A Comprehensive Model of Integrated Marketing Communication, Brand Equity, and Sales

Social media raises new opportunities and challenges for firms, providing new channels of direct communication with consumers who can provide huge amount of data and useful information about desiderata, innovative products and services. Due to the growing utilization of social media, companies increasingly invest in communication and marketing campaigns handling user content generation. Although these activities are widespread now, there is still little understanding on what effects they may have on the real economic value of the firm. Traditional studies focus on the relationship between marketing campaigns and the firm's brand value, others analyze the interdependence between the brand and the premium price of the companies'products. Only very few researches focus on the tri-lateral relationship among marketing campaigns, brands, and sales in the domain of social media. In this paper we propose some ratios aimed at measuring the effects of communication campaigns in the social media domain and we depict a framework that explains the correlation among marketing campaigns, brand equity, and sales.