– DOI 10.55206/GCEJ1079

Hristina Sokolova

Rousse University “Angel Kanchev”, Faculty of Business and Management

Email: hsokolova@uni-ruse.bg

Abstract: The paper presents the results of a survey among digital consumers in Bulgaria. The text proposes a concept of a four-dimensional model of the perception of success among digital consumers in the country. The model includes four sociocultural categories: well-being, happiness, achievement and social capital. The hypotheses are, first, that the sociocultural notion of success includes concepts belonging to at least one of the four dimensions of the success model; second, that the notion of success is associated with topics in respondents’ daily lives, such as income size and employability. The aim of the study is to approbate whether and how many of the replicated associations fall into the four sociocultural categories. The study was conducted from January to June 2023, it covers 265 Bulgarian citizens who use the social networks Facebook (Meta) and LinkedIn. The methodology includes a combined questionnaire of a free association experiment and a close-ended questionnaire. The paper communicates some of the results of the free association experiment. According to the results the respondents’ answers belong to all four categories of success. There is a significant difference in the total number of reactions, produced by men and women, which belongs to the social capital category. The following conclusions are drawn at the end of the paper: the digital generation needs to understand its own values and attitudes to have a better quality of life; knowledge of notions of success is useful for team managers and HR professionals; and the new digital generation’s motivation differs from that of the so-called analogue generations.

Keywords: success, sociocultural feature, digital users, associative experiment, achievement, well-being.

Rhetoric and Communications Journal, issue 57, October 2023

Read the Original in Bulgarian