2010) What specific aspects and dimensions in branding are we particularly interested in? In order to get a necessary overview of the state-of-the-art in branding literature, it has been deemed necessary to look closer into brand strategy, brand equity and assets that underlie brand equity which are brand awareness, perceived quality, brand loyalty, brand association and other proprietary brand assets. 3. Methodology This chapter presents the methodology planned to be used in this study. Diverse alternatives for research approaches, designs, strategies, sample selection, data collection methods and data analysis are discussed and the specific choices made in this research proposal are clarified. Finally, critical questions about how to handle reliability and validity of the study are presented. Population Sample For some research, it might be possible to collect and analyze data from every possible case or member of the whole interested population if such research focuses on a small group. However, most research needs to employ sampling procedures because the group of interest is typically large, containing too many cases or members which make it impossible to collect data from all of them. Sampling techniques are divided into two broad categories, probability and non-probability. In probability sampling, each unit or element in the sampling frame has an equally known chance of being included in the sample, which allows for statistical inferences. This allows researchers to answer research questions and to achieve research purposes that require them to estimate statistically the characteristics of the population inferred from the sample. Probability sampling is often associated with survey and experimental research strategies. In contrast, in non-probability sampling, it is not possible to make valid inferences about the population. All non-probability samples rely on personal judgment somewhere in the process, which implies that such samples derived from non-probability sampling are not necessarily representative of the entire population. Researchers may still be able to generalize from non-probability samples about the population, but not from a statistical

standpoint. Non-probability sampling is more generally used in case study research (Saunders et al. 2009). In this study, the intention is to gather information about how social media create brand awareness. This research will be conducted using non-probability sampling. A judgmental selection has been used to choose the company that will be investigated and the employees that will be interviewed. Instruments There are two types of data collection methods. The critical distinction between the types of data is that primary data is collected by the researcher specifically for the purpose for which the data are required. Secondary data have been collected for another primary purpose e.g. all secondary data were primary data for another study. Both primary and secondary data sources can yield quantitative or qualitative data (Babbie 2004). Primary data is collected through the use of observation, interviews or questionnaires. Secondary data include both raw data and published summaries, it may include data collected by other organisations, governments, or data gathered by research organisations. Routine data collected by institutions participating in an activity (e.g. schools, health centres) are exceptionally good sources of secondary data which could not be replicated by primary data collection without unreasonable expense. The use of secondary data can result cost and time savings (Saunders et al. 2009). In this study, it is important to get information directly from the persons responsible for information and branding of the company chosen and to gather their views and opinions. But since it is a very recent phenomenon we are looking at, it has also been deemed necessary to build on secondary data (the secondary data has been collected through search on the companys website); i e data collected for other purposes, in combination with using primary data collection, where the method used will be semi-structured interview. Procedure The research strategy refers to the research procedure used to answer research questions and fulfill the purposes of the research. The choice of research strategy is guided by the research questions and objectives, the extent of existing knowledge, the amount of time and other resources available, and the researchers philosophical foundation (Saunders et al. 2009). There are several research procedures that can be labelled as research strategies including case study, survey and experiment. CASE STUDY If the phenomena to be investigated are complex and deeply embedded in the organizational context of a company, the case study can be chosen as a suitable research strategy Yin (2009). When conducting a case study, a natural question is whether to focus

on one case or go for multiple cases. Yin (2009) argues for choosing one case if it represents a unique or extreme case of the studied phenomenon. Usually, one case implies a one case company, although Yin (2009) discusses the embedded case design, where the main case can contain several intertwined sub-cases. For example, one and the same company in different markets can become the embedded case with local markets as sub-cases and the corporate one as an umbrella case. A case study is most often used in exploratory and explanatory research with the ability to answer the question why as well as what and how (Saunders et al. 2009). Both quantitative and qualitative techniques can be applied for data collection in case study research (Yin 2009). SURVEY The survey research strategy is the most popular and common strategy for social research, including business disciplines (Saunders et al. 2009). This strategy can be used to answer who, what, where and how questions and is mainly used in descriptive and exploratory research. It is generally associated with the deductive research approach. In addition, a survey strategy allows researchers to collect a large amount of data from a substantial population at a very low cost. The data are typically quantitative and gathered by questionnaire. The data can be easily compared and analyzed using various statistical techniques. Survey is usually the preferred research strategy for researchers who are interested in collecting original data to describe a population that is too large to observe directly. Careful probability sampling provides a group of respondents whose characteristics may be taken to reflect those of the larger population, and carefully constructed standardized questionnaires provide data in the same form from all respondents (Babbie 2004). Questionnaires are not the only data collection technique in the survey research strategy. Structured observation and interviews can also be employed in survey research, but the questionnaire remains the most commonly used tool in survey. EXPERIMENT Experiment is used in both natural and social science research. Experiment tends to be used in exploratory and explanatory study to answer how and why questions (Saunders et al. 2009). Two groups are set and members in each group are basically similar in all aspects. The researcher uses one group as the experimental group and another one as the control group. At the beginning, the dependent variable is measured for both groups and the two measurements are compared with each other. Then, the researcher places some form of planned intervention or manipulation only to the experimental group. The intervention or manipulation is the independent variable. Finally, the dependent variable from each group is re-measured. The researcher is now able to compare the results before and after the manipulation of the independent variable for both the experimental and the control group. This allows the

researcher to see if there is a causal relationship between the independent and dependent variables. This experimental research strategy can be conducted in either laboratory experiments or field experiments (Saunders et al. 2009). In business disciplines, an experiment strategy could be used in several ways but this research strategy is typically expensive and complicated. This research will be conducted as a single case study, of how the selected company X uses social media to create brand awareness. The reason why this case was chosen, is that company X has one of the 300 strongest brands in the business to consumer sector in Sweden, their products classify amongst the fast moving consumer goods industries, and initial research indicates that company X uses social media currently. The intention is to create a deeper knowledge about the case in question, and to investigate deeply into the organizational context of this case. The choice was made to make an in-depth study of one case, instead of looking at several cases in a more superficial way.