Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Research Question: To what extent has promotion through social media contributed to the increase in sales of Red Bull GmbH’s products since 2014?! ! ! Introduction to Red Bull and Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Red Bull GmbH, referred to as Red Bull from here forward, is a multinational private

company based in Austria. They are an energy drink company who are known for their

products simply known as ‘Red Bull.’According to their website, over 6 billion cans of Red

Bull were sold in 170 countries in 2016, indicating high levels of success as an energy drink

company. One of the reasons Red Bull is extremely well-known around the world by both

consumers and non-consumers is through their social media marketing campaign. ! Social media marketing is a marketing tool that incorporates the use of technological

concepts and techniques with the aim of growing a business through different media, centered

around creating content that attracts attention and encourages users to share it on their social

networks (Oxford University Press, 2014, p.252). Social media marketing has only recently

been accepted as a form of marketing due to the rapid increase in popularity with the

development of websites and platforms in the past few years. For example, according to

Statista, Facebook had 1276 million monthly active users in 2014, which increased to 2196

million as of 2018. Whether this sources has presented factual information or not cannot be

known, however there appears to be a degree of reliability as this source is a large company

dedicated to market research and business intelligence. Moreover, this growth, and hence

marketing strategy, has been possible due to globalization, where the widespread adoption

and use of information communication technologies has allowed transfer of information to

occur instantaneously worldwide. In the case of Red Bull, their choice to focus on building

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