Social Marketing
Introduction
“Why can’t you sell brotherhood like we sell soap?” True. Selling soap and social cause are completely two separate things. However, recently marketing has observed a mingling of the two wherein organizations have associated themselves with a social cause to promote their brand. The trend to promote products or brands with a social cause is supposed to boost image as well as sales.
Industry buzz is social marketing establishes a firm as responsible and boosts consumer demand even during recession . Companies are putting their brand names with social causes like fighting breast cancer or AIDS awareness. But the real impetus of such campaigns and its effect on brands’ image is uncertain. Target customer profile of such cause related marketing is also uncertain.
However, the question related to social marketing arises is its effectiveness. Further, with advent of new media social marketing has attained a new platform where word-of-mouth campaigns through repeated click on “Like” and “Retweets” increases social awareness. Social marketing therefore assumes great importance for marketers, especially during recession, in order to recreate their brand image.
In this report, I will explore how social marketing influences others in their purchase decisions. In order to understand this, I undertake a literature review of journal articles, books, and online articles to understand the effectiveness of social marketing for brands and its effectiveness with the new media (e.g. Facebook).
The objectives of the report are delineated in the following points:
- To find the demographic profile of those influenced by social marketing campaigns,
- To prove how new media such as Facebook and text messages influences young consumers
- To prove how social marketing increases public relations and improves customer loyalty.
Literature Review
In this section, I undertake a literature review on peer-reviewed journal articles and books to understand social marketing, its effectiveness, and the use of such marketing with help of new media. This section will also provide the demographic profile that is believed to be influenced most with social marketing through online or mobile campaigns.
Evolution of Social Marketing
Kotler and Levy raised the question in the sixties regarding the relevance of marketing as a socially useful tool. They were aiming to make marketing as a tool “serving and satisfying human needs”. Researchers mentioned fleeting references of the similarity or difference of marketing soap and goodwill or other such concepts earlier.
Social marketing was formally introduced in the marketing arena with the 1971 article of Kotler and Zaltman titled “Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Change.” The transition from a socially useful marketing process to social marketing was a logical concept that brought forth serious pressure on the marketing discipline to become for socially relevant and ethical .
The need for development of a non-conventional, socially conscious marketing strategy was found to be necessary due to the following reasons:
Increased needs of nonbusiness organizations for marketing services. Attacks on marketing’s negative impact on society. The emergence of exchange theory, the coalescence of social marketing oriented theory. And the decline of consensus-oriented perceptions of social reality.
Therefore, sue to the greater demand of socially responsible marketing strategy aiming at social causes, this gave marketers the possibility to work with government and non-profit organizations to promote social change programs. This demand for social marketing was found from parallel academic streams such as advertising and public relations .
Though there was a lot of demand and debate about social marketing in the 1970s, there was little scholarly work in the area apart from Kotler and Zaltman’s 1971 article. It was not until Lazer and Kelley (1973) and Richard Manoff (1975) social marketing literature was facing dearth of academic attention. Manoff (1975) wrote the book on social marketing who applied many principles from his experiences working in social change projects.
After these there was almost a stagnation of a decade before Kotler & Roberto published another book on social marketing and Fine a year later. However, in the decade of 1990s and later there is a modest body of literature that can be found on the subject – e.g. Andreasen (1994), Brenkert (2002), Guiniven (2009), Donovan & Henley (2010), etc. – and has contributed immensely to the discipline.
However, it is in the 1990s that ethical concerns regarding social marketing gained predominance in marketing literature. And recently in the last 5 years there is an increasing trend is understanding how social networking can become an effective tool for social marketing .
What is Social Marketing?
In order to understand the impact of social marketing on brands, it is important first to refresh our definition of marketing. Kotler and Zaltman defined marketing as an occurrence “when people become conscious of an opportunity to gain from a more careful planning of their exchange relations.”
Marketing management is a process that tries to ascertain the behaviour, preferences, desires, attitude, and wants of potential customers that may provide help in designing new products . Therefore, a marketing process is usually a dual process of selling the old product and creating the new one.
Social marketing is a marketing that was initially done to simply promote a social cause such as “Keep America Beautiful” or “Join the Peace Corps”. The aim of true advertisements was to inform and persuade. Kotler and Zaltman first introduced the concept in their 1971 article that established the definition of social marketing.
Kotler and Zaltman believes that social marketing is a strategy that definitely has an impact on brand advertisement, however, they raise the question as to how it can be used. Therefore, social marketing is defined as:
… the design, implementation, and control of programs calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas and involving considerations of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution, and marketing research.
So it is an intermingling of the social cause with the brand idea and merging them together to become one communication to the consumers. Therefore, the social cause becomes a prop with which the marketing campaign is propelled.
Andersean (1994) identified three problems with the definition put forth by Kotler and Zaltman (1971). First, the term “social marketing” was confusing at such as early stage when it was confused with “societal” marketing.
Second, their early discussion on social marketing did not mention explicitly if this form of marketing was solely for non-profit organizations or for both profit and non-profit organizations . Third, this definition limits the objective of marketing only to ‘influencing’. Pointing out these shortcomings of the first definition, Andreasen (1994) put forth an alternate definition of social marketing:
Social marketing is the adaption of commercial marketing technologies to programs designed to influence the voluntary behaviour of target audiences to improve their personal welfare and that of the society of which they are part.
First, this definition clearly shows that social marketing is just another adaptation of commercial marketing. Second, it demonstrates that social marketing aims at changing behaviour and not just influencing the behaviour. Third, social marketing’s aim is to extend benefit to the consumers or the society as a whole and not the marketer. This third point sets social marketing apart from commercial marketing, where the latter aims at deriving the benefit for the marketer and not the consumer.
How ethical is it?
Ethical prerogative for marketing campaigns has been traditionally been debated upon . Marketers have immense ethical and moral responsibility towards the stakeholders and all whom a marketing campaign affects . Social marketing aims at promoting social good. Ethics in social marketing assumes greater importance as this aims at marketing social goods.
However, this can be adopted by anybody who wants to reach that end. The Ku Klux Clan or the Nazi party to attain something that they believed to be social good could use this form of marketing. Therefore, Andreasen (1994) insists that the characteristics of such form of marketing must be clearly articulated, and social marketing should be used based on personal judgment.
Brenkert believes that social marketing faces greater challenges that are not faced by commercial marketing. As social marketing aims at solving social problems the ethical bindings of social marketing arises from the social ends it promotes. As the ends of social marketing are “social exchange” rather than “commercial exchange” therefore the ends at which these marketing campaigns are aimed at is extremely important.
Second issue that arises is that social marketing aiming at behavioural changes may lead to conscious moral changes, which may solve a problem just temporarily. Further social marketing aims at bringing forth change using marketing technique rather than political or social discourse, which removes democratic, and self-determination of the subjects .
Many authors have pointed out to ethical concerns in commercial marketing such as Kotler and Zaltman (1971), Andreasen (1994), and Bloom and Novelli . Donovan and Henley pointed out that the main ethical issue in case of social marketing is the issue of power. Bloom and Novelli (1981) essentially believed that social marketing treats some groups differently, which negates the egalitarian and anti-discriminatory principles of ethics.
Therefore, they point out that the process of differentiation between the target customers that brings the unethical element in social marketing. Andreasen (1994) believes it is the ends attained through social marketing that infuses the ethical question similar to the idea presented by Brenkett (2002). Therefore, it must be understood that social marketing is not an undesirable issue, but it therefore; the marketing of social causes should be done keeping the ethical concerns in mind.
Is social marketing beneficial to commercial marketers?
Many brands today are associating themselves with social causes and plunging into what is called “cause marketing”. In this, a firm or brand is typically associated with a social cause such as breast cancer, AIDS, or cyclone relief that is used as a tool to boost social image of the steely corporate image to the customers. There has been an increasing debate on the effectiveness of social marketing apart from the ethical concerns related social marketing discussed in the previous section.
Andreasen points out that researchers are presently undertaking a lot of empirical studies to understand the benefit of social marketing for commercial purposes. Many researchers have started to understand effectiveness of social marketing.
Rose et al. (2007) aimed at understanding the effectiveness of social marketing in influencing individuals’ behaviour. They studied 54 interventions that were filtered based on social marketing criteria. Their findings suggest that social marketing can be an effective tool for influencing individual behaviour.
Hastings & Saren try to understand the effectiveness assuming that social marketing tries to change consumer behaviour. They believe that social marketing tries to influence social behaviour of individuals. They also point out that individual behaviour being immensely influenced by environmental influences. It can be an effective part of social commercial marketing. in conclusion they agree with Andreasen and believe that social marketing will make an “enormous contribution in the growing field of critical marketing” .
Hoeffler and Keller argue that marketers have increasingly adopted “corporate societal marketing” and points out six ways how this can increase brand equity. They demonstrate that it can increase brand awareness, augment image of the brand, and band credibility, evokes feeling for the brand, increases a community feeling with brand and engages customers with the brand.
They point out that in order to use social marketing as a strong corporate marketing strategy, it is important to choose the cause carefully. They suggest that a cause can be chosen that has a ‘commonality’ with the brand, or ‘complimentarily’. The researchers use brief cases to demonstrate their point and show the effectiveness of associating brand with the right cause.
Strate points out with the aid of a beer marketing campaign using social marketing principles, that social marketing can actually bring forth change in the cultural and behaviour of the individuals. Further, this can also increase brand identification.
Hamlin and Wilson examine the effectiveness of cause related marketing for any brand. They see if linking commercial ventures with charitable causes can bring forth brand identity. This research designed an experiment to understand the ‘fit’ between the social causes and brand and effectiveness of social marketing. The result of the experimental research demonstrates that consumer’s perception regarding the cause related brand is not greatly improved.
They also show that there is not effective influence on the purchase decision of the consumers for a social cause related brand. This finding goes against the general view of other marketing researchers that social marketing has a great effect on the brand identity an image.
Some researchers like Cone, Feldman, & DaSilva and Rangan, Karim, and Sandberg believe that social marketing for commercial brands can be successful only through proper identification of the cause with which the brand is to be associated. For instance, Cone et al. (2003) mentions the campaign by ConAgra to fight child hunger. This according to them has been a successful campaign for the company. However, it is believed that too much of moralization can lead ot failure of a social marketing campaign (Rangan et al., 1996).
In a recent article published by Henderson and Arora researched the effectiveness to use embedded premium promotions wherein a certain percentage of the purchased quantity would be donated for a cause. Their research aimed at understanding if such promotions should be used for multi-category product brands.
Their findings suggest that in case multi-category product brands, there is no significant enhancement of brand attractiveness. However, they also show that such promotions are better in terms of return on investment sense than price promotions. Therefore, their findings suggest that embedded premium promotions are helpful for both brands and categories.
The study of empirical marketing researches on social marketing and its effectiveness demonstrates that social marketing is an effective tool that be used for commercial brands. Brand association with a cause helps in improving brand image and increase brand identity and engagement. Social marketing also bring forth individual behaviour change. Given this effectiveness of social marketing for marketing brands, it is important to understand the context of social marketing in new media perspective. This is done in the following section.
Social marketing and new media
Marketing has researched a new level with the social media. Marketers believe online marketing is a highly effective way to reach the teens . Others like believe that a marketing campaign in the mass media like television or radio will not succeed unless effective merchandising of the social concept exist A New York Times article on social media marketing indicates that brands are being launched and marketing appearance in Facebook before they are actually sold in the market:
As Perfetti Van Meller gears up to launch Mentos UP2U, its first stick gum… the initial advertising efforts will be focused in social media like Facebook. For instance, the new gum already has a Facebook fan page, at Facebook.com/up2u, which more than 95,900 people have indicated they “like”. The first 1,000 visitors who clicked on the “like” button got free gum in a promotion”
Chinn and Artz believe that social networking provides immense opportunity for social marketers. They provide a list of online tools that a social marketer can use such as emails, online bulletin boards, web sites, etc.
The new media also provide extensively interactive and social tools for marketing a social cause or product or both and those are blogs or micro-blogs like Twitter or social networking websites like Facebook or video sharing through YouTube, etc. Marketers, they believe are more eagerly opting for this tool because they want to reach out to larger number of potential customer as a much lesser cost.
Social networking has boosted marketing results of many consumer-based products as they are believed to provide links to the customers and increase sales . Andreasen points out that the Internet has become a powerful tool for social marketers to build communities through which they can promote a cause:
Internet proved itself to be a very powerful tool, allowing Amnesty International to create a community (network) of advocates called Fast Action Stops Torture that linked individuals and organizations around the world to bring attention to cases of human torture.
Social networking is allowing more people to connect to more customers and is helping in creating brand awareness more quickly and to reaching larger masses: “Social networking sites are allowing planners to connect with more people more often, and in a shorter period of time than they could face-to-face meetings, phone calls or e-mails.” Some social networking sites that have become a rave for marketers are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Researchers have pointed out that the word of mouth campaigning through social networks has the greatest influence on individuals . They study the role of networking sites and how they influence individuals. They also provide a profile of individuals who are mostly affected by such websites. Social marketing is greatly influenced by social networking websites may have on social marketing. Individuals are greatly influenced by social networks and word mouth publicity of a brand related cause.
Research has proven that the effectiveness of social marketing is enhanced with the use of social marketing. Social networking websites enable mingling of like-minded people and form a network. Social marketing in such a network it is easy to reach out to the targeted customer.
Uhrig, Bann, Williams, and Evans conducted an empirical study, which showed that more and more people are participating in social network websites. Therefore influencing individuals through social networks for purpose of social marketing becomes easier.
Thackeray, Neiger, Hanson, and McKenzie believe that second generation applications can enhance consumer engagement. Therefore, they believe that it holds immense potential for social marketing campaigns. As the marketing medium entails less cost and access to a greater number of audiences, Web 2.0 is believed to have a greater potential of reaching the right target customers.
The above review of literature on social marketing demonstrates a few principles about the process. First, social marketing can be done for both profit and non-profit marketing. Brand communication through social marketing is empirically believed to hold greater influence on consumer behaviour.
Third, the advent of Web 2.0 technology has increased the potential of social marketing with the capability to reach out to a greater number of consumers. Therefore, social marketing has gained a greater and more influential relevance in the new age marketing where word of mouth marketing has started gaining greater importance through social networking.
Whom does the Web 2.0 social marketing target?
This section delineates a consumer profile that can be derived from previous Web 2.0 based social marketing campaigns. The section will first discuss the empirical researches, their methodology and findings and then demonstrate the kind of people who are mostly targeted through social marketing through Web 2.0 technology.
Social marketing research in Web 2.0
Social networking has gained immense importance for marketers. Social networking helps social marketers to boost their image, increase brand awareness and increase engagement.
Customer profile
In order to understand the customer profile that needs to be targeted through social media marketing through Web 2.0 it is important to understand the customer profile that most predominantly use this new technology. Their usage behaviour and demographic profiling needs to be understood.
Then the question arises if the target customers for the brand are the ones who are using this social media. Uhrig et al. point out that in 2007, 75 percent of the adult population used the Internet and more than 90 percent of the users where in the age group of 18 to 29 years. Of these users there was a likely tendency for them to socialise or network in some way:
Among all Internet users, 39% read someone else’s online journal, Web log or blog; 30% post a comment or review online about a product or service they received; 22% comment to a news group, Web site, blog, or photo site; and 19% create content for the Internet. (Uhrig et al. , 2010, p. 342)
An empirical research conducted by O’Connor & Lundstrom showed that college students – an average age group of 17 to 25 years – have a typical information seeking behaviour. They seek information regarding anything through the Internet search engines, which they believe to be reliable and faster. The empirical study they conducted derived three groups of demographics that make up similar behavioural pattern among target consumers.
The demographic profile predominantly consisted of female, above 18 years, Caucasians. However, the control group were male. 65 percent of the group reported that they used the Internet as their first source of information provider. The study findings suggested that social marketing derived greater behavioural change than traditional marketing. 94 percent of the participants said that they preferred the Internet as a preferred medium of gather information. Therefore, Internet is a more successful medium for social marketing for youths.
Darian & College studied the effectiveness of social marketing to change alcohol consumption behaviour of college students. They conducted a study related to the behaviour of the students and their alcohol consumption habit. The researchers did a profiling of the students based on their drinking habit and utilized the results to devised the product, marketing, pricing and distribution strategy.
Their research suggests that traditional marketing is not a suitable method to change behaviour of alcohol drinkers. Further, as college students were found to gather most of their information regarding a product from their friends and peers it could be logically concluded that social networking provided such as venue online.
Therefore, the friends and peers through social networks can become effective influencers. Here too the social marketing campaign was targeted towards youths in order to change their drinking habits and bring forth a more suitable campus environment that would help in stopping alcohol abuse.
Smith et al. conducted an empirical research into the effectiveness of social networking as influencers and the personal motivation of consumers to have been influenced. This research was conducted based on two studies – first was a questionnaire survey and the second was an in-depth interview with the influencers.
The first study demonstrates that social network of friends and peers have a high degree of influence on the consumer. Further, this research also found that consumers increasingly seek information from brand sites and review websites like CNET Network in order to get a prior knowledge of the product. The survey respondents were also asked to present their internet usage pattern.
The study demonstrated that more connected users are more likely to provide review to the brand sites than less connected users (Smith et al., 2007). Therefore, the study finds that the more connected people are the ones who provide advice to the less connected people. This implies that marketers have to target the people who are more connected in social network as they act as influencers in brand purchase and help in spreading word-of-mouth campaign for or against a brand or product.
The second study shows that the influencers are motivated to help others in making the right decision. A third questionnaire survey shows that word of mouth campaigns are more helpful in case of heath marketing or social marketing. However, the researchers believe that it is wrong on part of the marketers to reach out to the connected few.
Therefore, the word-of-marketing is based on the principle of connecting with the high internet users who act as the influencers. Therefore, the research demonstrates that there is a great amount of internet-based marketing but it targets usually those people who are better connected.
Charging embedded premium for the products sold and donating the premium for a social cause is an effective method of social marketing. Researchers believe that it has greater potential to attract customers than price discount . Researchers have tried to understand the product social marketing fit that would allow embedded premium to be a successful marketing strategy.
They conducted a questionnaire survey and the survey results showed that social marketing is an effective method of increasing brand image and can increase brand awareness and identity. It also increase brand acceptance wherein people try to help the poor and give out premium price in order to help the needy.
Horn points out that one of the best way to reach to the teen consumers is through the Internet. This allows marketers to adopt new media as a potential form of attaining greater reach of the youths. Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter etc. hold immense potential in increasing the campaigning possibility in their social marketing website.
Chen point out that the risk perception a consumer holds regarding smoking or alcoholism. The research shows that the perception of an addict is influenced by three sources and of which social advertisements and peer pressure plays the largest part. Further, the risk perception that a consumer has directly affects his addictive behaviour as well as intention to start smoking.
From this findings, managers can deduce that smoking health hazard marketing can become more successful if the risk perception associated with the advertisement could be increased. Further, the target for such advertisements should be elderly males and/or people with low level of education. However, people who are less addicted to smoking, especially younger people, should be induced not to smoke through social marketing techniques.
Jones, Reis, and Andrews studied another influencer for organ donation cause and that it families. Their study shows that family members can become facilitator or hinderer of organ donation decision of individuals. Their research predicts that the attitude and belief of family members becomes a strong influence on an individual’s decision to donate organ. They conducted a questionnaire survey of 23 pairs of undergraduate university students and their parents.
The study demonstrated that the behaviour of the individuals regarding attitude, degree of family communication, and intention for making a donation. The research therefore shows implications that in order to increase organ donation rate in Australia, the social marketing targets must become the influencers i.e. the family of the targets.
Pickett-Baker and Ozaki aimed at understanding the effect on green brands of marketing and advertising techniques. They aimed at understanding if this green way of life could be established as a pattern of regular lifestyle. In order to do this, they conducted a research on consumer behaviour and advertising. Their aim was to identify the process in which consumers could be influenced to adopt greener products.
They did a questionnaire survey based on Dunla,p, Roper Stratch Worldwide Environmental Survey and Liere HEP-NEP survey . They analyzed 52 complete responses. The findings of the study suggested that there was a strong correlation between consumer confidence and environmental beliefs of individuals. The finding also report that most consumers do not identify eco-friendly products.
However, they support greener product and would like greener companies to produce them but the traditional marketing given no relevant information to them regarding this. Therefore, the research suggests that social marketing could be adopted for the marketing of eco-friendly products among groups of people who are environmentally conscious.
Stasio questions the relative success of social marketing in changing behaviour. The study demonstrates that a social marketing purely targeted towards its cause would be successful. However, it must be one without any hidden agenda. They show that when these prisoners are targeted among a group their long-term success is greater. Therefore, in order to make the process successful the communication objectives of the social marketing must be made clear. The ideal model that is devised for the success of the program is:
At the time of sentencing, the judge would say, “John Smith, you are being sentenced to X years and Y months which will be served in the community under my supervision. Our goal is to admit you back into our community after you pay your debt or your offensive and demonstrate your ability to live by our rules. Starting today, we will develop, with your involvement, a plan to achieve that goal. The plan will require hard work of you, beginning in prison and continuing- and getting harder- after you return to the community. It will also require that your family, friends, neighbours and any other people interested in your welfare commit to the goal of your successful return.
Therefore, the aim of the program was to provide social inclusion to the prisoners and help them rehabilitate. This is more of a correctional centre but with the aid of peers and family of the prisoner.
Peattie & Peattie studies the effect social marketing campaigns have on reducing consumption. The research develops a social marketing model that can be adopted to reduce consumption propensity to consumption. They have shown that health oriented consumption marketing can successfully reduce the propensity for consumption. Social marketing can successfully harness satisfaction among consumers:
One element of commercial marketing that social marketers may be able to harness to successfully market consumption reduction, is expectations management. Within services marketing in particular, there is a longstanding recognition that customer satisfaction is a function of the match between a customer’s experience and expectations. Therefore satisfaction can be achieved either by raising service standards, or by managing expectations downwards.
The research also demonstrates that a social marketing campaign can become successful if consumers view it as “normal”. The other trend in demographics is the increase in the number of people who are “hard-working, high-earning, consumption-intensive, lifestyle” will be more influenced as adhering to less consumption can make their experience more satisfying . The study shows that the research shows that there are
1.4 million Britons have purposefully reduced their incomes in exchange for a better quality of life, and a further 600,000 planned to downshift between 2005 and 2006. The research revealed that just under a million 35–54 year olds were making serious plans to downshift and over 1.3 million under 35s in full time employment planned to downshift by the year 2013.
The research indicates that consumption reduction social marketing can be targeted to a demographic age group of 35 years to 54 years and that there are a lot of employees people just below the age of 35 who were planning to downshift consumption in the next two years.
The literature review provides various facets of social marketing and shows how social marketing is beneficial to the marketers. It also shows when and where it must be used and to target which demographic profile. The review also demonstrates the suitability of the campaign and the influencers of the chosen demographic profile chosen.
Implications
The literature review shows that there is a lot of research regarding the social marketing in non-profit as well as for-profit sector. However, the use of social marketing with the aid of the new media has not been thoroughly researched upon. The above literature review demonstrates that there are areas of research that need to be advocated. First, there is no consensus regarding the definition of social marketing that makes the concept unclear.
Second, social marketing has the potential to influence consumer behaviour is a well researched and empirically proven fact. However, the influence a brand campaign associated with a cause and its success is not clearly delineated in the available pool of research. There is a lot of therefore further research is required to understand the effectiveness of the social marketing campaign for cause related brand marketing.
Third, the social marketing and its association with social networking websites is unclear from the present literature. There is literature on successful social marketing. There is literature on successful marketing campaigns through social networking websites, their benefits, and the model in which they work. From the two stream of available literature, it can be intuitively deduced that there is a great deal of potential that social marketing through Web 2.0 holds, especially to reach out to the younger generation. This area needs to be further analyzed.
Recommendation
The above analysis of the empirical study of the social marketing campaigns show that such campaigns can be targeted at any demographic group but it must be conducive to the target that the brand tries to achieve and on the basis of the target the influencer and the media for disseminating the campaign should be decided.
For instance, when targeting the youth as a target for a social campaign the influencers are friends and peers and family and the media that should be adopted for dissemination are reality television shows or social networking websites like Facebook or Twitter.
The literature review demonstrates that [people who are well connected through in Web 2.0 are more likely to participate in online campaigns and become active advocates for the same. Therefore, social marketers aiming for a cause to be marketed along with their brands should become regular participants in the social networking websites in order to make a group of like minded people to enhance their influence on other potential consumers.
Conclusion
Social marketing is in its maturing stage of life cycle . Marketers have repeatedly identified the hidden potential of social marketing and the advantages it holds for the success of the brand image. Marketers believe that cause marketing can boost brand image, identity, customer loyalty, and engagement. Therefore, social marketing is identified as a secret tool for marketers to induce customers to spend in a recession hit economy.
Web-based marketing has become the new rave. Online marketing especially through social networking websites that provide accurate hit of target customers through advertisements. the literature review suggests there is a great potential for targeting social network marketing as a medium for social marketing.
This is because it is easier to reach to the target customers given their demographic profile and interests and campaign their products. Therefore, the cost of campaigns also reduces considerably and helps in influencing customer more as social marketing campaigns has a greater potential to influence and change behaviour.
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