How to Adopt Social Behavior to Achieve Efficient Social Marketing

Abstract

This study surveyed related literatures regarding social marketing, prosocial behavior, and helping behavior to classify four types of social behavior (altruism, compensatory, reciprocity, and egoism) by two dimensions: (1) who are the welfare appealed, (2) the level of restitution intention. Furthermore, this study constructed a social behavior model for social marketing and utilized two social issues—“Bag-Taking” and “Blood Donation” to test the social behavior model. The empirical conclusions are as follow: social behavior could be directed and positively affected by actual control factors (external objective factor) and social behavior intention (personal subjective tendency); social behavior intention could be directed and positively affected by actual control factors and social behavior motivations (including relieving personal distress and evoking empathy); the social behavior motivations (internal emotion response) could be directed and positively affected by social norms (external pressure) and personal norms (individual perception of norms); the personal norms and economic evaluation could be directed and positively affected by social norms (external pressure). Finally, this study submits marketing implications to academic professionals and industrial practitioners.