IS YOUR COMPANY READY FOR WHAT'S APP?

Traditional marketing approaches using large-scale media are extremely expensive for organizations and are becoming less effective all the time. The contribution of this article is to conduct a performance analysis of social media marketing strategies, investigating a customer group on the WhatsApp platform run by a factory store located in the South of Brazil. Two main variables were used to evaluate performance: interactions (Dokun, Hosanagar, Nai, 2014; Homburg, Ehm, Artz, 2015) and sales (Stelzner, 2015; Xie, Lee, 2015; Fulgoni, 2015). Fieldwork was conducted in Brazil over a 7-month period, of 2015 to 2016. Data were collected from a controlled WhatsApp group comprising 431 members who were customers of a factory outlet run by the firm Itacorda. Many research findings have identified social media marketing as a potential tool for reducing marketing costs while increasing the effectiveness of activities when online social media platforms are used. The results of this study with relation to sales are compatible with previous studies that have investigated other online platforms. However, this study did not confirm previous findings related to the variable interaction, in this controlled customer group. The findings of this study highlight a new technology platform used for marketing strategies. Few studies have attempted to explain the WhatsApp platform as a tool for social media communication or efforts to make money or leverage sales using this new platform. This widens the prospects available to firms for social media marketing.