Two-stage taxonomy for measuring success in social marketing practice

Tools

Akbar, M.B. ORCID: 0000-0003-3092-6878, Amoncar, N., Cateriano-Arevalo, E. and Lawson, A., 2023. Two-stage taxonomy for measuring success in social marketing practice. Journal of Social Marketing. ISSN 2042-6763

Preview

Text
1825518_Akbar.pdf - Post-print
Download (268kB) | Preview

Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1108/JSOCM-11-2022-0226

Abstract

Purpose: Given the lack of understanding of social marketing success in theory and practice, this study aims to investigate how social marketing experts conceptualize success.

Design/methodology/approach: In this qualitative study, the authors conducted an open-ended online questionnaire with 48 worldwide social marketing experts, most with more than 20 years of experience in the field. The authors analyzed data using topic modeling, a machine-learning method that groups responses/terms into cluster topics based on similarities. Keywords in each topic served to generate themes for discussion.

Findings: While behavior change is mentioned as paramount to conceptualizing success, participants prefer to use more tangible and less complex forms to define/measure success, such as campaign recall uptick. In addition, lack of funding was considered an important factor in measuring success. This study provides a two-stage taxonomy to better understand success in social marketing.

Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to conceptualize success in social marketing practice.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Journal of Social Marketing

Creators:

Akbar, M.B., Amoncar, N., Cateriano-Arevalo, E. and Lawson, A.

Publisher:

Emerald

Date:

31 October 2023

ISSN:

2042-6763