Mutah University

“Effects of Internet Viral Marketing on

customers’ satisfaction. A study on fast

food firms effort on viral marketing”

by:Ala Momani , Ala’a Alqadi and Saif Addeen Obeidat

Faculty of Business Administration

January 2015

Ala.Momani@gmail.com +962777070212

Supervisor:

Dr. Malek Al-Majali

Index

Subject PageChapter 1

1.1 Introduction 31.2 Study statement 4

1.3 Study questions 4 1.4 Objectives. 4Chapter 2

2.1 Literature study 5 2.2 Previous studies 6 2.2.1 Measure of viral marketing impact on purchasing decision.

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2.2.2 Determinants of Customer Satisfaction in Fast Food Industry.

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2.2.3 The Viral makes you aware -How is brand association affected by viral marketing through individual networks?

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2.3 Fast food restaurants firms’ effort in social media 7 2.4 Dimensions of viral marketing affecting customers’ satisfaction.

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2.4.1 Promotion 10 2.4.2 Brand Awareness 10 2.4.3 The Brand Trust 12 2.4.4 Brand Association 14Chapter 3 3.1 Conceptual Model and Hypotheses 15 References 16

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Chapter 1

1.1 Introduction

Viral marketing is becoming a key instrument in marketing strategies now days, used by a lot of firms to achieve there goals. viral marketing uses the instincts of humans to communicate share knowledge and socialize with each other , due to the wide spread of the internet among all people now days, and the tendency of people from different ages to spend more time on the internet to use the social media, some times more than the time spent on watching TV ; viral marketing is getting this advantage as it can penetrate the social networks of any person as easy as a click of a mouse from one friend to defuse among all friends in the same social network, and if this ad is attractive enough, well designed and noticeable, friends will distribute it in other social networks making a splash or a Buzz in the internet spreading like a contagious virus converting the word of a mouth to the word of a mouse.

Fast food restaurants Firms know that the world is changing in their favor as the modern family concepts tend to depend on home cocked food less and the need for fast food is increasing. Those firms need to drive customers to their restaurants threw building the awareness trust loyalty and satisfaction toward their fast food brand.

In this proposal we will study the effects of viral marketing conducted threw internet on fast food restaurants customers satisfaction, Threw the dimension of Promotion, awareness, Trust and association. A literature study of some researches related to viral marketing and fast food customers’ satisfaction, in addition to viral marketing related subjects from some well known fast food brands websites to get the effects that may impact customer satisfaction.

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1.2 Study statement

Fast food companies are considering viral marketing in their marketing mix more widely threw well deliberated employment of current social networks in the internet to increase their direct and indirect effects over customers. In this proposal we are going to study the effects of viral marketing dimensions of promotion, awareness, trust and association over fast food restaurants customers’ satisfaction.

1.3 Study questions

What are the effects of viral marketing on fast food restaurant customer’s satisfaction?

1. What is the effect of Promotion on fast food customer’s

satisfaction?

2. What is the effect of Brand awareness on fast food customer’s

satisfaction?

3. What is the effect of trust on fast food customer’s satisfaction?

4. What is the effect of Brand association on fast food customer’s

satisfaction?

1.4 Objectives.

To study the impact of Viral Marketing dimensions of Promotion, Brand Awareness, Trust and Association on fast food customers satisfaction.

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Chapter 2

2.1 Literature study

Viral marketing is a marketing technique that stimulate people to pass on a product or a Brand name advertisement that has a marketing message to others in their social network creating an exponential growth of the advertisement visibility “the marketed message " threw targeted people or potential customers . Marketers can use many kinds of communication media to start seeding their initial message like TV, magazines, newspaper, and sometimes the post mail, but as the internet now days is penetrating among all people individually throw their personal computers laptops tablets and even mobile phones accessible any where any time; the internet became the most favorable media to deliver viral marketing messages easily with less cost than the TV and other media .

The internet provide a lot of options to start seeding the viral marketing message like e mails , blogs , online forums , you tube , flicker and social media networks known as web2 like face book , twitter and google+ , marketers recently concentrate their effort on social media networks because of their resilience and dynamic ways of holding all kinds of media from videos to music and sound messages and text messaging as well, and the ability of these networks to reach customers directly . these networks have a unique feature that provide a direct statistical measure of how many times a certain message has been viewed giving the marketers an option to monitor their effort and give us a key instrument to study the viral marketing effects on customers . This may justify why we chose the viral marketing conducted threw social media networks for our study.

As illustrated in the previous paragraph we are going to examine the viral marketing activities of some well known fast food restaurants brands like McDonalds and Burger king threw the most used internet social media websites and the websites of the

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mentioned brands as well, to determine the effects of such marketing technique “viral marketing “in the fast food customers satisfaction.

2.2 Previous studies

2.2.1 Measure of viral marketing impact on purchasing decision. By Dr Rudaina Othman Yusef 2009

This study was conducted on a sample of internet users from students of marketing at Zarqa private university and Zaytuna University in Jordan. The objectives of this study were:

a) To find the extent of perception of the sample to viral marketing concept.

b) The impact of contents of what the firms deliver threw internet by using viral marketing concept.

c) To find the accuracy of the content from the customers perspective that led customers to relay on and purchase.

d) The impact of viral marketing on purchasing decision of customers.

The most important findings for this study are:

a) There is impact and relationship of viral marketing on the customer decision to by.

b) The information sent threw the website relevant and credible and reliable, thereby forming a positive image of the organization sent.

c) There is a relationship between the concept of viral marketing and proliferation of advertising messages via website.

2.2.2 DETERMINANTS OF CUSTOMESATISFACTIONIN FAST FOOD INDUSTRY. By Shahzad Khan 2012

A research to find what is the key success factors for fast food industry in region of Peshawar Pakistan. His sample was collected from restaurants like KFC and Pizza hut .the study finds that there is

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a significant positive relationship between the Promotion, Service quality, Customer expectations, Brand, Physical Environment, Price, and Taste of the product to customer satisfaction.

2.2.3 The Viral makes you aware -How is brand association affected by viral marketing through individual networks?By Ida nelson and Magnus Svensson 2009

The purpose with this paper is to research the effect a network conducted viral marketing, has on consumers´ brand association. The study used a viral marketing commercial of not well known skin care brand (Apoliva), the sample was of people within the Face book network who are living in Sweden and speaking Swedish (because it was a Swedish commercial). The findings show that consumers tend to buy a brand although they do not like the commercial related to the brand, since the commercial itself is not of importance and in most cases the consumers do not relate the commercial with the brand. In other words viral marketing is able to impact the awareness of brand even though the customers don’t like the commercial itself.

2.3 Fast food restaurants firms’ effort in social media

Fast food restaurant firms are engaging heavily in social media networks where table 1 shows a recent statistics of how many fans four of well known fast food brands have in their main pages or channels . We chose for this study the fore famous social networks as follows:

a. Facebook : Facebook is a will known free social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and videos, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. It is available in many different languages, each profile contains a wall which is a virtual bulletin board that holds videos photos and text messages, face book has about 1350 million users worldwide table 1 shows the number of fans that hit alike for the fast food brand advertisement .

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b. Twitter : Twitter is a free social networking micro blogging service that allows registered members to broadcast short posts. And share short videos and photos but its mainly for short blogging “ tweets “ where registered members can follow freely the tweets of anybody they like and even all the conversations related to tweets, twitter has about 284 million users worldwide table 1 shows the number of followers for each brand.

c. Google+ : Google+ (or Google Plus) is a social networking and identity service that is owned and operated by Google Inc. Google has described Google+ as a "social layer" that enhances many of its online properties, google+ gives users the ability to form social circles that can he interact with each circle individually giving it a power advantage over face book ,it has now about 540 million active users , table 1 shows the number of followers for our fast food brands sample.

d. YouTube : YouTube allows people to discover, watch and share videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and acts as a distribution platform for videos . individuals and firms are allowed to create their own channels in YouTube to set their vides , anybody wither he is subscribed to the service or not can see and download videos , table 1 shows the number of uploaded videos views for each fast food brand.

The good thing about the social internet networks that they are available to anybody with internet access, and they provide a free statistical measure of the activity on each page wall or channel, which give the marketers and researchers the ability to see the popularity of certain Ads or videos among internet users.

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Table 1 updated 2/12/2014

rank Brand # of FaceBook

fans

# of Twitter followers

# of Google+ views

# of YouTube views

1 McDonalds 54,801,660 2.65 M 2,839,359 20,178,606

2 KFC 36,160,982 710 K 105,739 5,996,033

3 Burger King

7,503,751 982 K 6,277,539 13,452,048

4 Popeye’s Chicken

496,310 37,199 K 13,125 72,101

Table 1 illustrates some of the viral marketing effort by the fast food brands, the numbers are from their pages on the social media targeting USA English speaking customers, a lot of other pages from the same Brand name targeting deferent regions and languages of the world, McDonalds as an example has more than 30 million video viewers in their Canadian YouTube channel alone. But we are using one region for our study because we noticed that marketers are using the same viral ideas with deferent themes for deferent regions and languages. We noticed that the Arabic language is not will represented in fast food brands effort toward viral marketing except for promotional advertisements, no videos nor direct communication targeting Arabic speaking customers to build trust in brand and quality of materials used in their products, this may will be a concern soon for fast food brands as Arabic content on internet is growing and Arab people will soon begin to concern about their kind and quality of food offered by fast food restaurants .

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2.4 Dimensions of viral marketing affecting customers’ satisfaction.

2.4.1 Promotion

“Promotion is communicating information between seller and potential buyer or others in the channel to influence attitudes and behavior. The marketing manager’s main promotion job is to tell target customers that the right Product is available at the right Place at the right Price”.(McCarthy and Pereault, 2002)

At a quick glance of what kind of viral materials do fast food brands have in their social networks; one will find the new promotions as the first to come, a lot of nice pictures and short videos of what it seem a delicious meal with happy faces around it with a good price tag appearing to show how affordable those meals are, some of the promotions ad a value to the customers by offering extra free sandwich with each meal ordered or bigger French fries at the same price of a small one. Another kind of promotion we noticed most of fast food restaurants do to a achieve customer satisfaction is the happy meal designed for the kids, because marketers know that customers will be satisfied if their kids are happy and satisfied. So some viral marketing messages show happy kids with a meal in a restaurant and happy with a toy home too.

From our perspective as illustrated from the paragraph above, promotion is an important dimension of viral marketing and promotion can have a positive impact on fast food customer satisfaction. Hence promotion is our first independent variable as a dimension for Viral marketing effect on fast food customers’ satisfaction.

2.4.2 Brand Awareness

According to (Keller,1993) “Brand awareness is the combination of brand recognition and brand recalling. Brand recognition means if a customer can have heard or seen a brand

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and then see or hear it again, the customer will remember the brand and distinct it from competing Brands”

One of the best examples of viral marketing campaigns for fast food restaurants that we found in our review, is the Burger king viral marketing campaign which was conducted on April 2004 the campaign was known as “the subservient chicken” if you go to YouTube and perform a search for the original videos for the subservient chicken you will find that it was a simple idea but creative one, it represent a man wearing a chicken suit in a living room and he is ready to do what he told to do from the users by entering a command threw an interactive website specially created for this campaign , the website will ask you to tell a friend by sending the link in an easy way by email which led in turn to propagate virally between people. A hidden message in the campaign telling that “people can’t say no to chicken don’t say no” and that chicken wants you to remember our restaurants when you think about food.

Burger king was facing trouble competing with other tough brands like McDonalds and KFC and need to improve the awareness of its brand and products, it’s already lagging McDonalds and KFC in chicken sandwiches and want to build awareness about its new product the Tender crisp sandwich, the campaign was specially designed for this product as a part of bigger marketing campaign mix , the result was a success to the campaign designer and Burger king .According to (Andrew Schneller and John Marshall,2007) in their case “Social Media and the Burger King Brand” Sales of Tender Crisp Chicken Sandwiches increased by an average of 9% per week after the campaign. This represents the success of the campaign.

According to ( Kotler, et al, 2012) they define the Brand Awareness as “Consumers’ ability to identify the brand under different conditions, as reflected by their brand recognition or recall performance” and we think that the subservient chicken campaign was able to rebuild and improve the awareness of the Burger King brand at all .this awareness will drive the customers to Burger Kings restaurants and if they find what they expect from previously positioned recognition of Brand in their minds; they will be satisfied

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and so The Brand Awareness is the second dimension of viral marketing effect on fast food customer’s satisfaction.

2.4.3 The Brand Trust

Trust for the fast food brands is a big issue; they are already criticized by the media for targeting children and customers with unhealthy food served by their restaurants. Food they serve is full with extra calories, according to (Jennifer L. Harris and others,2010) in their research “Evaluating Fast Food Nutrition and Marketing to youth” people in the united states are shifting toward consuming more food outside their homes and most of that consumption is for fast food restaurants due to heavy advertisement from fast food firms, The internet is full of information about obesity and fast food brands relation, but this is not the full story, a new kind of small videos and pictures are shared widely in the internet social networks with big number of viewers worldwide spreading virally like a virus. These videos and pictures concentrate on the material used in fast food meals, some of these videos have millions of views, in a little search in the internet we find one of these videos attacking McDonald’s nuggets meal one of McDonald’s famous chicken products. The video illustrates the process of producing the nuggets and known as the “Red Slime myth” the process begins from hole live chickens and hens being blinded in some machine that will turn them into red slime of chicken meat and blood. This red slime looks at the first glance like a gigantic pink ice-cream; shortly the observer will discover the disgusting fact of the mix, after that a chemical substance which the video calls as “ammonium hydroxide” is added to the mix to kill bacteria, the hole mixture interred another machine which gives the final shape and dressing for the nuggets exactly as they appear in McDonald’s restaurants.

American people used to call fast food products as junk food but videos as illustrated in the previous paragraph ads the terms disgusting and unhealthy, imagine what these unknown origin videos and pictures spreading in social networks could do to customer trust of fast food restaurant Brands!

rank Question Duration andUpload date

Number ofYouTube viewers

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1Is pink slime in a chicken

McNugget ?6.54 minute video

Dec 8 2014 5,108,864

2What are NcRip patties made

of ?5.28 minute video

Nov 3 2014 2,424,972

3 Is McDonalds Beef real?4.30 minute video

Oct 13 2014 2,100,405

4What kind of potato do you use and are they processed then formed?

5.13 minute videoOct 16 2012 2,982,872

McDonalds as well as other fast food brands have to defend back against negative viral marketing information, and good marketers need to find a way to turn negative viral marketing into positive, McDonalds was the first to act by launching a huge viral marketing campaign called “our food your question” maybe because MacDonald is the largest fast food firm spending on advertisement and they find one of their products is directly mentioned in the red slime videos, McDonalds new campaign is based on viral marketing techniques, its designed to answer the direct questions from customers about the ingredients of the meals specially beef and chicken, the campaign uses twitter and face book meanly to capture the question, and they use well designed videos to answer, letting the video to be shared by customers themselves in their own social media. According to (MacCarthy&Perrealt,2002) “customers can trust information that is the same information used by someone inside the company”. Table 2 shows some of these questions and the number of YouTube views for the answer.

Table 2

Table 2 shows that McDonalds marketing communicating channels throw social media are reaching a lot of customers, which reflects the efficiency of social media to hold viral marketing messages, and maybe the curiosity of people toward what they eat, MacDonald is trying to say that bad ingredients may be used in fast food

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restaurants but not by McDonalds. We think that threw the “our food your question” campaign McDonalds is able to build trust of its brand over its customers, and this trust will led to customers satisfaction, from our perspective trust is one dimension of viral marketing impact on fast food customer satisfaction .

2.4.4 Brand Association

Brand associations are the informational nodes linked to the brand node in memory and contain the meaning of the brand for consumers. In other word, brand association is what the consumer likes about the brand; what about the brand that bring meaning to the consumer.

According to Keller, (1993), when building brand equity, it is very important that the consumers have good, strong and special associations to the brand.

Keller (1993, 1998) classifies brand associations into three major categories: attributes, benefits and attitudes. Attributes are those descriptive features that characterize a brand, such as what a consumer thinks the brand is or has and what is involved with its purchase or consumption. Benefits are the personal value consumers attach to the brand attributes, that is, what consumers think the brand can do for them. Brand attitudes are consumers' overall evaluations of a brand.

Viral marketing is able to influence the feeling of customers toward the value and personality of the brand as well as descriptive features and characteristics of the products related to the Brand, which consist the Brand association concept. In this study we are considering Brand association as a dimension of Viral marketing effects on fast food restaurants customers’ satisfaction.

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Chapter 3

3.1 Conceptual Model and Hypotheses

To study the impact of viral marketing on fast food customers’

satisfaction, hypotheses were presented by the following model. This

model has been inferred by previous studies, and since this study is

narrow, The following abbreviated form was prepared:

Through literature reviews, it was noted that the viral marketing

greatly affects fast food customers satisfaction.

This study examines the impact of the viral marketing on fast food

customer’s satisfaction; five hypotheses have been derived from the

previous model:

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1) H1: There is a positive effect for the viral marketing on

fast food customer’s satisfaction.

2) H2: There is a positive effect for the promotion on fast

food customer’s satisfaction.

3) H3: There is a positive effect for the awareness on fast

food customer’s satisfaction.

4) H4: There is a positive effect for the trust on fast food

customer’s satisfaction.

5) H5: There is a positive effect for the Brand association on

fast food customer’s satisfaction.

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