Customer behavioral changes appeared: on the one hand, some customers feel embarrassed and suspicious because of a clear business intrusion within social media communities; on the other hand, some others, addicted by social media experience, are glad to be part of brands’ core fans and dedicate time to them.

1. Research Proposal, December 2014. RIM501E, Viatcheslav DMITRIEV.
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CUSTOMER BEHAVIORAL CHANGES TOWARDS
BRAND MANAGEMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
SCEPTICISM, SUSPICION AND ADDICTION
GUILLAUME CHEVRON
PGE3 Student
IT Business Management
ESC Rennes School of Business
KEYWORDS
Customer behavior, scepticism, suspicion, addiction, internet, social media,
digital marketing, brand management strategy, efficiency scale, online shopping
INTRODUCTION
The recent ten-year massive utilization and generalization of social media within people life have deeply
transformed customers’ behavior. This phenomenon has popularized famous social media platforms
such as Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, which have become an important place to interact for people
and for business. Indeed, whereas these platforms were only community areas at the beginning, where
people could share information each other, they became quickly business-oriented places with branded
content and commercial from companies.
From this trend, customer behavioral changes appeared: on the one hand, some customers felt very
embarrassed and suspicious because of this business intrusion within a private place; on the other hand,
some others, addicted by social media experience, were glad to be part of brands’ core fans and dedicate
time to them.
This new phenomenon has become a real issue for companies whose digital brand management is a real
key success factor, in particular the social media. The brands-customers paradigm is currently
changing, encouraging companies to develop their current brand management into a deeper and more
relational community paradigm (Quinton, 2013). Therefore, those have to understand precisely these
different customer behavioral changes - the target characteristics and the reasons of concerns - in order
to adapt smartly and efficiently their digital strategies.

2. Research Proposal, December 2014. RIM501E, Viatcheslav DMITRIEV.
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THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Social media platforms are a strategic leverage for brands and e-business companies, which can reach
more easily their target market, especially thanks to the new data mining and big data tools (Dennis,
2010). This business over-presence leads to a nascent scepticism towards brand management and
online shopping, necessarily link to social media, from consumers which may fully realize the benefit of
using the Internet to do their shopping, but which also express a certain level of concern about the risk
of using that channel (Soopramanien, 2010). However, the over-presence of a brand is not the only cause
of scepticism. Indeed, this phenomenon may be linked also to the brands’ reputation regarding their
corporate social responsibility communications (Elving, 2013), or to certain cultural values specific to
particular countries, such as collectivism and individualism (Huh, 2012).
Conversely, despite this new type of branded content advertising on social media platforms, researches
have emphasized the existence of Internet addictions (Young, 1996; Beard, 2005) and have noticed three
different types of Internet addicts: excessive gaming, online sexual pre-occupation, and texting (Young,
2009). We note that texting (and e-mailing) are predominant on social media, which is very visible in
particular on Facebook, the world most popular social media platform1. Indeed, whereas people mainly
used Facebook once or twice a week in 2008, we notice that a deep internet addiction phenomenon has
appeared nowadays, leading some people to consult their Facebook account more than once every
“awake hour”2. Therefore, a recent research regarding the increasing and worrying Facebook addiction
has been done in order to measure this new phenomenon: the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale
(Andreassen, 2012). It is an advanced method which does the link between addictive behaviors and the
five-factor model of personality: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and
openness to experience (Wiggins, 1996).
Addiction, suspicion and scepticism to brand management on social media are distinct behavioral
phenomena which seem distant and hard to define. However, we believe they represent a real marketing
challenge for companies on the Internet because these groups of people are difficult to reach and
potentially can get bigger. Indeed, on the one part, some people get a tremendous use of social media
platforms, leading them to be bored and not receptive at all to branded content or to any commercials;
on the other hand, some people remain sceptical and very suspicious of the brands’ social media
contribution and do not trust online shopping, and more generally brand management.
From a psychological and marketing-oriented approach, we believe it would be interesting to lead a
study regarding the consideration of new customer behavioral phenomena, such as addiction or
1 Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform, with more than 1,3 billion user in the world.
2 These hours represent the period when people do not sleep.

3. Research Proposal, December 2014. RIM501E, Viatcheslav DMITRIEV.
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scepticism, within digital marketing strategies of companies in order to improve sales. We will extend
the study to the implementation of a customer behaviors set, defining the different steps between
addiction and scepticism, from a psychological approach to improve the online marketing strategy of
companies. This set may be implemented thanks to a qualitative test which will measure the impact of
brand content on different targets and will be the founding principles of a ‘brand management efficiency
scale’.
RESEARCH DESIGN
In order to lead successfully this study, it is important to collect reliable qualitative and quantitative
data which will be used to create a customer behaviors set named ‘brand management efficiency scale’.
From a psychological and marketing-oriented approach, this set consists of defining and measuring the
different levels of customer reaction towards brand management.
Qualitative data, collected from semi-structured or group interviews, may be used to define distinct
customer reaction stages, from total addiction to total suspicion, showing then the impact on
customers of distinct brand management supports such as commercials, banners, Facebook posts,
tweets, etc. Quantitative data, as for them, collected from data mining methods (Dennis, 2010,) may be
used to measure quantitatively the importance of each stage, thanks to key indicators showing brand
management efficiency such as the personal characteristics of the people concerned or their tendency
to purchase for example.
Finally, the data analysis will provide the ability to measure the efficiency of a brand management
strategy on targets which are increasingly difficult to reach and whose their negative impact is
increasingly important on other targets.

4. Research Proposal, December 2014. RIM501E, Viatcheslav DMITRIEV.
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REFERENCES
ANDREASSEN, Cecile Schou (2012). Development of a Facebook Addiction Scale. Psychological
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ELVING, Wim J.L. (2013). Scepticism and corporate social responsibility communications: the
influence of fit and reputation. Journal of Marketing Communications, 2013, Vol. 19, No. 4, 277–292.
HUH, Jisu (2012). Scepticism towards DTC advertising - A comparative study of Korean and
Caucasian Americans. International Journal of Advertising, 31(1), pp. 147–168.
QUINTON, Sarah (2013). The community brand paradigm: A response to brand management’s
dilemma in the digital era. Journal of Marketing Management, 2013, Vol. 29, Nos. 7–8, 912–932.
SOOPRAMANIEN, Didier (2010). Conflicting attitudes and scepticism towards online shopping: the
role of experience. International Journal of Consumer Studies 35 (2011), 338–347, 2010 Blackwell
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