EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY AS A MARKETING STRATEGY TO POWER BRAND PROMOTION: AN EMPLOYEE PERSPECTIVE

Employee Advocacy is an emerging and cost-effective concept of employee amplification to market products and services by enabling employees to build and share the company's brand contents through social media platforms. The paper summarizes the available research-based contents as well as articles and blogs of experts in the field of digital and social media marketing. The study primarily intended to assess employees' awareness and perception of various aspects of employee advocacy. It has identified forms and types of contents shared and social media platforms now used by the employees in the automotive sector for leveraging brand promotion and communicating with the target market. The study has been designed as a descriptive research paper based on the empirical data collected from a sample of 102 employees from automobile showrooms in the southern districts of Kerala using a snowball sampling technique. A questionnaire was drafted with the help of google forms and administered among the respondents via email and WhatsApp. Two-dimensional plot of correspondence analysis, Descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U test, and Kruskal-Wallis H test was applied to present and describe the empirical data and to draw inference about the significance of the difference in the awareness and perception of employees about the aspects of employee advocacy on brand promotion in terms of demographic factors. Awareness level and understanding of the elements of employee advocacy is found very low and significantly different among employees according to the designation. This paper also indicates that the social media policies and guidelines of the companies were not rightly imparted to the employees. That's why the involvement and creative use of the potentials of social media platforms by the employees were not up to a remarkable level. Employees perceived that employee advocacy as a cost-effective brand promotion strategy for the future, and it demands the employer's motivation, recognition, and rewards for inspiring employees to be brand ambassadors. This research addressed a relatively new concept in which there has been no extensive empirical researches and calls on the attention of the market as well as academic researchers for contributing the unexplored areas of the novel and powerful idea for utilizing human resources in a platform where they are interested and involved.