Social Media Impact on Consumers in Developed and Developing Countries: The Case of US and Kuwait

Understanding impact of social media on user's attitude is important. As social media have become very popular amongst people and have become an integral part of the world economy in recent years, predicting impact of social media sites has become a major goal of many researchers in academia and industry. The objectives of the proposed research are two-fold. The first objective is to identify factors that strongly predict consumers' attitudes toward social media usage. The second objective is to investigate how culture influences adoption of social media in developed and less developed countries. The research draws upon the Theory of Reasoned Action, TRA (Fishbein & Ajzen 1975) and the Technology Acceptance Model, TAM (Davis 1989). To achieve the objectives of this research, an English and Arabic Online survey is developed for the US and Kuwait samples and then Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used for testing of the hypothesized relationships and to compare the two cultures. This research provides valuable information and new insights for scholars and managers. The results of this study enable marketing managers understand the importance of social media that can be used to enhance their business. More specifically, the research will assist marketing managers in Kuwait and the US in understanding the critical factors that lead businesses to create their own social media sites by identifying what factors affect consumer's attitude toward social media sites in order for business owners to focus on the most important factors without placing unnecessary emphasis on aspects which are proven to be less important. Furthermore, based on the positive significant results, marketing managers in the two countries are be able to develop effective advertisement strategies through social media based on the proper mix of factors depending on the target market.