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The social marketing literature tends to focus on upstream marketing (policy) and downstream (individual behaviour change) and has a limited view on midstream (working with partners and community groups) social marketing. The paper proposes midstream social marketing should also include an understanding of how services and service employees influence and support individual behaviour change goals. The paper presents four key services marketing principles – derived from services theory and thinking – which the paper believes to be essential for implementing effective midstream social marketing.

This is a conceptual paper that uses service theory and case-examples to show how service thinking can be used as a midstream social marketing approach.

For effective uptake and impact of social marketing services amongst people and populations, social marketers need to design programs that consider the service experience, the service employee, service quality/customer value and the active role of the customer in value creation.

Services marketing is a well-established sub-discipline of marketing which, until recently, has not interacted with social marketing. The extension and application of services theory for social marketing can enrich and propel the social marketing discipline forward. Further research is recommended to evaluate how service principles can be applied in practice.

Given that social marketing services tend not to be accessed in sufficient numbers by the people who most need them, social marketers need to think beyond the technical, cognitive, and organisational-focused goals when designing social services.

This paper identifies key service theories that social marketers should understand and use and is thus a source of fresh ideas for theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of experience levels on consumers' value perceptions in their use of a social marketing preventative health service. The study uses services thinking to investigate customer value in a social marketing consumption situation.

An online, self-completion survey was conducted on n=853 Australian women who were users of breastscreening services.

Experienced users derived higher levels of functional and emotional value than novice users and reported higher levels of satisfaction and behavioural intentions to use the service again. However, path analysis indicated that satisfaction was a stronger driver of behavioural intentions for novice users.

The findings highlight the need to understand and segment target audiences in more meaningful ways beyond traditional demographic segmentation. There is a need to understand the value benefits that target audiences seek and acknowledge that these value and service experience perceptions are likely to change over time as target audiences transition from novice to experienced users. This is useful in allowing health services to consider ways of providing a degree of customisation to target audiences, resulting in higher levels of satisfaction, particularly amongst novice users, leading to behavioural intentions to return.

Two novel approaches are used to understand social marketing behaviour: value theory and a services perspective. Through the examination of experience levels, this study acknowledges the enduring nature of many social marketing behaviours, allowing social marketers to examine differences in target audiences' experiences based on whether they are new to or familiar with a behaviour. This provides a fresh perspective in understanding target audiences in social marketing through an understanding of their value perceptions which influence their behaviour, and how these value perceptions are likely to change over time.

This paper aims to highlight the importance of social marketing at the midstream (meso) level as a key component of a proposed model for co-creating public services. The model demonstrates how supportive relationships and conversations within and between service organisations, front-line service staff, social networks and clients are essential for the effective co-creation of health and welfare services and social marketing interventions.

This is a conceptual paper that uses network and services theory and a case study to show how the midstream social marketing approach and service co-creation can be applied in practice and how these concepts relate to upstream and downstream social marketing.

The case study demonstrates the powerful role of social networks, staff–client relationships and conversations in the co-creation of effective services and the improvement in communications, trust and understanding between service providers and the community.

The paper shows how service providers and social marketers can achieve co-created, customer-oriented services/interventions through the development of congruent, empathetic narratives, relationships and conversations. The case study demonstrates how this can be achieved in practice through staff training, the identification of “community communicators” and value-based targeting and communications.

The integration of conversations, relationships, values, services and midstream social marketing into a model for co-creation offers a valuable tool for social marketing and health/welfare service professionals.

Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover specific articles devoted to certain topics. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume III, in addition to the annotated list of articles as the two previous volumes, contains further features to help the reader. Each entry within has been indexed according to the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus and thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid information retrieval. Each article has its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. The first Volume of the Bibliography covered seven journals published by MCB University Press. This Volume now indexes 25 journals, indicating the greater depth, coverage and expansion of the subject areas concerned.

This paper seeks to draw from services marketing theory as an alternative and under-used pathway to social and behaviour change for the achievement of societal well-being. Social marketing services are an important part of social change programmes as they contribute towards service users’ health, well-being, and the fulfilment of social marketing goals. However, value destruction can occur in users’ service experiences, leading to a decline rather than improvement of their well-being. The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature of the value destruction process and identify the outcomes in social marketing services from a consumer’s perspective.

A qualitative exploratory study using a focus group (n = 4) and individual depth interview (n = 4) methods was undertaken. The discussions were guided by a semi-structured interview guide and were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Thematic analysis of the data revealed two value destruction processes: incongruent resource application and misuse of firm resources. The value destruction processes suggest three types of outcomes: reduced usage of the service, termination of service and strategic behavioural actions.

This study is the first to examine value destruction processes and outcomes in social marketing services from a consumer’s perspective. This study contributes towards the small but growing body of research on value destruction in both commercial and social marketing by challenging the assumption that value creation is always positively valenced and responding to critique that there is currently insufficient focus on value destruction in service research and its impact on well-being.

This paper aims to provide a review of the extant literature on value creation and destruction in social marketing services for social change, for the purposes of developing a research agenda for future research in this area. Creating value in social marketing services is now identified as a key focus for social marketing (Russell-Bennett et al., 2009; Domegan et al., 2013), yet work in this area is nascent and conceptual, methodological, and empirical work is needed to advance the research agenda (Zainuddin et al., 2013; 2016).

To help shape the future of research on value in social marketing services, this paper appraises the contributions of the current research literature, and identifies gaps in the current knowledge. A systematic literature review was conducted, following the PRISMA protocol for conducting and reporting systematic reviews (Moher et al., 2009). The review covers the areas of value creation in social marketing, value destruction in social marketing, dimensions of value in social marketing, and from value-in-exchange, to value-in-use, to value-in-behaviour in social change.

A research agenda for further work in this area is provided within the themes of 1. conceptual development, 2. broadening ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations, 3. research contexts, and 4. measuring and evaluating value in social marketing services. Within each of these themes, a series of research questions are provided to guide further work in the four identified themes.

This paper is the first to offer a review of the extant literature on value creation and destruction in social marketing and social marketing services, and offer a research agenda for future work in this area. This paper contributes to services marketing and the development of service thinking as key component of social marketing, and the role that value creation plays in this (Russell-Bennett et al., 2013).

This paper aims to demonstrate the utility of branding theory for social marketing services. Specifically, this is to our knowledge the first to investigate brand personality (BP) and brand personality appeal (BPA) in a single study as predictors for consumer attitudes and intentions to engage with a service.

The associations between BP and BPA and their subsequent associations with attitudes and intentions are tested in two service types, i.e. a commercial marketing service (banking) and a social marketing service (health screening). This involved a cross-sectional dual online survey administered to a sample of 395 women 50-69 years old in Queensland, Australia. This sampling criterion represented the primary target audience for the social marketing service, which was breastscreening and was maintained for the banking services sample. Multiple mediation analysis using a bootstrapping approach was conducted using Mplus 6.11.

BP and BPA perform similarly across the two service types. BP and BPA are related and have direct and indirect associations with consumer attitudes and behavioural intentions towards both commercial and social marketing services. Specifically, the BP traits of responsibility and activity were found to have significant direct and indirect relationships with attitudes and behavioural intentions towards both commercial and social marketing services. The relationships for the emotionality and simplicity traits were non-significant. The results also suggest that the attractiveness, favourability and clarity BPA traits had the strongest associations with consumer responses.

This study demonstrates the utility of using branding in social marketing services, which to date has been under-utilised. It also offers originality by combining BP and BPA in the same empirical inquiry, which to date has been examined separately. A new and alternative factor structure for BPA is provided, and future research is recommended to further examine BPA in this and other contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss two parallel but distinct subfields of marketing that share common interests (enhancing consumers’ lives and improving well-being): social marketing and transformative service research. The authors also suggest a research agenda.

The paper offers a conceptual approach and research agenda by comparing and contrasting the two marketing fields of transformative service research and social marketing.

Specifically, this paper proposes three opportunities to propel both fields forward: 1) breaking boundaries that inhibit research progress, which includes collaboration between public, private and nonprofit sectors to improve well-being; 2) adopting more customer-oriented approaches that go beyond the organizational and individual levels; and 3) taking a non-linear approach to theory development that innovates and co-creates solutions.

This paper presents the challenges and structural barriers for two subfields seeking to improve human well-being. This paper is the first to bring these subfields together and propose a way for them to move forward together.

Transformative service research (TSR) and social marketing share a common goal, which is to institute social change that improves individual and societal well-being. However, the mechanism via which such improved well-being results or so-called “transformation” occurs, is not well understood. The purpose of this paper is to examine the claims made in the TSR literature to identity the themes and scholarly meaning of “transformative” service exchange; ascertain the mechanisms used in service contexts to realize transformation, including to motivate long-term, sustainable societal change; and develop a transformative service exchange continuum to guide research and managerial approaches that aim to create uplifting social change. The authors recommend their continuum as a framework to inform how social marketing and service scholars design service solutions to address wicked social problems.

This paper presents a qualitative study where Leximancer, a text-mining tool, is used to visualize the structure of themes and concepts that define transformative service exchanges as explained and applied in the literature. Additionally, a profiling analysis of transformation as it is discussed in the TSR literature is used to identify the mechanisms that service marketers have developed to establish current theorization of service thinking for social change. These qualitative phases of analysis then inform the development of the transformative service exchange continuum.

A scoping review identified 51 articles across 12 journals, based on this study’s selection criteria for identifying transformative service exchanges. The Leximancer analysis systematically and efficiently guided the authors’ interpretation of the large data corpus and was used in the identification of service themes. The use of text-mining software afforded a detailed lens to enrich the authors’ interpretation and clarification of six high-level concepts for inclusion on a transformative service exchange continuum.

This paper aims to unpack the meaning of transformative service exchange by highlighting the mechanism(s) used by researchers when designing social change outcomes. It contributes to TSR via the development of the continuum across micro, meso and macro levels. The temporal nature of transformative service exchanges is also elucidated. This continuum integrates current TSR studies and can guide future service studies in the TSR and social marketing domains.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of corporate social responsibility on customer satisfaction, loyalty and repurchase with or without cause-related marketing or cause marketing across Islamic companies.

An experimental survey of Iranian university students was conducted to investigate the customer satisfaction, loyalty and purchase intention with companies using social marketing methods such as corporate social responsibility along with cause marketing and cause-related marketing. A total of 400 usable surveys were obtained in SRBIA University of Tehran, while possessing the greatest ability to consume more hoteling services companies and mobile producers beyond Iranian students.

The results indicated that through an experimental research by including social marketing in products or service companies such as mobile producers and hotel services companies in Iran (as an Islamic country), there are same levels of loyalty and repurchase intentions, but different levels of customer’s satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors found out there is no significant difference regarding the effect of cause marketing and cause-related marketing on loyalty and repurchase intentions. Also, it is different on customer’s satisfaction given the company type.

The sampling frame for this research was limited to students in one of Iran capital city universities. The results are not exactly generalized to all the populations for Iranian product or service consumers. Also, the sampling methods used in this research might have generated bias due to time and resources constraints. So, it is recommended for future studies to consider broader samplings more than university students and beyond only the consumers of international product or service companies.

No study has used corporate social responsibilities to explain customer satisfaction while providing cause marketing and cause-related marketing as corporate social marketing in service companies influencing the customer loyalty and repurchase intentions.