- Title
- A comparative analysis of social media brand image of insurance companies in South Africa: a longitudinal study
- Creator
- Gudu, Daniel
- ThesisAdvisor
- Nel, Deon
- Subject
- Social media -- South Africa
- Subject
- Internet marketing -- South Africa
- Subject
- Chernoff faces
- Subject
- Ínsurance companies -- South Africa -- Marketing
- Subject
- Insurance companies -- South Africa -- Case studies
- Subject
- Multivariate analysis -- Graphic methods
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- text
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MBA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144277
- Identifier
- vital:38327
- Description
- Social media is changing the way business is conducted. Almost five billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. Social media has an extensive worldwide presence. Out of the total global population of over 7,5 billion people, over 4 billion are internet users. Of these, over 3 billion are active on social media. Social media is very influential in today's decision-making processes. Businesses must integrate social media into their strategies. The purpose of this research was to investigate the use of a novel method, Chernoff Faces, to assess and compare the social media brand images of six insurance companies in South Africa based on social conversation measurement. The intention of research was towards observing existing situations at hand and pointing out the game changers that can provide the industry with a new leap. Social media are multidimensional and understanding them requires tracking different measures simultaneously. Integrating social media into a communication strategy leads to a problem in finding the best way to portray and communicate multivariate data. It is essential to find the best way to represent and transmit the data so that marketing executives can quickly and easily monitor changes in brand images. Previous studies have successfully proved the possibility of using this method to gauge a "snapshot in time." This study took the concept further by closely monitoring the results for a set of brands over a period to account for the dynamic nature of social media. Accordingly, the study was a longitudinal study of 30 days. Data on the insurance companies was collected from Social Mention, a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content into a single stream of information. A tool in the statistical software Stata, Chernoff's faces, was used to analyse the results by generating facial expressions to the metrics associated with the social mentions of each of the insurance companies. The resulting facial expressions were then analysed to recognise the more favourable and stable brands and those that need appropriate risk management. Managing Social Media is challenging as managers must always keep it as positive as possible. Brand managers, therefore, need a better tool to gauge the mood in social media conversations due to the fast-changing nature of social media and the importance of social media to business especially insurance.
- Format
- 81 pages, pdf
- Publisher
- Rhodes University, Faculty of Commerce, Rhodes Business School
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Gudu, Daniel
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | QUDU-MBA-TR20-201.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |