“The SoLoMo customer journey: a review and research agenda”

The purpose of this paper is to develop a better understanding of the impact of (So) social media, (Lo) local marketing, and (Mo) mobile applications (SoLoMo) on consumer behavior. The paper is based on a literature review of peerreviewed articles, published books, trade publications, and doctorate dissertations. This paper examines the SoLoMo consumer, which is a concept that has not been widely discussed in the literature of digital marketing. A thorough literature review of the digital customer journey indicates an oxymoron. On the one hand, there is a vast range of studies in the literature to explore the impact of social media and mobile devices on marketing and consumer behavior. On the other hand, little has been said about the integration of social media, mobile application, and local marketing and how it shapes the profile of the SoLoMo consumer. This paper suggests three areas for further research: (1) the examination of the SoLoMo consumer behavior; (2) the exploration of the digital customer journey; and (3) the investigation of selected new technologies that can shape the future of marketing. The study contributes to the understanding of digital consumer behavior in a multichannel marketing environment. It also proposes a research agenda to explore the future of online consumer behavior in the digital multi-touchpoint market landscape.


Introduction ©
Marketing's role in the evolution of business is essential to identify and address how people decide during their customer journey (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). As a well-developed scientific field, marketing is continuously adapting its methods and strategies to fullymeet the new consumer needs. This paper contributes in the existing literature on consumer behavior by focusing on the impact of (So) social media, (Lo) local marketing, and (Mo) mobile applications (SoLoMo) on the digital customer journey. This paper focuses on the SoLoMo customer journey, which has not been widely studied and mentioned in the literature (Chaney, 2015). For this reason, this paper aims to discuss fundamental concepts and contemporary digital marketing issues on a rather unexplored topic. Shields and Rangarajan (2013) argue that review papers by nature avoid reaching definite conclusions. The latter authors support that such studies serve to map the patterns in the current literature to identify the different research tools for data collection and selection of participants in both qualitative and quantitative research studies. Therefore, the present exploratory study aims to provide the theoretical framework which will lead to new research studies to further the SoLoMo consumer behavior.
Customers engage in a multi-platform journey which looks less like a funnel and more like a flight map (Lecinski, 2012). The new consumer starts the journey from online search engines. Other sources of influence such as traditional media (TV, radio, print, outdoor), as well as in-store marketing in brick-and-mortar stores play a supplementary role. The Ericsson Mobility Report (2017) showed an addition of more than 107 million new mobile subscriptions in Q1. Now, according to the latter report, the total number reaches the 7.6 billion of mobile subscriptions globally. What is more impressive is the report's forecast that there will be approximately 1.5 billion smart devices with cellular connections by 2022, which equals to the current population of China at the moment or the combined population of the USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Russia. Also, Ericsson Mobility Report (2017) forecasts the connected devices (smartphones, tablets, and phablets) will be 26 billion by 2020.
The digital world will be based on mobility, as the numbers of mobile applications, and mobile data traffic are rapidly increasing. The global digital agency "We are Social" argues in its Digital Statshot Report (Kemp, 2017) that mobile devices will push internet penetration beyond 51% of the world's population during mid to late 2017.
SoLoMo is an emerging marketing concept that can make use of modern digital marketing tools and explore the convergence of social media, local marketing applicability, and mobile connectivity.
Modern consumers do not make a clear distinction between the digital and physical marketing landscapes, as long as they both lead towards customer satisfaction (Chan & Yazdanifard, 2014). Little has been said about the integration of social media, mobile application, and local marketing and how it shapes the modern consumer. SoLoMo is a concept that promotes new dimension in online consumer behavior. The next section offers a literature review regarding the SoLoMo customer journey to conclude to discuss the impact of new SoLoMo-friendly technologies on marketing. Mobile marketing, location-based services, e-mail marketing with opt-in mailing lists, affiliate marketing, online public relations, article syndication, advertorials, referrals, and backlinks create a new marketing landscape in which the brand needs to have a loud and consistent voice. Otherwise, brands and consumers will never manage to meet. This paper identifies critical concepts in the literature by suggesting three areas for further research: (1) the examination of the SoLoMo consumer behavior; (2) the exploration of the digital customer journey; and (3) the investigation of selected new technologies in today's marketing landscape. The following section in this paper's literature review provides an overview of the SoLoMo consumer.

The SoLoMo consumer behavior
Though a review on relevant literature, this paper aims to better understand the SoLoMo consumers. Particular focus should be given to the new generation of online users who are having a natural inclination towards technology. This generation of students and professionals is defined as digital natives who "spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age" (Prensky, 2001, p. 1).
Digital natives are both pioneers and early adopters of technological concepts (Papakonstantinidis, 2014). Digital natives will try first the new smartphones, and they will set the trends in technology and marketing. Digital natives were those who started downloading MP3-formatted songs from the web and then quickly moved to streaming applications of social entertainment such as Spotify for music and YouTube for videos. Also, digital natives have a natural inclination towards online games where they see it as a chance to increase their reputation among other online gamers. Finally, digital natives prefer meeting online with their friends and followers as they seem to be more open and expressive when using social media than in their face-to-face interactions (Papakonstantinidis, 2014). For this new breed of consumers and online users, SoLoMo is not a marketing strategy. It is a way of living. What makes the SoLoMo consumer different?
The growth of the SoLoMo consumer has changed the dynamics of product marketing beyond recognition (Doyle, 2012). The fundamental means by which brands send and receive information, the way that customers make purchasing decisions and find out about products or services, is now completely different. The main shift has been the change in the information flow dynamic between the brand and the customer. Before the advent of social marketing, there was a fairly distinct process that most brands went through when marketing a product or service. The first step in the process was to conduct market research about potential customers, their wants and needs, previous purchasing habits, and so forth. This then allowed the brand to segment their marketing strategy depending on the customers they wanted to talk to and their selected method of engagement. They would then design some marketing collateral to achieve that aim, whether it can be by TV, radio, print advertisement, or whatever. The key is that the brand is in control of the marketing process at all times.
SoLoMo has changed that notion completely; the brand is not in control of the process, but is merely a participant in a wider array of information sharing and exchange that now determines how people decide to buy something (Tuten & Solomon, 2014). There is exceptionally clear evidence to show that people use social engagement to seek recommendations and feedback on brands from people whom they trust, friends or other people in their networks whose opinions they trust or believe to be a neutral arbiter. Therefore, people will ask their Facebook friends for recommendations on their purchases, or whether someone has had a good or bad experience at a particular restaurant, for example. Sometimes this is quite passive; someone might simply read that someone has had a great night at a new restaurant, and decide to check it out themselves.
As a wider element of social engagement, websites like TripAdvisor or feedback systems such as those found on eBay have become important parts of the marketing mix. These systems are built around usergenerated reviews of products and services, and consumers tend to place a good deal of store in the information that they get from them. Therefore, no marketer can ignore this kind of social engagement and reflexive feedback in their plans. Fundamentally the dynamic has changed so that consumers may now know more about products and services than the marketers themselves; they can compare and contrast multiple providers very easily, and with no input from the brands themselves.
The local marketing is the second element of the SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) marketing concept. Consumers are adopting new technologies and social media interfaces that allow them to behave in a different way than they did in the past. Nowadays consumers have more power than before regarding pre and post purchase attitudes (Chaney, 2015). The new consumers do not waste time going through the traditional distribution channels through which their level of control was extremely low. Now, they are experimenting with new channels through which their voice can be heard. The key search engine companies have realized this new era, and they are trying to adopt it. Papakonstantinidis et al. (2016) argue that a satisfied SoLoMo consumer can be the most efficient, free of charge brand ambassador, while a dissatisfied one will write negative reviews online to harm the brand intentionally.
The current and expected growth of connected devices in online social networks shapes a new marketing landscape. Nowadays, brands act as humans and consumers act as brands. Both brands and consumers engage in public discussions on the major social networking platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin, Snapchat, and Instagram. Bolen (2015) argues social media is becoming people's primary source of information, communication, and entertainment. As such, marketers have found a fertile environment full of opportunities to approach consumers in a more humane way than mass media advertising.
SoLoMo consumers are becoming attached to their mobile devices. Mobile digital media time has already overtaken desktop and other media internet access (Kemp, 2017). Smartphone penetration has increased for two reasons. First, wireless networks have become faster and ubiquitous. Second, mobile devices are nowadays more affordable. Mobile marketing can provide consumers with personalized information based on their location and the time of receipt (Papakonstantinidis et al., 2016). In other words, consumers are more attached to their phones than their personal computers, providing marketers with new tools and opportunities to target their audiences with the highest accuracy as ever before. Further studies of the convergence of social media expansion, location-based services, and mobile usage should explore the new customer journey in marketing. The next section discusses how the SoLoMo consumer affects the digital customer journey.

The digital customer journey
Advertising blooms from the early existence of humanity. People need to influence other people, using any means they have. Until recently brands relied heavily on traditional marketing tools such as television ads, print ads, brochures, posters, and radio ads to communicate with their target markets (Chan & Yazdanifard, 2014). Now, with the rapid development of the internet, brands communicate directly with their consumers seeking immediate and accurate feedback.
The desire of every business or brand is primarily to approach new customers, then progressively to build relationships with them, and finally to convert them to loyal customers and lead them to purchase. In that purpose, digital marketing has distinct differences from traditional marketing. In digital marketing, the achievement of acquisition, conversion, and retention may be fulfilled with different manners (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). It depends on the product or service that someone wants to promote, the needs, or even their target audience. There is not an ideal marketing plan in the digital world; there are always different solutions.
We used to say that a marketing plan needs to master the 4Ps: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. Today, in addition to what traditional marketing dictates, we need to know what the customer thinks and how he or she behaves before, during, and after the purchase. Knowing the variety of different channels that can be used in the new marketing landscape, a consumer can be approached through a well-structured website, social networking sites, blogs, or mobile apps. For a digital marketing campaign to be successful, it is crucial that both the online and offline marketing techniques have to integrate correctly. Rolling out a digital marketing campaign can be challenging. Thus, a selection of acquisition, conversion, and retention tools is essential (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012) to guide modern consumers to their digital and physical customer journey.
The acquisition tools are used for starting the customer cycle, focusing on selecting the right target audience and emphasizing on establishing the relationship between the customer and the product. Conversion tools, on the other hand, aim to persuade customers to act by proceeding on the purchase of the product (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). Finally, after the customer-product relationship has started, the brand's primary goal is to keep its existing customers and turn them into loyal, returning customers. Retention tools are used so that the company's products will always be on the radar of the existing customers. Today's customer journey is significantly affected by social media, local marketing, and mobile applications. As smartphones and mobile telecommunication companies offer constant and high-speed online access, 92% of teenagers answered that they go online daily, and 24% almost invariably (Pew Research, 2016). Much of teenagers' (aged 13-17) access is facilitated through mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), with Facebook (71%) being the most popular social media platform among them. According to Pew Research (2016), other than Facebook, the most popular social media platforms for teenagers are Instagram (52%), Snapchat (41%), Twitter (33%), Google+ (33%), Vine (24%), and Tumblr (14%).
It is quite impressive that YouTube is not one of the teenagers' options. Nevertheless, 71% of the logs into more than one social networking sites. The terms social networking sites and Web 2.0 are widely discussed in a range of industries, such as advertising, marketing, web development, and human resources. Both terms, however, are elusive since they are continually adjusting to new realities that online users shape. The digital customer journey includes a variety of marketing touchpoints where brands and consumer can meet and discuss. Nowadays, consumers use not only the popular social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but it also consists of online journals (weblogs), community forums, collaborative platforms (wikis), and virtual gaming worlds. Nevertheless, as Murugesan (2007) argues, the main characteristic of social networks is that online users can generate content and to promote it through the web by sharing links with the online Web 2.0 communities.
The main characteristic of a social networking site is the sense of community that the traditional websites cannot develop. Many examples of social networks prove that today's administrations are gradually using it for their benefit. Social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and forums are low-cost advertising and communication platforms that further engagement with customers and users of the Internet (Miller & Lammas, 2010). The primary objective of social networks is to strengthen the social bonds among friends. As such, the social networks became widely known as channels of interpersonal and group communication. The social networking sites have significantly affected the way the Internet users can communicate with friends, make new friends, get informed, and share links with the public (Safko & Brake, 2009). In the traditional ways to communicate, such as the face-to-face interaction, or the phone conversation, new forms of communication have been added.
Nowadays, the SoLoMo customer journey involves instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, Skype, and Viber. The SoLoMo consumers expect to reach each brand at any time they want (Papakonstantinidis et al., 2016). The SoLoMo consumers treat the brand as a friend, who is always available and accessible. Younger generations consider e-mail and chat as primitive ways to communicate. Twitter posts, Facebook status updates, and Skype conversations are now the main element of their communication process. The SoLoMo consumer is more receptive and open when a brand communicates within context (Chaney, 2015). For example, further research could explore to what extent brands can communicate with consumers by providing them with tips and experience points to help them increase their online gaming status.
Digital customers are getting more familiar and comfortable with the Internet, and they expect from brands to approach them and interact with them. A website is a portrait of business, is the beginning of all. Customers may explore the website and learn about a brand everything they need. Through a website, a brand may also provide access to social networks accounts. An online profile of business, product, or service may rise positively in the digital world, to manage its purposes (Doyle, 2012). Social media is becoming the crossroad where people's information, communication, and entertainment intersect. Also, the number of mobile users who access social media to search for local offers is considerable increasing daily. Given the information as discussed in the present paper, the SoLoMo consumer and how he/she experiences the digital customer journey needs to be further explored. The next section in the current literature review highlights the significance of investigating some critical new technologies that will shape tomorrow's customer digital journey where more touchpoints will be added.

New technologies
This section highlights essential technologies that have the potentiality to shape the future of marketing. The first technology that future research needs to explore is the NFC (Near Field Communication) Technology. The NFC technology offers vast possibilities for brands to communicate with their consumers. Through wireless technology, NFC enables two devices that are close to each other to exchange bits of information (Dutot, 2015). NFC technology can assist consumers to connect to their bank account and communicate this information to the retailer to make a payment (Pham & Ho, 2015). The NFC technology can allow marketers identify users' personal preferences and shopping habits to develop faster and easier purchase experience during the customer journey.
Consumers want to be able to communicate with the firms in the most natural possible way. They usually forget their passwords of their different accounts, and sometimes they do not even remember that they have an account in a specific firm (Dutot, 2015). How many times have we tried to register on a specific website and get back a message saying "This email is already being used; If you forgot your password, please click here." Firms need to realize that consumers are in need of secure but straightforward ways of access when they are buying products online. They are in need of instant, intuitive connectivity, zero configuration, and quick essential access, and NFC technology could offer that.
Retailers could make use of NFC technology mainly through four categories of NFC applications (Dutot, 2015). The first one is the "Touch & Go". For the consumers to make use of this application, they need to put the device reader close to the access code. Another category of NFC application is the "Touch & Confirm". This category includes any mobile payment that the consumer needs to confirm just by simply entering a password to accept the transaction. The third category is called "Touch & Connect" that allows data transfer to occur between two mobile devices (Levesque et al., 2015).
Consumers exchange music, images, and other bits of information. The fourth category is the "Touch & Explore", and consumers explore different services that are being offered by the same retailer without even typing the URL in their browser. In other words, the retailers could directly inform the local marketing oriented consumers by sending them special offers, discounts, and other types of information through their digital touchpoints (i.e., smart posters, smart billboards, and augmented reality layers).
The second technology that requires further exploration is the internet of things (IoT). Wearable technologies are offering to the retailers a fantastic opportunity to understand their SoLoMo consumers. Sensors and display technologies are being embedded into clothing, and they could identify in real time the emotional state of the consumer. These sensors could illustrate the different types of mood and levels of stress by displaying light or a different color to inform both the wearer and those that are connected with him or her. The new technology incorporated with the wearable items could help retailers to capture things like a heart rate and then try to interpret that in their benefit. For example, if consumers are excited about a brand then their heart rate will increase. If retailers now the exact moment that this will take place they could reinforce that feeling with an extra offer for example, or they could suggest some cross-sales through the app.
Firms need to make consumers feel comfortable to give their data on the spot (i.e., detect emotions). The amount of data that is being gathered from the wearable items could open an entirely new field for the consumer behavior analysis (Park & Skoric, 2015). Further research can explore the brands' intention to use the personal data generated from wearable items such as people's health condition such as someone's heart rate or levels of blood pressure. The fact that firms have an enormous amount of data it does not mean that they can make full use of it. Modern marketing experts need to perform significant data analysis and work with algorithms (Kinnunen et al., 2016). With this new technology, the amount of data is going to be enormous, and firms need to be able to interpret it. The natural extension of these devices is to become from wearable to implantable. In the next years, we will move from glasses to lenses and from clothes that show our mood to e-ink tattoos that light up and express our feelings in the current situation.
While marketers are leveraging location-based marketing, the internet of things is becoming more popular and is growing today's marketplace (Bruno, 2015). Many firms are launching new accessories that either work as stand-alone products or need to be connected to the smartphone of the consumer. Either way, it is becoming a huge trend. In general wearable items are quite expensive breakthrough products that are using incredibly sophisticated technology (Kinnunen et al., 2016). Firms need to differentiate, and retailers need to make use of this new trend. Before analyzing the benefits and how retailers could incorporate into their marketing strategies the wearable technology lets identify the new trends in the wearable market.
The constantly changing environment, especially in the wearable market, is pushing for changes in the social media platforms. The current platforms are not yet optimized to receive information from the wearable items. The main reason for that is because most of the social media are designed for interaction to take place on screen-based devices, which is not the case for most of the new wearable items. The new devices have limited screens, and in some case, they have not at all, which means that the social media platforms will have eventually to adapt to facilitate meaningful interactions on wearable technology.
Wearable items will be able though to communicate with social network platforms automatically and share information related to its users (Levesque et al., 2015). For example, if a smartwatch detects that a user ran 5 km and burned 500 calories in a specific location, the wearable device can compare this information with other users in the community and share the comparative statistics. Another feature which is underused is the voice recognition. In the wearable items where the screen is tiny or even there is no screen, the voice recognition is going to play a significant role. Due to this fact, a new era of social media is going to arise, and new social media platforms will be developed just for voice.
If both marketers and retailers could understand the consumer's reasonable emotional state and could see in real time when it is getting out of normal range, then they could have a fantastic opportunity to intervene with some sort of experience that the person might be receptive to. In other words, retailers could provide some real-time help or feedback at the moment. Retailers could use wearable technology to provide consumers with convenience marketing, making the life of the consumer as comfortable as possible.

Generalization of the main statements
This paper aims to provide the reader with a systematic literature review of today's online consumer behavior in the digital multi-touchpoint market landscape. It contributes to the understanding of digital consumer behavior and highlights the concepts that need to be explored in future research. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on the digital customer's journey. For this reason, this section aims to generalize the paper's main statements by identifying three areas of marketing literature that need further exploration. First is the examination of the SoLoMo consumer behavior who demonstrates a unique mindset in consumption. Second is the exploration of the digital customer journey which has been characterized by the plethora of multitouch points in both the digital and the physical environment. Third, further investigation should explore certain new technologies that will shape tomorrow's marketing landscape.
The SoLoMo customer is a term that has not been widely discussed in the literature. Customers use social media for communication, information, and entertainment. However, as literature argues, consumers do not make a clear distinction between the online and the offline world. Marketing is becoming more and more "phygital", both physical and digital. For this reason, further research needs to explore how consumers decide when they are standing in the intersection between the two sides of marketing.
At the same time, local marketing applications with the use of NFC technologies and mobile wearable devices widen the possibilities of reaching the consumers in multiple touchpoints during their customer journey. Today's digital customer journey seems endless and continuous. Consumers are fascinated with the new technologies such as the wearable and virtual reality devices and that will allow them to live the brand in an alternative marketing environment. Also, critical studies could explore the brand-consumer relationship in the new customer journey to develop a better understanding regarding the issues of privacy and confidentiality.
The paper is based on a literature review of key peer-reviewed articles, published books, trade publications, and one doctorate dissertation to examine an under-discussed term in digital marketing which is the SoLoMo consumer. It aims to highlight alternative concepts in literature to point out the most suitable research methods for datacollection and selection of subjects. This review paper avoids reaching definite conclusions; rather it suggests an agenda for further research in consumer behavior.

Conclusion
Technology is creating a new intelligent ecosystem that affects the way people communicate and do business. However, what is the role of the business in this new environment where the technology is moving so fast that many firms are not able to keep up? These firms should aim to understand the SoLoMo customer fully. In other words, academic scholars and professional researchers need to explore the new consumer needs. The new system that is arising is no doubt flooded with smart technology and big data. With the use of the new technologies, the products will be able to sell themselves because in the minds of the consumers they are positioned as helpful and needed.
The business environment is changing, and firms need to be prepared to take advantage of the new opportunities that are created in a new ecosystem that accelerates creativity, innovation, and of course focuses a lot on entrepreneurial spirit (Ankeny, 2013). The new idea is not only creating applications that the user needs to give the input every time but creating applications that will learn from experience (Chaney, 2015). In this way, they will be able to improve with every single interaction, and with no doubt, they will be able to assist the consumer in making simple and more complex purchase decisions. Further research can explore the applications of cognitive computing that is characterized by machine learning and selflearning systems. Modern marketers will benefit from the use of data mining and social habit pattern recognition applications.
One of the main issues that consumers are facing today is that they have at their disposal an infinite amount of information, but unfortunately they have limited time to access it. Most of the devices that we are using today are relying on humans to receive the initial information. As Oh et al. (2014) argue, new types of innovation shortly will help consumers to manage massive amounts of consumer data. Since more and more devices are being connected to the Internet, more and more information will be shared among the users. That will inevitably lead to sharing of knowledge and experience. Firms are already focusing toward such extensions where the sharing of the shopping experience holds a central role and more consumer data are available for brands.
The new environment is also demanding wearable technologies (Bruno, 2015). Until now most manufacturers have been focusing on wearable technology which relates to health and fitness.
However, wearable technology can provide data based on consumers' social habits and emotions. The new environment is without question characterized by mobile development. More and more new features are being incorporated into smartphones. This trend will not slow down since the mobile market has not settled yet. Following this trend, the location-based mobile commerce has the potential to affect industries in various but still unexplored ways in the future. At the same time, the new environment could incorporate some technologies that could change the traditional way of shopping, and that will make firms to rethink their online and offline strategies.
Of course in this turbulent environment, consumers crave for recognition of their individuality, even though they are pleading for respect of their private life. This opposite approach is quite intriguing for both marketing and communication scholars. Consumers are engaging themselves in platforms where they are becoming part of the business model (McKinsey, 2013). This new type of trend in the business environment has to do mostly with thinking a new way of how different types of services are managed and consumed (Ericson et al., 2014). New types of technologies give the firms opportunity to create a market where people with same goals could be connected.
The ever-present technology can challenge marketers in a plethora of ways that are still unexplored. The new digital customer journey may no longer be about the consumers' physical location, but more about their emotional state. Wearable technologies are offering to the retailers an opportunity to truly understand their consumers and go beyond social media and other forms of digital marketing. Through a systematic, but not exhaustive, literature review, this paper explains the implications developed by the integration of social media, mobile applications, and local marketing in marketing. The review paper calls for a need to further investigate the SoLoMo consumer, the SoLoMo customer journey, and the new marketing technologies such as the NFC and the Internet of Things. The suggested research agenda could be the basis of future exploration in consumer behavior.