Influence of social media on buying behaviour of consumers of organised retail markets

Social media marketing had indeed become a critical aspect of the overall marketing strategy for organizations, including Indian retailers. A well-defined social media marketing strategy acts as a blueprint that guides the entire process from formulation of products to implementation and evaluation. The study aimed to investigate and analyse the impact of social media on the marketing of food commodities through organized retail markets. With the rapid growth of social media platforms and the increasing popularity of organized retail markets, it becomes essential to understand the relationship between these two phenomena and their influence on consumer buying behaviour and food commodity sales. Consumers were selected from five selected retail markets using simple random sampling. From each retail market, 20 respondents were selected. The data were collected from various age groups, income groups and gender groups. A total number of 100 customers were interviewed. The results revealed that social media highly influenced ‘Alternatives evaluation’ component of consumer behaviour followed by ‘Information search’, ‘Purchase decisions’, ‘Post purchase behaviour’ and ‘Need Recognition’. The results indicate that the highest mean score was observed for "Alternatives evaluation" with a mean of 3.80, suggesting that social media significantly impacts consumers evaluation and comparison of different options before making a purchase decision. Following closely, "Information search" and "Purchase decision", both showed substantial mean scores of 3.41 and 3.21, respectively. This signifies that social media plays a crucial role in helping consumers gather information about products or services and influences their behaviour for deciding to purchase. The socio-psychological variables selected for the study viz., Age, Occupation, Annual income had no significant relationship with buying behaviour while Education ,Social media readiness, Social media skills and Social media interaction pattern significantly influenced the buying behaviour of consumers.