Press stories as a medium for social marketing: the publisher's perspective

Features editors in 50 UK newspapers and magazines completed a mail questionnaire concerning their use of charity infotorials, ie human interest press stories based on materials developedandsubmittedbycharityemployees. The research focused on publishers' reasons for carrying this type of article, editorial policy regarding materials submitted by charities, perceptions of the quality of the copy received, and the determinants of publishers' levels of satisfaction with outcomes. A clear dichotomy emerged between publishing firms that viewed infotorials mainly as a means for gaining a competitive advantage over titles produced by other businesses, and those that adopted a more altruistic approach to the publication of stories with a charity‐related theme. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications     

Differentiating literacy volunteers: a segmentation analysis for target marketing

Learning how an organisation's volunteers differ from volunteers serving in other organisations can provide managers with important information. This information can assist managers in identifying potential volunteers, and this information can help managers better understand what to communicate to potential volunteers. This paper presents a segmentation study of literacy volunteers as an example of a proposed methodology for differentiating sub‐groups of volunteers. Managerial implications of research findings and ideas for future research are also presented. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa: An institutional theory analysis from a social marketing point of view

This paper takes an international marketing (IM) approach to the study of women entrepreneurs (WEs) in sub-Saharan Africa by examining factors in the environments in which WEs operate. The goal is to understand better how environmental barriers of many types impact the efforts of WEs. Using institutional theory-driven analysis, findings from a wide range of literature are integrated, with special attention to issues of the social legitimacy of women as entrepreneurs. Results of this study demonstrate that WEs in sub-Saharan Africa face a daunting array of challenges arising from the socio-cultural, economic, legal, political, and technological environments in which they live. Moreover, unfavourable conditions in local regulatory, normative, and cognitive systems place additional burdens on women who desire to become entrepreneurs or to expand an entrepreneurial business. In order to address these gender-specific problems, social marketing is recommended with the goals of (1) changing social beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that negatively affect Wes, and (2) improving conditions in institutional systems and market environments. Recommendations in the paper suggest how to bring about changes in attitudes towards women, work and their independent enterprise. In conclusion, directions for future scholarly research are identified.     

Profit maximization and marketing strategies: Demand rotation and social influences

Microeconomic texts discuss alterations in industry demand curves as movements to higher or lower levels. Consider, instead, the implications for a monopolist's profit of rotating its (linear) demand curve. Where this can be done without cost by pivoting at the current price it will be profitable to continue to pivot the curve until it is horizontal or vertical. The possibility of rotating the demand curve of a ‘new’ product on an arbitrarily selected price allows us to consider the optimality of different advertising strategies (‘bandwagon’ or 'snob').     

The role and application of social marketing in managing water consumption: a case study

• Water shortages are an increasingly significant social and economic issue in many countries. Increasing the supply of water is one solution (e.g. desalination plants, new dams), but such measures are expensive. Using price to manage household water demand may be viewed as socially unequitable and politically contentious. Social marketing campaigns, where voluntary behaviour change is the goal, provide the potential to foster sustainable consumption of an increasingly scarce yet essential resource. This paper details a case study of successful water demand management in a drought affected region of South‐Eastern Australia. In this region, water consumption was reduced to more sustainable levels through a targeted and successful social marketing campaign. This case is of significant relevance to the field of Social Marketing where there are increasing calls for research into environmental issues in general and water consumption in particular (Kotler, 2011). The extant research literature and this case study are integrated to form several propositions about household water consumption behaviour. Consequently, this paper contributes to the literature by providing a conceptualisation of how residents respond to water conservation related social marketing campaigns. Key issues include the potential for reciprocal behaviour by consumers when a water authority is perceived to manage the water problem effectively, and linking behaviour change through structural approaches (e.g. subsidies and restrictions) and voluntarist approaches (e.g. attitudinal change).

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The state of #digitalentrepreneurship: a big data Leximancer analysis of social media activity

This paper examined online sentiment, key themes and patterns evident in social media activity about digital entrepreneurship. It provides a snapshot-in-time, visual-first perspective on social media user-generated-content (UGC) to better understand the topic of digital entrepreneurship. Global data consisting of 31,017 publicly available UGC which used the #digitalentrepreneurship (hashtag) and the keywords ‘digital entrepreneurship’ were collected. A computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), Leximancer, was used for an automated text-mining analysis. There is positive online sentiment surrounding digital entrepreneurship technology, ecosystem and industry, and one which promotes women transformation of digital entrepreneurship globally. Negative sentiment pointed out that future development and support of youth in digital entrepreneurship is needed. Digital entrepreneurs were identified as needing to focus on strategy, leadership, management, and social media platforms. A comprehensive perspective on the state of digital entrepreneurship in online UGC is provided. Insights into the challenges, issues, changes, success stories and key topics in digital entrepreneurship are highlighted. Future research is encouraged to adopt longitudinal and quantitative approaches, to provide further insights into the evolution of digital entrepreneurship. The paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by applying the Social Exchange Theory and the Social Media User Engagement Framework to better understand social media activity around digital entrepreneurship. The findings show that there are real challenges and issues to overcome but there are also changes occurring in digital entrepreneurship and social media users are keen to share and learn from digital entrepreneurship success stories.

     

The nature and influence of motivation within the MOA framework: implications for social marketing

• Social marketers acknowledge that to achieve optimum programme outcomes, identification and targeting of the non-conforming cohort is paramount. This article discusses the application of the social marketing framework, motivation, opportunity and ability (MOA) with a particular focus on the motivation aspect of the model. Motivation is considered from the perspectives of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
• Previously, the degree or level of motivation has been used in the operationalisation of the motivation construct, while in this paper the type of motivation is used as the basis for the construct. The construct is then applied to an environmental land management study, namely a rabbit control programme.
• Specifically, the aims of this paper were to further develop the MOA constructs, with a particular focus on motivation, including intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, to develop an understanding of the factors that are associated with ineffective behaviour and to develop a model to predict effective/ineffective control behaviour.
• Scales were developed to enable a study of the relationship between the MOA constructs, including intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the respondents control behaviour. Data were collected from a random sample of 566 respondents who were involved in the control programme. Using ANOVA and MANOVA techniques, significant differences were found between those landholders that exhibited effective control and ineffective control with regard to all MOA constructs.
• A multinomial logit (MNL) regression model was then developed to predict behaviour. This model showed that ability and intrinsic motivation were significant predictors of behaviour. The estimated model was able to predict recalcitrant landholders with 98% accuracy. The results of this study therefore provide a significant contribution to social marketing as it is the recalcitrant cohort that social marketers wish to understand and whose behaviour they frequently attempt to rectify in order to achieve stated social and/or environmental objectives. The implications for related social market theory, policy development and environmental management programmes are discussed.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heterophily in social groups formation: a social network analysis

Quality & Quantity - Research on heterophily as a relational phenomenon is mostly limited to specific professional contexts which do not include knowledge about status or value heterophily as a...     

Attracting potential blood donors: The role of personality and social marketing

Globally, society has been facing several and growing health problems, which increased the importance of efforts towards social change. In this context, using social marketing to create and implement programs that foster behavioural change has increased in the public health community. One of the health problems that society has been facing is the unceasing need for blood products, so the subject of blood donation became an important research topic in the area of social marketing, as social marketing strategies can contribute to solving this problem. It is essential to understand the factors that motivate individuals to donate blood, to enhance the recruitment and retention of blood donors. Our study aims at evaluating the key personality factors that influence blood donation behaviour to reach a higher understanding of what concerns this global issue. The method used to analyse the data is ANOVA. We conclude that the Personality of potential donors is significantly different from the non-donors' regarding Openness to Experience and Agreeableness. These results suggest that potential donors might perceive blood donation, as well as the associated barriers, differently from non-donors. Based on our findings, we suggest some perspectives for future research in this area.     

Critical social marketing – The impact of alcohol marketing on youth drinking: Qualitative findings

• This paper presents findings from exploratory qualitative research as part of a critical social marketing study examining the impact of alcohol marketing communications on youth drinking. The findings from stakeholder interviews (regulators and marketers) suggest that some alcohol marketing might target young people, and that marketers are cognisant of growing concern at alcohol issues, including control of alcohol marketing. Focus groups with young people (aged 13–15 years) revealed a sophisticated level of awareness of, and involvement in, alcohol marketing across several channels. It was found that some marketing activities featured content that could appeal to young people and appeared to influence their, well‐developed, brand attitudes. The research demonstrates the utility of taking a critical social marketing approach when examining the impact of alcohol marketing. The implications of these findings for research, regulation and policy around alcohol marketing are also examined. The contribution that studies such as this make to the debate around marketing principles and practice, and to social marketing, is also discussed.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Target marketing in a social marketing context: gender differences in importance ratings of promoted intrinsic and extrinsic restricted exchange benefits of military enlistment

Social marketing involves influencing voluntary behaviour of people towards a social end. Examples of social marketing range from campaigns to encourage healthy physical behaviour to efforts to encourage tax support for public education, overcome racism, or stimulate ‘patriotic’ behaviour. Using data from a summer 2001 telephone survey of 600 young adults, this paper investigates how recruitment campaigns may benefit from considering gender differences in importance ratings of a variety of benefits promoted by the military in the USA. Importance ratings are assessed using differences in means and variances tests. Findings identify gender specific differences that may be used to enhance recruitment campaigns. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Interdisciplinary social science: a methodological analysis

Since the 1930's, interdisciplinarity has been advocated in the social sciences for the purpose of achieving more comprehensive explanations of observable social phenomena. However, the realization of this promising perspective has been rather poor. This article argues that two main causes of the failure to create interdisciplinary social science can be distinguished, i.e., methodological and theoretical problems. Methodological problems stem either from taking a reductionist approach towards interdisciplinarity, or by mistaking measurement issues for theoretical topics. Theoretical problems result from the poor state and rate of theory formation within psychology. The implications of these problems are that the validity and reliability of explanations of macro social phenomena, which are provided by disciplines such as sociology and macro economics, are seriously at stake.     

Using social media for efficient brand marketing: An evaluation of Chinese Universities using Bilibili

As the higher education market becomes increasingly competitive, Chinese universities are competing to develop brand marketing programmes on social media platforms, with significant differences in performance. This paper divides universities’ social media marketing processes into two stages: the production-operation stage and the marketing communication stage. It constructs a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to evaluate the brand marketing efficiency of 296 Chinese universities on the Bilibili video-sharing platform to provide strategic proposals for social media marketing. The results show that 10 universities perform efficiently in the production-operation stage, while 11 universities perform efficiently in the marketing communication stage. The gap in marketing efficiency is relatively large across Chinese universities. Most universities perform unsatisfactorily because of their redundant input or insufficient output. To improve the brand marketing efficiency on Bilibili, universities should pay more effort into quality rather than quantity of input, produce high-quality videos continuously and build and maintain fan loyalty.     

A social activity and physical contact-based routing algorithm in mobile opportunistic networks for emergency response to sudden disasters

Sudden disasters such as earthquake, flood and hurricane necessitate the employment of communication networks to carry out emergency response activities. Routing has a significant impact on the functionality, performance and flexibility of communication networks. In this article, the routing problem is studied considering the delivery ratio of messages, the overhead ratio of messages and the average delay of messages in mobile opportunistic networks (MONs) for enterprise-level emergency response communications in sudden disaster scenarios. Unlike the traditional routing methods for MONS, this article presents a new two-stage spreading and forwarding dynamic routing algorithm based on the proposed social activity degree and physical contact factor for mobile customers. A new modelling method for describing a dynamic evolving process of the topology structure of a MON is first proposed. Then a multi-copy spreading strategy based on the social activity degree of nodes and a single-copy forwarding strategy based on the physical contact factor between nodes are designed. Compared with the most relevant routing algorithms such as Epidemic, Prophet, Labelled-sim, Dlife-comm and Distribute-sim, the proposed routing algorithm can significantly increase the delivery ratio of messages, and decrease the overhead ratio and average delay of messages.     

Threat appeals in social marketing: death as a ‘special case’

Death is commonly used as a threat, both by fear-appeal researchers and by social marketing and health promotion practitioners (eg ‘Quit smoking or you'll die’). Fear (or threat) appeal researchers have frequently used death to arouse fear, and particularly in the ‘high’ fear condition. It is argued here that death is a ‘special case’ threat, and that the introduction of death in high fear conditions is a confounder in that death is a qualitatively different negative outcome from the non-death negative outcomes used in low fear conditions. The use of death in threat appeals requires attention in its own right for a number of reasons. First, death will occur eventually regardless of the message recipient's behaviour. Hence, messages that threaten death may arouse defensive responses in the target audience (eg ‘you've got to go sometime’), and unresolvable anxiety in the general population. Secondly, death can vary on a number of attributes (eg age at death, sudden versus prolonged, etc), and, while most threat appeals imply premature death, few studies have made this point explicit. Thirdly, the fear of death is multidimensional and some dimensions are more readily acknowledged as fearful than others. For example, a threat specifying the effect of one's death on loved ones might have more impact than a threat of death to oneself. Fourthly, people may fear death differently, or, for religious or other reasons, may not fear death at all. Furthermore, there may be age and gender differences in response to threat appeals using death. It is concluded that systematic research is required to determine whether and for whom death threats are effective. Copyright © 1999 Henry Stewart Publications     

Microfinance and social capital formation- a social network analysis approach

The microcredit program has emerged as an important poverty alleviation strategy over the last three decades, and several studies have examined its economic impacts on the community well-being. However, far too little attention has been paid to the effects of micro credits on community social connection and solidarity. This paper aims to examine the application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to explore the impact of the rural microcredit fund on community social capitals. In doing so, the data on interactions of four rural development groups' members before and after the microcredit project implementation were collected using participatory workshops in Neyzar village of Qom province in Iran. The data were analyzed by Ucinet software, and the socio-graphs were produced by the NetDraw application. The results show that, more people have been involved in the social interactions after the project implementation and there was statistically significant increase in density and decrease in centralization of cooperation network. Furthermore, there were no important distinctions in centrality of people with various educational levels before and after the project implementation. Overall, it can be concluded that, the microfinance initiative considerably promotes the community social capital and participation in the rural development activities. Moreover, the SNA techniques are applicable as an impact assessment tool to investigate changes in community social capital.     

Branding HIV/AIDS communication: the social marketing campaigns of MTV and Viacom

• Based on an ethnographic study of the production and reception of HIV/AIDS public service campaigns by MTV and Viacom, this paper examines the role of branding in HIV/AIDS education promotion. A main premise of the paper is that audiences for HIV/AIDS social marketing campaigns are now less addressed in terms of the classic HIV/AIDS prevention categories of ‘general public’ and ‘risk groups’ and are increasingly viewed as ‘market segments’ implicated in the campaigns in relation to the techniques of branding. Drawing on examples from research conducted amongst audiences in the North of England, the findings highlight the differing audience understandings of the branded consumer objects and icons of HIV awareness. Using a cultural materialist perspective, concerned with the relationship between the campaigns and social relations, this paper examines the process of corporate-sponsored HIV/AIDS campaigns. The findings underscore how social marketing campaigns are increasingly being related to as branded media objects and icons, closely tied to people's material experience and understandings of the aesthetics framing these branded objects and icons. The paper argues that identification and engagement with the campaigns is most evident amongst participants who shared the consumer values and the marketing discourses used by marketing managers and producers of the public service announcements.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Enhancing occupational health and safety in young workers: the role of social marketing

• Young workers (age 15–24) suffer work‐related injury at a much higher rate than older workers, yet research on the role and effectiveness of social marketing to influence and improve workplace safety is limited.
• A review of the relevant literature reveals that significant gaps exist in terms of effectively using social marketing to reduce young worker injury rates.
• A comprehensive, multi‐faceted social marketing approach is required to address young worker safety.
• Directing more attention toward the practice of social marketing can enhance the effectiveness of campaigns to reduce workplace injuries.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Excel spreadsheet as a tool for social narrative analysis

Qualitative research is an open field where different researchers from several disciplines deal with social meanings and with the issue of understanding. During the last two decades, the use of computers and software has extended to become a relevant part of our daily landscape and also a basic device of social research, even in relation to a qualitative approach. There are many applications of qualitative research software specially designed by a diversity of firms and institutions producing different levels of sophisticated tools that can be used in the social research process. This paper presents a protocol for using an Excel spreadsheet as a tool for analyzing social discourses. We will show how to work with the documents produced in the empirical data collection and the criteria to structure the components of the application and its main representations. Finally, we offer a methodology for developing a personalized application in order to orient social design as a powerful and reflexive tool that contribute to a social thinking immersed in continuous improvement.     

全球化市场营销的社会满意度概念、测度及其应用

在全球化深入发展的今天,企业所面临的市场环境日趋复杂,顾客因素之外的其它社会因素(比如各国政府组织、非政府组织、媒体、居民等)对企业生存与发展也发挥着日益重要的影响。本文通过欧盟对中国打火机等产品的反倾销案例分析,以及基于顾客满意度等相关理论研究,提出了涵盖顾客满意度的市场营销社会满意度的新概念,并应用模糊综合评价方法构建了社会满意度测评体系,对其评价测度体系和应用进行了初步研究。本文认为,社会满意度能够全面衡量企业适应社会环境的能力,这一概念的提出和应用有助于企业树立社会化的全方位市场营销新理念,更好地参与全球化、社会化的市场竞争。