Browsing by Subject "word-of-mouth marketing"

The purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of the meanings consumers attach to health food consumption. The phenomena was observed from the perspective of health food bloggers and in addition to how the bloggers communicated their health food behaviour, the role of word-of-mouth in electronic environment and companies’ word-of-mouth marketing was also investigated. The research was carried out using qualitative research methods and the empirical part of the study was implemented using netnography. As data I used writings from 4 health food blogs that were written during time period 12/2014 – 02/2015 and published in the website blogilista.fi. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. The theoretical part of the research covered an overview of factors affecting decision-making and food choice, word-of-mouth literature and motivations literature. The theoretical framework was created leaning on sociological aspect of human behaviour and with psychological self-determination theory I tried to gain a deeper understanding of how and why people get motivated in healthy lifestyle and healthy eating. I combined these with the aspects of changing communication environments of today and looked deeper in the meanings of social interaction in electronic platforms. As to the findings of this study, five different themes emerged from the narratives of blog posts. These were physical benefits, safety through control, energetic and attractive me, good conscience gourmandize and aesthetic character and pursuit of novelty. The findings gave examples of the diverse and multiple meanings connected to eating and ways to interpret the world through different behaviours. Also, some suggestions for companies’ word-of-mouth marketing strategies were given.