Is Instagram’s shift from social media to social commerce legitimate ?

Field: Business, Management and Accounting (Social Sciences)

This research aims to analyse to what extent can Instagram influence the purchasing decision of cosmetics amongst Swiss women and become a relevant distribution channel for brands. The first section of the document presents the evolution of Instagram since its creation and allows to assess its importance in today’s society. It discusses its functionalities that not only reflect its initial purpose of serving as a social media but also as a means to provide an e-commerce experience to its users thanks to its business-oriented features. The second section is oriented towards the marketing evolution and new theories that have evolved along with the digitalisation of the world and social media. New terminologies such as social commerce and social selling are discussed in order to distinguish their differences and importance in today’s marketing strategies. Finally, the last section of the report contains different data that has been collected from brands’ and consumers’ perspectives, thus enabling to assess the influence of Instagram on Swiss women when it comes to the purchase of cosmetics. From the literature review and findings, important notions such as authenticity, proximity and trust have emerged. In today’s society, social connectivity and online communities are extremely important since they are the first point of reference when in need of information. As a matter of fact, the practice of social commerce emphasizes the importance of social objectives by placing a path to purchase as a secondary dimension. Therefore, the first objective of brands is to leverage social communities so they can nurture their relationship with their customers. By doing so, they develop human attributes that enable them to not just be considered as a symbol or a logo, but rather like a trustworthy source of information. Therefore, through social commerce and social selling, brands put communication and engagement with their customers at the centre of their marketing strategies. From consumers’ perspectives, results demonstrated that Instagram is not only a social media platform through which users connect to interact together but has rather evolved towards playing an important role at each stage of the customer journey. In fact, users connect to be inspired by content, to seek information and/or to help them decide whether to purchase a product or not. As a matter of fact, 41% of respondents are influenced by external sources such as influencers, friends or family and sales consultants’ advice when it comes to the purchase of cosmetics. In addition to that, 45% of respondents have already bought a product after having visualised it on the platform. Therefore, it can be understood that Instagram can have a certain influence on Swiss women when it comes to the purchase of cosmetics products since external sources of influence and visual content have an impact on their purchasing decisions. From brands’ perspectives, the implementation of Instagram’s new checkout feature requires some trade-offs because they will have limited access to their customer data as they will belong to Instagram. Nevertheless, the checkout feature combined with brands’ e-commerce platforms could be beneficial to professional pages as they both participate in increasing brands’ conversion rate through product sales. For these reasons, it is recommended to cosmetics brand pages to have a Swiss Instagram account in order to leverage the notions of trust, proximity and authenticity with their national followers, thus allowing them to establish social communities on Instagram.