Digital marketing in food industry

Abstract

This paper aims to understand the different aspects of consumer behaviour that affect product purchase and attitude towards different food brands. We try to understand the consumer responses to different brands on social media and the significant differences seen in the western and Indian consumers and their attitude towards different food brands. The field of marketing has changed more in the past few years than it did in the several preceding decades. Part of the reason for the shift has been the advent of the Digital Age. India currently has the second-highest number of internet users after China (Mandavia, 2019), but internet penetration is only 36%. This means that there is enormous headroom for growth in this segment. Firms are now figuring out innovative ways to use the internet to grow. One of them is the use of Digital Marketing. We will be focusing on social media in our analysis. India has an active social media penetration of 29% with YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp being the leading social media networks. It has a total of 290 million Facebook users as compared to the 3.6 billion users in the world (Keelery, 2020). With the advent of Jio and the cheaper internet, this figure is expected to increase fast. We will be looking at the food industry in our paper. Instagram was chosen as the social media handle for our research. In order to extract comments from Instagram posts, Phantombuster was used. More specifically, the phantom named “Instagram Post Commenters” was used. Phatombuster required us to input the post URLs before extracting a specified number of comments from the posts. For Indian pages, we looked for posts having at least 20 comments per post. For Global pages, we set the maximum number of comments to 250 comments collected per post. This was to account for the difference in following between the Indian pages and the Global pages. Putting a cap on the number of comments allowed us to perform an analysis with reasonable number of data points without crashing the processor. Similar types of posts were collected from the Instagram pages of reputed food brands. These posts were from the Indian page and the global/general page. The reactions of the consumers to these posts were analyzed by using the comments they had posted. The qualitative analysis was done by using KH Coder. From our analysis, we were able to observe several points of both similarities and differences between Indian and Global consumers. We observed that Global consumers were more concerned about animal cruelty as compared to Indian consumers. Indian consumers were more concerned about online delivery options and safety measures related to COVID, but global consumers were more health conscious. Both types of consumers liked to discuss about the product offerings in detail.