Starbucks’ marketing communications strategy on Twitter

Many scholars have found that social media are extraordinarily useful platforms for marketers to engage their stakeholders. Much research has developed frameworks for and proposed empirical guidelines on how brands should communicate and interact with audiences on social media platforms. However, a comprehensive study that is based on a successful and reputable brand is still lacking. The objective of this research was to categorise the types of content used by one of the most admired brands in the world, Starbucks, and evaluate its effectiveness on Twitter. In total, the author studied 565 tweets and retweets and 1392 replies. This research found that Starbucks’ marketing communications strategy includes three types of original and retweeted content: information-sharing, emotion-evoking, and action-inducing content. The author also found six types of replies: information, Apology and suppot, positive comment, question and enquiry, chit-chat, and gratitude. To be successful on the social media platforms, this research suggests that brands should use various types of content, focus on visual content, and prepare for and manage customer interactions appropriately. The findings present useful and practical information for brands that seek to engage audiences using an inexpensive but compelling marketing communications strategy on social media.     

Marketing in five “simple” questions!

Peters (1987) describes how after some of his seminars he is asked “But what do I DO?”. This question is also often directed at people who have been introducing marketing ideas to businessmen—particularly businessmen whose work does not bring them into contact with customers. This article explains how anybody can start to think in marketing terms by asking five simple questions about the organisation they work for. “Simple” to ask, but requiring disciplined thought if answers are to be found which lead to appropriate managerial actions. “Difficult” to answer not least because the answers to each question affect the answers given to the others. In doing so it also introduces a number of basic but important marketing concepts.     

Consumer Demand for Guaranteed Renewability in Health Insurance

Journal of Consumer Policy - This paper addresses the following question: Why do consumers demand guaranteed renewability in health insurance? The answer to this question has important implications...     

Creating Value for Customers,Clients, Partners and Society: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Food Waste

ABSTRACT

Roughly one-third of edible food produced in the world is wasted, that is, it is never consumed by humans, despite the persistent demands for nutrition throughout the world. The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “…the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” When it comes to food, an increasing number of these key stakeholders question how a global marketing system that routinely wastes a startling fraction of its product comports with “…value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large,” and whether the food marketing system can do more to sustainably convert scarce planetary resources into global nutrition. We introduce the articles in this special issue, which provide an intellectual and empirical basis for exploring how the global marketing system generates a substantial amount of food waste and how the food marketing system can do more to reduce the amount of wasted food.     

Emotion As Well As Reason: Getting Students Beyond "Interpersonal Accountability"

The paper notes the recent spread of business ethics courses in American higher education, observing that teachers trained in economics have not readily incorporated ethical notions or theory into regular courses, such as finance, management, accounting, and marketing. The presumed ethically neutral, value-free approach of economists, who dominate business courses, is increasingly inadequate to meet the needs of business managers – or of business students. Technological and political changes, creating an interdependent environment within which managers operate, have eroded older ethics based on tradition and common backgrounds. They have also raised ethical issues of new orders of complexity. With corporate business managers finding ethical concerns more pressing matters than do many teachers, the paper offers some tentative answers to three questions about how to interest business students in ethical issues: What Approach to Business Ethics Gets student's Attention? What Is the Value of Simulations and Games? What Can Be Said About the Business System And Its Values? The answer to the first question is simulations and games. Case method analysis is serviceable, engaging students' intellect, but all too often without emotional involvement or self-revelation. Experiential learning through class-room games accomplish both engagement and involvement in ways that are exceedingly helpful to business students, who have had "less occasion for critical reflection on self and world than have others of their age." The answer to the second question is: They engage the whole student, stimulating the player to examine the source of her ethical strengths and the reasons for ethical lapses. Generating emotional involvement the games leverage and enhance reasoning, allowing students to learn more about their own values and question their own behavior. The answer to the third question is: A socially justifiable (community-legitimated) competitive market system requires of its managerial participants an emotionally informed response – as well as a rational analysis and use of business techniques. Business operates with enhanced effectiveness efficiency at appropriate levels of such virtues as loyalty, trustworthiness and cooperativeness; they ensure externality benefits as well as promote justice for its own ultimate social justification.     

Marketing performance assessment and accountability: Process and outcomes

Marketing accountability, and how it may be achieved via performance assessment and metrics, have been central topics in both the marketing literature and practice (Katsikeas et al. 2016). Recent developments in digital channels, the accompanying explosion of data and emergence of marketing automation, the globalization of markets, and the rise of customer experience as a key firm priority have further magnified interest in and the importance of understanding how potential marketing outcomes are and can be achieved (CMO Survey, 2021; Mintz et al., 2021). As a result, gaining clarity on how to design and manage performance assessment systems to deal with these issues has never been more important. This paper argues that further progress in this research domain requires a deep understanding of the marketing performance assessment (MPA) process to provide both a catalyst and foundation for the next generation of research. Although there has been considerable research in the areas of marketing metrics and marketing accountability, much less attention has been paid to the MPA process that links them. Yet, the MPA process is essential to successful marketing management. To address this, we first review past research in this broad domain to answer the “Where have we been?” question that identifies theneed for a new conceptual model. Second, drawing on research findings both within the broad MPA domain and allied areas within and outside of marketing, we develop and detail a new conceptual model of the MPA process and use it to identify what really needs to be known but is currently unclear in this domain (i.e., “Where do we need to go?”). Third, we suggest how these areas of needed inquiry may best be investigated (i.e., “How do we get there?”) by identifying new perspectives, theories, data sources, and analysis approaches that may be productively employed in future research.     

Social media influencers: A route to brand engagement for their followers

Social Media Influencers (SMIs) are micro‐celebrities with large followings on social media platforms who engage consumers and hold the potential to promote customer‐brand relationships across different product categories. SMIs have an existing relationship of trust with consumers, and consumers seek out the content created by SMIs for valuable information and advice. This study explores the process of brand engagement between consumers and brands in the digital content marketing environment, specifically examining the research question: Do SMIs act as a route to brand engagement for their followers? The context for this study is the beauty community on YouTube; over 60,000 user comments were analyzed through automated text analysis. This study is among the first to provide empirical evidence that SMIs do act as a route to brand engagement through the three dimensions of cognitive processing, affection and activation.     

The Philosopher Is Not Always Right: A Comment On "The Customer Is Not Always Right"

This paper is a response to "The Customer Is Not Always Right" published in the November, 1994 issue of this Journal (Sorell, 1994). The authors argue that "The Customer Is Not Always Right" ignores significant contributions from the literature of business and economics. This comment refutes Sorell's arguments on a case by case basis showing why in each situation the customer is, in reality, right or the situation is not a question of the customer being right or wrong. Existing knowledge from economics and marketing is shown to provide richer, more parsimonious explanations and answers to the problems and dilemmas posed by Sorell.     

Should retailers harmonize marketing variables across their distribution channels? An investigation of cross-channel effects in multi-channel retailing

Retailers with more than one channel of distribution have to decide whether marketing variables such as conveyed image, price, and assortment should be harmonized across channels. This article presents an integrative model and survey results that shed light on this question; its focus is on stores, online shops, and catalogs. The results show that harmonization of marketing variables has advantages and disadvantages: on the one hand, it correlates positively with overall customer loyalty and cross-channel customer retention, i.e., one channel causes more sales in other channels. On the other hand, it also correlates positively with cannibalization within the distribution system. This suggests that general recommendations strictly favoring or disfavoring harmonization do not account sufficiently for the complexity of the problem and retailer heterogeneity.     

Speaking vs. listening? Balance conversation attributes of voice assistants for better voice marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is shaping marketing in an unprecedented way. Empowered by AI, voice assistants are increasingly capable of speaking and listening like humans, offering a great opportunity for a new marketing approach - voice marketing. This research examines how conversation attributes of voice assistants determine consumer trust and intention to engage in voice shopping. Using a sequential mixed-method design, three studies consistently show that consumers perceive the speaking attribute of voice assistants as more human-like than the listening attribute. We find that such incongruency between the two conversation attributes can undermine consumers' trust in voice assistants, leading to reduced willingness to accept product recommendations from voice assistants and shop via voice assistants, which would hamper the development of voice marketing. Accordingly, this research suggests that AI giants with strong technological strength and capital support should distribute more resources to advance the underlying technologies enabling human-like listening (e.g., natural language understanding and voice recognition). But for AI startups with limited financing ability and technical talents, they may consider appropriately reducing investments in the underlying technologies enabling human-like speaking (e.g., natural language generation and voice synthesis) to enhance the congruency level between the conversation attributes of voice assistants.     

Economics at Google

Business Economics - What does an economist do at Google? I get this question a lot so I thought this would be a good opportunity to answer it, using illustrations from pricing in ad auctions, the...     

Limits to growing customer value: Being squeezed between the past and the future

Marketing managers often have to balance between marketing exploitation strategies (reaping value from what already is known) and marketing exploration strategies (reaping value from new sources). However, do marketing strategies once exploited or explored in a certain way or direction leave enough potential for further exploration? Based on the various cases of Apple, Alpro, Intel, Nutella, Patagonia, and Ryanair, this article shows that several risks and limits come into play when trying to answer this question. Companies may get squeezed between the past and the future while facing the pressure of temporal consistency driven by past behavior and experiencing the limits of future growth in the dominant customer value drivers. To counter this problem, companies often start integrating new value drivers in their story, leading to other risks, such as incompatibility with existing drivers. The cases discussed in this article reveal that companies may have to accept more sacrifices in order to increase returns within their growth trajectory. Value engineering will become a crucial discipline for companies to survive in many industries. This article gives a step-by-step approach on how to implement this in an organization.     

Getting Lapsed Donors Back: An Empirical Investigation of Relationship Management in the Post-Termination Stage

Firms lose customers for various reasons all the time, raising the question of whether to stop marketing to these customers or to try to win them back through sending more marketing instruments. The answer lies in knowing the probability of regaining a lapsed customer. However, since customers have various reasons for dropping out, identifying which customers are worth reviving becomes important. This article examines this issue in a donation context, using data from a large not-for-profit organization. Results suggest that sending marketing communications with an appropriate frequency has a positive influence on reviving lapsed donors but sending overly frequent communications may evoke resistance to appeals. Furthermore, the varied behavioral histories and characteristics of lapsed donors affect the probability of revival. The article provides a useful approach to fundraising managers in a not-for-profit industry.     

Keeping Up with the Kardashians: Consumers' Intention to Engage in Cosmetic Surgery

This study examined the predictors of intention to engage in a cosmetic surgery. A convenience sampling approach utilizing a self-administered pen-and-paper and online survey was used to collect 214 responses in Australia. Favorable attitude had a significant positive effect on intention to engage in a cosmetic procedure for female respondents. On the other hand, subjective norms had a significant positive effect on intention to engage in a cosmetic procedure for male respondents. Managerially, findings will help practitioners in the cosmetic surgery industry to implement marketing strategies that target this growing consumer segment.     

Relationship Marketing and the Challenge of Dialogical Interaction

SUMMARY

Our aim in this article is to challenge relationship marketing's hidden monological assumptions, and as a redress, position dialogical interaction at its core. First, we reflect on the common sense of ‘marketing communication’. Next, we clarify the concept of ‘dialogue’. We then comment on the concept of dialogue in markets, building on Karl Popper's idea of an open society, followed by scrutiny of general marketing practice to show that such dialogue is absent. We then consider the potential for marketing to be dialogical in nature. To do this we will make a necessary distinction between informational interaction, communicational interaction, and dialogical interaction. Finally, we draw the conclusion that dialogue is not so much a method of communication but an orientation to it, and consider some implications for marketing theory and practice.     

A Special Theory of Globalization:

The focus of this study is to provide theoretical and empirical evidence supporting a new direction of globalization offering the viewpoint of marketing globalization. The result of this analysis suggests a special theory of globalization that can be implemented by the multinational organization. One approach to globalization focuses on a standardized marketing mix strategy to global homogenous markets, while the other focuses on a modified marketing mix strategy to global diverse markets. Multinational corporations can engage in either or both strategies while maintaining a global approach to international marketing.     

Black,white or grey magic? Our future with artificial intelligence

ABSTRACT

Are new technologies driving us towards dystopia or utopia – or something in between? Marketers not only have a stake in finding out the answer to this question but also a direct (and indirect) influence on determining the answer. This commentary discusses recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, and how these are influencing marketers, consumers and society by either leading to a dystopian (black magic), utopian (white magic) or ‘dualopian’ future (grey magic). We argue that the net effect is squarely in the grey and that marketers have a unique power to leverage AI and robotics developments for good. The commentary concludes with 24 research questions forming an agenda for future research under three streams: marketing power, understanding the bias and ethics revisited.     

Is there “no such thing as business ethics”?

What are we to make of the claim that we often hear, that there is no such thing as business ethics? This essay first examines two arguments that might be in people's minds in making such a claim — that business is a “game,” and hence the ordinary constraints of morality do not apply, and that one cannot survive in business if one is too “ethical.” The critique of these arguments begins the process of making clear what business ethics is. The paper then proceeds in a more positive vein to define and explain for the sceptic what business ethics is. Everyone must confront the question, what should I do in my business relationships? Business ethics is defined, then, as the effort to develop Socratically one's answer to this question, that is, through the critical examination of alternatives. In the process of explaining this notion, several other senses in which someone might say that there is no such thing as business ethics are explored and the basic distinction between the moral point of view and ethical egoism is introduced.