Understanding awareness of SOCSO among employers in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah / Ainah Awang, Clifrich Chuck Johnny and Najihah Sapawi

This report was prepared and directed with the purpose of understanding customer awareness of SOCSO among employers in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The researcher has conceptualized the framework to examine the influence of three independent variables, namely public relations, personal selling and advertisement towards customer awareness as the dependent variable. The respondents were taken from Kota Kinabalu Sabah as the samples to be studied. Employers in Kota Kinabalu that are registered with SOCSO are taken as the population which consists of 29,710 registered employers. Data are collected through personal administration and had 392 valid replies, in which only 380 replies are usable for the purpose of this study. The entire research in examining the effectiveness of promotional tools namely public relations, personal selling, and advertising towards understanding awareness of SOCSO among employers in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, revealed that only public relations has a significant relationship to be an effective medium in enhancing customers' awareness of SOCSO. The analysis of data also disclosed that personal selling and advertisement are not significant promotional tools to influence customers' awareness on SOCSO. Therefore, researchers observed that SOCSO has to put more effort on personal selling and advertisement activities. They also can choose to focus on public relations activities and minimize cost of personal selling and advertisement activities which is not significant to the customers' preferences towards awareness of SOCSO.