Developing a dynamic multi-actor engagement framework for social marketing programmes

Abstract

Social marketing adopts marketing tools to achieve voluntary behaviour change, and has been effective in promoting a variety of public health and social wellbeing causes including, but not limited to, alcohol harm reduction (Kubacki, Rundle-Thiele, Pang, & Buyucek, 2015a), improving rates of physical activity (Gordon et al., 2006; Xia et al., 2016) and promotion of healthy eating (Carins & Rundle-Thiele, 2014). As social media have become an integral driver of modern communication in recent years (Lovejoy et al., 2012), social marketers have started incorporating the use of social media in their communications (Evans et al., 2019; Kubacki et al., 2015b; Li, Lia, & Lin, 2017; Neiger et al., 2013). Although the prominent advantages of social media include their ability to engage communities through two-way conversations (Jaakkola & Alexander, 2014; Lariviere et al., 2017), along with allowing them to create their own content (Ashley & Tuten, 2015; Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011), research suggests that social marketers have little knowledge about the use of social media for creating customer engagement in social marketing programmes (James et al., 2013; Justice-Gardiner et al., 2012; Neiger et al., 2012; 2013; Overbey, Jaykus, & Chapman, 2017). Further, social marketers have struggled to engage their audiences on social media, despite their potential to scale up programme reach and build ongoing community support to help resolve social issues (Rodriguez, Ostrow, & Kemp, 2017). Recognising the importance of creating customer engagement to bring about behaviour change, and also the noticeable dearth of research assessing the effectiveness of social media in creating such engagement, this PhD seeks to provide new insights into how to engage customers in social marketing programmes through the use of social media. This research was carried out as a series of inter-related studies. Study 1 is a systematic literature review to identify, analyse and evaluate social marketing programmes that have included the use of social media to engage their programme participants. Specifically, this study aims to better understand the use of social media in creating participant engagement across various social and health-related social marketing programmes. Study 2 involved qualitative in-depth interviews with social marketing practitioners who use social media to create engagement in their social marketing programmes as well as users who are engaged in these programmes via social media. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it aims to gain an understanding of social marketing practitioners’ perceptions of customer engagement and the objectives and practices that guide their social media activities. Second, this study aims to develop insights into social media users’ perceptions of factors influencing their engagement in social marketing programmes. As a result, this study concludes with the proposition of a dynamic multi-actor social media engagement framework which is then applied in practice in Study 3. Study 3 consists of a netnography focusing on the communication of a social marketing initiative via social media. This study aims to explore the interactions between social marketing practitioners and users of their social media platform using the dynamic multi-actor engagement framework. Exploring their interactions provides insight into how these two groups engage with one another, and helps to identify the characteristics of their engagement on social media. The review of the existing social marketing programmes in Study 1 showed that social marketers were not harnessing social media’s potential in developing customer engagement and building relationships with their customers; rather, in most of the thirty-one social marketing studies examined, social media were mainly used to disseminate the programmes through one-way communication, with only a handful of programmes using social media to interact with users or to build enduring relationships with them. Moreover, conducting thirty-two interviews with social marketing practitioners and social media users allowed insights to be gained from both key stakeholder groups. Consequently, a new practical framework for multi-actor engagement in social marketing programmes was proposed along with measurement tools necessary for assessing its components. The multi-actor engagement framework recognises the dynamic and iterative engagement between multiple actors on social media, in contrast to simple dyadic interactions between the focal customer and organisation, which lead to the development of enduring and long-term relationships. The framework identified four distinct levels of engagement ― connection, interaction, loyalty and advocacy — all equally important constituents of engagement, and thus, equally important to developing sustainable social marketing impact. In addition, the application of this multi-actor engagement framework to understand, analyse and assess engagement behaviours in a real-life and ongoing social marketing programme on social media provided further insights into the applicability of the framework and identified additional measurements to further refine the overall applicability of the framework.