An investigation into the impact of positive eWOM through Facebook on the customer purchasing decision in the fast food industry: a case study of McDonald’s, UK

NAME: MD SHARIFUL ISLAM
SID: 139176760

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS
PAGE NO

INTRODUCTION
1
LITERATURE REVIEW
2
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
4
RESEARCH METHOD
5
ACTION PLAN
6
REFERENCES
8

Background
In recent years there is a continuous challenge to the traditional marketing due to the rapid decline in mass marketing (Sweeney et al, 2008). Even people do not trust the message which they have already received since their trust is shifted from traditional marketing. Although some traditional advertising campaigns revolving around mass media still work, most of them do not meet the success and therefore it is becoming difficult for them to achieve the marketing goals (Marsden et al, 2004). On the other hand, customers have become the core of the market and marketing process. One of the key reasons of this significant change is advent of internet and the revival of the old word of mouth marketing by altering it in a new form which is called electronic word of mouth (eWOM). This change has been boosted though the evolution of social networking sites where the creation and exchange of user-generated content has been facilitated. One of the most popular social networking sites with billions of users is Facebook where the key benefits of eWOM is combined which is to reach a mass network along with developing trust in social relationships (Chu & Kim, 2011).
Although a number of researches are available on eWOM (Phelps et al, 2004, Hennig- Thurau et al, 2004, Jensen et al, 2009), rare evidence of research is available which only discussed eWOM only in the context of Facebook. Most of the researches discussed eWOM in the perspective of vast area of social networking. Moreover, very few researcher adopt the fast food industry as their context while discussing eWOM (Zhang et al, 2010). Therefore this significant fast moving industry achieved lack of attention of most of the researchers who conducted their study on eWOM.
Starting the journey as a barbecue

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