Vliv sociálních sítí na rozhodovací proces spotřebitele

Abstract

In recent years, with new Web 2.0 technologies, traditional marketing tactics have changed. Companies have begun to look for new ways to make the most of the social media platform in order to better penetrate the social networks. This has resulted in increased investment in online marketing of companies of all sizes. The advantage of these platforms is in particular their reach as well as their financial availability. However, one of the social media issues is that users are constantly overwhelmed with information. That´s why identifing the most appropriate types of information and ways of communicating them to people has became very important task for marketers. Similarly understanding the differences in consumer behavior and purchasing processes has become significant. The aim of this paper was to find out if and to what extent there is influence of social networks on the decision-making process of consumers. Also identify changes in decision making that were caused by introducing social platforms into online marketing. The data of this diploma thesis were collected by using an online electronic questionnaire and subsequently processed by using descriptive statistics, second stage sorting and hypothesis testing. For dependence testing, the Friedman ANOVA, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, Shapiro-Wilk test, and Post-hoc comparison using paired Wilcoxon Holm-Bonferoni significance correction were used. The research showed that most of social networking users use three or more social networks and Facebook has become the most widely used platform among Czech users. Respondents spend more time on social networks per week than on the mass media. The younger the respondent the more time they spend on social media and the older the respondent is the more time is spent on mass media. Most respondents have prejudices about products that are most often caused by their previous experience. At the stage of identifying the need, respondents were more influenced by social media than by mass media. Respondents actively use social networks to find information, most often they use online forums and Youtube. Most of them find it easier to search on social media than mass media. Also, most users find social media more effective in attracting consumers. The oldest age group of this research shares information about the purchased products the most out of all age groups. The only noticeable difference between men and women was the use of Instagram, which is used by significantly more women, and also more frequent use of social media by women to obtain an overview of discounts and special deals. The dependence of the reported social networking effect on the decision-making process phase was identified, with the "comparing information and alternatives" phase being most influenced. Also, the dependence of factor "means" on decision-making time has been demonstrated. Users who use Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook most often to search for information have claimed that social networks have a greater influence on their decision-making process.