The impact of digital marketing on consumer behaviour : a case study of millennials in South Africa

Abstract

Study objective: Digital marketing has become the most common method employed by marketers to communicate products or services to consumers since the evolution of digital technology. This necessitated the need to understand the impact of digital marketing on consumers in order to maximise value creation. This paper was aimed at gaining more insight in the effect of digital marketing by focusing on the millennial consumer in the retail industry. An exploratory study was conducted with 14 millennial consumers in the Gauteng region and unstructured interviews were used to explore qualitatively the impact of digital marketing on millennial consumers. The findings of the study revealed that millennial consumers found digital marketing useful for their intentions, namely to get better deals on the products and services they had intended to acquire. The study identified possible issues which could hamper the adoption of this form of marketing such as privacy issues. Millennials find advertisements that are visually appealing favourable, and they tend to react to advertisements like that.