THE DIGITALIZATION IMPACT ON BRAND INTEGRATION AMONG THE CONSUMER TYPES OF X, Y AND Z GENERATIONS

Abstract

Traditional marketing employs the brand funnel metaphor to explain the purchasing process of customers. This method is used to understand the customer’s decisionmaking process and the purpose of the study is to comprehend how does the customers are targeted towards influencing their decision. The brand funnel model is the best tool of understanding this relationship between brands and consumers which has five stages: awareness, consideration, buy, loyalty and engagement. However, with the increase in the impact of digitalization in individual’s lives, there is a new reality of hyper-connected digital consumers, which is changing the relationship of consumers with brands and putting the significance and accuracy of the brand funnel into question. The study measures and analyzes the impact of the digital era together with the traditional media drivers on brand interaction among X, Y and Z Generations which are the most adapted generations to digitalization with the increase of internet usage. Moreover, the study focused on the most digitalized sector, the smart phone industry which is both a tool and an intermediator where it addresses to mass consumption and involves a great competition in durable consumer markets while controlling the factors of generation type, occupation, marital status, education level and socioeconomic stratum. The data of the study was collected with a questionnaire by dividing the consumers into three clusters as X, Y and Z Generations and at total with 340 respondents. The study tried to see which media driver had the most impact in decision making for consumers and how important the digitalization impact for brand integration through internet. And how the internet affected the relationships between the stages of the brand funnel together with the traditional methods of word of mouth, social media impact and social media influencer’s effect on consumer’s decision-making process are tested in the study. Also, it has been analyzed the relationship between the purchase of a specific brand and remembering that brand’s commercial in purchasing decision.