Impact of social media on consumption patterns: Evidence from Republic of Serbia

Social media has gained an increasingly important role in consumer life. Building a permanent social network presence and interacting through online communication have become a very popular and inevitable sphere of modern society. Social networks represent a great platform for gradual emergence and promotion of consumer-brand relationships, where both retailers and consumers participate in the creation of online brand communities. From the marketing perspective consumers all over the world are strongly connected to each other via engagement in online word-of-mouth communication, generating new patterns in brand purchasing processes. Having given that teens and young adults are considered main advocates of this trend, we extrapolated this idea to accessing the student population, with premise that their behavior is more specific to related research question than random sample perspective would be. The intention of the study was to investigate the role and the importance of social media among the student population in the Republic of Serbia, with a special emphasis on their opinions and attitudes towards gathering and using online information about brands. The results should be beneficial for marketing professionals in terms of better understanding consumer behavior, as one of the most complex and unpredictable phenomenon in the time when Internet creates a suitable environment for business success. In the era of social network platforms brands are considered to have their own persona that actively participates in life of customers by responding to communication via social media.