Degree
Master of Business Administration
Faculty / School
Faculty of Business Administration (FBA)
Advisor
Dr. Saima Hussain, Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing
Committee Member 1
Dr. Saima Hussain, Assistant Professor Business Administration - Academic Affairs, Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi
Project Type
MBA Research Project
Keywords
https://ir.iba.edu.pk/do/search/?q=Lux&start=0&context=8598587&facet=">Lux, Influencer, Digital marketing, Engagement, Trust, Unilever, Digital content
Abstract / Summary
This report serves the purpose of finding an advocacy base for Lux which the brand can utilize whenever it is running a brand marketing campaign. The report goes on and defines what Influencer Marketing is. The term itself comes from the word ‘influencer’, which basically means any person who holds some level of command over any topic and who is able to have an effect or is able to mold the opinion of his or her followers, on that particular topic. Unilever, the parent company for Lux, wanted to have access to a data base of influencers relevant to their target audience which they could simply refer to and utilize when running marketing campaigns.
Our research primarily focused on looking at world’s best-case practices since the concept of Influencer Marketing was still relatively new to the Pakistani marketing domain. Digital marketing has been the new go-to area for most of the advertisers because of its reach and engagement. Keeping this in mind Unilever wanted to be the first one who would venture in this domain and capture the advantages of this untapped medium. We studied literature from multiple sources and brought in the best-case practices that have been followed globally by big companies who have ventured in a similar direction. The results of this were then added into our recommendations to the company and the brand. In addition to literature study we got questionnaires filled from the target audience of Lux asking them about their digital media consumption habits and which types of influencers they followed.
Our literature helped us categorize the influencers into three major groups. These included Micro influencers, Digital content creators and Celebrities. We then went ahead and conducted an observational study (netnography) of the different types of influencers that pertained to the relevant target group and categorized them into the above three groups based on certain parameters which were also outlined in our literature review.
We utilized the marketing funnel and literature study for the creation of the influencer database where we assigned average percentages for engagement, trust and conversion to every stage of the marketing funnel for all three types of influencer groups found in our literature study. This formed the basis of our working mechanism that went behind the creation of the influencer data base.
In the end we recommended Unilever to keep a mix of influencers depending on the nature and purpose of the campaign. In addition, influencer marketing works best when it comes naturally from the influencer. Force fitting a brand message in an influencer post/video only damages the equity and credibility of that influencer as consumers today are aware and can easily distinguish between a sponsored message and the one which comes naturally. Another recommendation from our end to the client was that to use those niche influencers who have large reach as their credibility is much higher than celebrities. So, in effect if the company wants to have a large impact of any marketing campaign on the target audience, it is best to use more micro influencers and digital content creators as opposed to single big celebrity.
Recommended Citation
Nadeem, A., Qureshi, F., Malik, M. A., Noman, M. T., Kazmi, R. R., & Muzaffar, Z. (2019). Influencer marketing for LUX (Unpublished graduate research project). Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan. Retrieved from https://ir.iba.edu.pk/research-projects-mba/219
