Designing a social media strategy of herbal cosmetic products for Chinese customers using customer knowledge management

Abstract

The small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the north of Thailand lack the knowledge of marketing and selling products online to China based on social media. In addition, they lack of knowledge about customers as well as their requirements and demands, thus causing low customer awareness and sales. The purpose of this research is to develop a framework based on customer knowledge management (CKM) approach to improve customer awareness and satisfaction for Thai SMEs using "'Do buy shop" as a case study. A qualitative research method has been used in the study. Data collection was conducted through an interview, observation and document analysis. A variety of tools are used in accordance with the KM process. Root cause analysis, SWOT and TOWS analysis, Text mining and Kano model are used in the stage of knowledge capture and analysis, giving the result of knowledge-about and knowledge-from customers. In the knowledge creation step, a social media marketing strategy based on WeChat and Weibo platforms is developed and its prototype was created and implemented in knowledge applying stage, giving the output of knowledge for customers. The assessment result of 85 customers on the social media prototype shows that the business performance was improved as shown by its sales volume of more than 7000 bath within the one-month implementation period. Moreover, based on 20 customers who had experience in using social media prototype, the customer satisfaction result is also high showing the percentage of more than 60% in every questionnaire items. In addition, a social media marketer also satisfy on the developed social media strategy in terms of the intelligible and practical benefits.