10 sekunder i rampljuset : Hur företag använder Snapchat som strategisk kommunikation och varumärkesbyggande

Sammanfattning: Social media play a significant role in people’s daily communication and life. Even companies use them to reach a broader audience. This study aims to explore if Snapchat can be a useful platform for companies in their strategic communication, especially regarding corporate branding. Snapchat is the fastest growing social media today and they use content in a completely different way than other major social medias. This paper will show how Arla Sweden is using Snapchat to communicate with a specific target group, create engagement and strengthen brand identity. The study focuses on how users understand Arla´s content and is divided into two parts, where two qualitative methods are used. The first part focuses on Arla´s use of Snapchat and is conducted by an interview with an expert from Arla´s social media department. The second one aims to understand the user experience and is collected through four focus group interviews. The study is based on theories about corporate branding and Stuart Hall´s theory of encoding/decoding. The result shows that the users are critical to companies using Snapchat. The users view Snapchat as a private medium for friends and are negative to companies using it as a marketing tool. However, the study shows a positive result regarding users’ first experience with Arla´s content. The conclusion is that Snapchat can be used for corporate branding as long as companies make sure that the content is interesting enough for the target group.