Abstract
Orientation: Social media is often described a double-edged sword, yielding opportunities and challenges. It brings organisations closer to their customers, and when executed properly it can help drive business and provide a significant return on investment.Research purpose: To explore the opportunities and challenges that social media has created in SCM in the South African FMCG retail industry.Motivation for the study: Limited research has been conducted on the innate link between supply chain management (SCM) and social media, especially within the context of the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retail industry and within a developing country context such as South Africa.Research design, approach and method: A generic qualitative research approach was adopted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 top and middle managers from the South African FMCG retail industry. Thematic analysis was used to analyse data. This was done in sequential phases, namely by data familiarisation, generating codes, identifying themes, constructing thematic networks and drawing conclusions from the data.Main findings: The findings indicate that social media has created faster and more collaborative communication between an organisation’s suppliers and their customers. However, it has also empowered consumers and forced FMCG retailers to respond faster to consumer complaints and queries to maintain customer relationships for sustained competitive advantage. The lack of control over content that is shared by customers on organisations’ social media platforms is a challenge that organisations experienced. The predominant social media platforms found to be used were WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter.Practical/managerial implications: Traditional methods of communicating are changing, and organisations need to adapt to social media as an alternative form of technology customer engagement and relationship management. For managers, if social media is embedded in the supply chain, the supply chain can gather information from a broad base of different sources.Contribution/value-add: This collective intelligence can be used to uncover evolving trends or for better-informed decision-making, planning and overall collaboration between supply chain partners.
Highlights
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc., was quoted saying: ‘innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity and not a threat’
This study aimed to explore the opportunities and challenges of social media in supply chain management (SCM) within fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retailers in South Africa
The first research question of this study explored the opportunities social media has created in SCM within the South African FMCG retail industry
Summary
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc., was quoted saying: ‘innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity and not a threat’. There have been many innovations in the supply chain industry with the emergence of IT over the years such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft, to name a few (Wong & Ngai 2019:158). This emergence of IT in supply chain management (SCM) has created both opportunities and challenges for firms to engage, manage and communicate with customers, which have been augmented by social media (Wang, Wang & Che 2019:280). Customer engagement is central to the effective use of social media and likewise customer relationship management (CRM) in SCM (Markova & PetkovskaMirčevska 2013:92). Organisations, especially organisations operating in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, need to embrace the opportunities presented by social media engagement platforms as FMCG retailers are required to be flexible to be able to cope with technological change, innovation and globalisation, as well as the constantly changing customer demands, needs and expectations (Manders, Caniëls & Paul 2016:181)
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