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What can normally be observed on the market, is often considered like the premises of developing marketing as a science, but what is seen, is it always true? It remains to be investigate. It is possible to study what is really happening without any intervention, but in order to obtain different and significant results, there can be manipulated certain independent variables for analyzing their influence, by measuring the effect on dependent variables reflected in consumer’s behavior. Marketing experiments have proven to be highly effective in identifying relevant results over time, representing a method of research into the different phenomena encountered on the market for various products and services. In fact, marketing experiment method measures the cause and effect relationship. This paper proposes to contribute to the development of the specialized literature by presenting the tools used for a marketing experiment. It has been used as a method of investigation, analysis of the secondary databases. Against the backdrop of technology development, an inventory of new tools used in applying such a research method is needed to highlight scientific researches as a modern and current tool in marketing research.

The way that companies are doing marketing has changed dramatically over the years, vividly encouraged by the new channels of communications that have been developed, the social communities here included. This paper focuses on the IT industry and aims to analyse the impact of social media conversations on the brand image of cloud computing providers, with special focus on three social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Through using netnography as main method of research, the paper aims to do a comparative analysis both from the point of view of different IT brands and from the point of view of different social communities, leveraging the use of specific hashtags. The research focuses on different aspects, such as number of conversations around a specific hashtag, type of topics, type of promoters, timeframe, geography, as well as the way these link and influence brand perception. The findings aim to help marketers better understand how and to what extent the conversations going on in social media can impact the perception and image of a brand and how they can leverage this to their advantage, with specific focus on the IT industry. As the below study shows, online marketing, especially through social media, can help shape the image of a brand in certain ways according to the different social network used. Due to the extensive reach that these online communities have, with the right tools, messages and influencers, marketers from the IT industry can benefit from a very useful and cost effective branding strategy which can help position their IT solutions in both a reliable and rapid way. On the other side, special care still needs to be taken regarding the messages that are being sent across these platforms, as once being launched it is very difficult to erase them and change the perception already in place. Also, overall, the brand perception of the companies analysed proved to be more or less consistent all over the different social networks, however this is again a very sensitive aspect to which marketers need to pay special consideration.