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The purpose of this paper is to analyze message features of fear appeals in current British road safety campaigns directed against mobile phone use while driving and to discuss barriers to explicit theory use in campaign message design.

This message-centred research takes a qualitative content analytical approach to analyze nine British web-based road safety campaigns directed against mobile phone use while driving based on the extended parallel process model. Message content and message structure are analyzed.

There still exists a gap between theory and road safety campaign practice. The study reveals that campaigns with fear appeals primarily use threatening messages but neglect efficacy-based contents. Severity messages emerge as the dominant content type while self-efficacy and response efficacy are hardly represented. Fear appeal content in the threat component was mainly communicated through the mention of legal, financial and physical harm, whereas efficacy messages communicated success stories and encouragement. As regards message structure, the threat component always preceded the efficacy component. Within each component, different patterns emerged.

To enhance efficacy in campaigns directed against distracted driving and to reduce the gap between theory and practice, social marketers should include messages that empower recipients to abstain from mobile phone use while driving. Campaigns should show recommended behaviours and highlight their usefulness and effectiveness.

This paper adds to limited research conducted on effect-independent message properties of fear appeals. It enhances understanding of fear appeal message features across the structure and content dimension. By discussing barriers to explicit theory use in social marketing practice and offering practical implications for social marketers, it contributes towards reducing the barriers to explicit theory use in campaign message design.

The purpose of this research project was to improve public awareness to improve public awareness of the importance of energy conservation and to improve the use of simple conservation strategies. A thorough evaluation of the net gain from the numerous energy campaigns rolled out to the public every year is lacking. This study conducted pre- and post-campaign surveys and focus groups to evaluate one campaign’s impact on self-reported energy behaviors.

The campaign used television public service announcements and a website to improve awareness of the city’s efforts to conserve energy and to increase individual energy conservation practices. Focus groups (n = 40) were used to identify common barriers to conservation, and pre- and post-surveys (n = 533, 479) were conducted to evaluate the campaign’s effectiveness.

Results indicated that the campaign increased positive changes in changing light bulbs and confidence in taking action to turn down thermostats, unplug devices and turn off lights. While follow-up research is needed on the precise mechanism of the psychological process at work, the findings are consistent with the concepts of self and response efficacy as needed components of any behavior change. The authors advocate the adoption of research-informed message design to maximize communication campaign effects.

This paper demonstrates how the combination of three prominent persuasion theories can be used to develop behavior change campaigns. Also, it is one of the few studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the Energy Star campaign.

The outbreak of Covid-19 increased the average time spent on social media (SM). This led to a transformation in how companies manage their digital marketing channels and created additional pressure for business-to-business (B2B) and family businesses, which tend to focus more on personal relationships with customers and stakeholders than on the implementation of digital marketing strategies on SM. The present research examines the case study of a Facebook advertising campaign created to promote the products and business values of an Italian family firm specialising in the production and commercialisation of biostimulants for agriculture.

The research aims to combine digital marketing avenues (i.e. a Facebook advertising campaign) with established psychological and behavioural theories, such as the dual process theories, by comparing the effects of two promotional videos (emotional vs functional).

The results suggest that emotional videos generate more passive behaviours, such as views, as well as active behaviours in the form of likes, comments and shares, while functional videos induce people to search for more information about the advertised products.

This is the first study to validate the role of Facebook advertising campaigns in developing an information-based approach to B2B family firms by testing the effectiveness of a targeted campaign comparing the impact of emotional and functional cues on increasing users' engagement while optimising the circulation of video content. The study helps to reduce the academic–practice gap by investigating the example of a fruitful integration between academic research and management practice.

This paper aims to use the advertisements of three major brands – Chymol, Formamint and Lifebuoy Soap – to examine how advertisers responded to the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in Great Britain influenza pandemic. It looks particularly at the ways in which marketing strategies changed and how these strategies were enacted in the lexical and semiotic choices (e.g. language, image, colour, typography, texture, materiality, composition and layout) of advertisements.

A total of 120 advertisements for the three brands were collected from the British Newspaper Archive and analysed using the theory and analytical tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis. The general themes and semiotic structures of the advertisements were identified, with the aim of deconstructing the meaning potentials of verbal and visual resources used to convey ideas about the pandemic, and how they work to shape public understanding of the products and make them appear as effective and credible.

Each brand rapidly changed their marketing strategy in response to the influenza pandemic, using such techniques as testimonials, hyperbole, scaremongering and pseudoscientific claims to persuade consumers that their products offered protection. Whilst these strategies may appear manipulative, they also had the function of fostering reassurance and sympathy amongst the general public in a moment of turmoil, indicating the important role of brands in building consumer trust and promoting a sense of authority in early twentieth-century Britain.

Exploring the way in which advertisers responded to the 1918‐1919 influenza pandemic reminds us of the challenges of distinguishing legitimate and illegitimate medical advice in a fast-moving pandemic and highlights the need to cast a critical eye to the public health information, particularly when it comes from unofficial sources with vested interests.

This paper considers the potential of social media for developing public services. The paper approaches social media as a context that can provide information that might otherwise be unattainable. The focus of analysis is on a special hard-to-reach group of marginalized youths who appear to have isolated themselves from society.

The authors answer the question: How can the experiences of socially withdrawn youth as shared on social media be used to enrich the knowledge base relating to the initiation phase of co-creation of public services? The data retrieved from the Finnish discussion forum are analyzed using the combination of unsupervised machine learning and discourse analysis.

The paper contributes by outlining a method that can be applied to identify expertise-by-experience from digital stories shared by marginalized youths. To overcome the challenges of making socially withdrawn youths real contributors to the co-creation of public services, this paper suggests several theoretical and managerial implications.

Co-creation assumes an interactive and dynamic relationship where value is created at the nexus of interaction. However, the evidence base for successful co-creation, particularly with digital technology, is limited. This paper fills the gap by providing findings from a case study that investigated how social media discussions can be a stimulus to enrich the knowledge base of the co-creation of public services.

The purpose of this paper is to generate insights into how multinational companies (MNCs) promote global mobility in their Employer Branding (EB) messages on Facebook.

The authors analyzed 13.340 EB messages found on the Facebook career pages of 30 major MNCs (10 of each in the US, UK and Germany) drawing on a methodological approach combining Grounded Theory and text-mining.

Building on the perspective of psychological contracts as sensitizing concept, the analysis of the overall sample reveals a range of core themes in EB messages across all MNCs studied. With regards to global mobility, MNCs emphasize relational, i.e. socio-emotional, contents, particularly, highlighting opportunities of experience and personal development. While global mobility is an overall marginal theme, German MNCs extensively promote global mobility, whereas US- and UK-based MNCs do not explicitly make it a subject of their messages. The findings are discussed in the light of institutional theory.

Despite mega-trend, little is known about social media EB, especially when it comes to the contents that MNCs communicate to (potential) employees. Applying an innovative methodological approach, the authors offer insights into these contents. Discussing the findings in the light of institutional theory, it is concluded that promoting global mobility in socio-emotional terms seems of high importance to reduce uncertainties associated with living and working abroad. This might help firms to hire internationally mobile employees, especially in countries where job mobility is generally low.

This study aims to determine how the most sustainable brands in Italy and Spain developed communication and awareness-raising actions during the COVID-19 pandemic and whether these companies were truly involved in raising public awareness of the pandemic. The authors specifically focus on sustainable companies, as health communication is considered to be an important corporate social responsibility task.

To answer these questions, the authors have used data on the social media activity (Twitter and Instagram) of these brands in Spain and Italy, extracting the posts and associated hashtags that each of them has published throughout the pandemic to be processed using social network analysis and visualization techniques.

The detailed analysis of both the levels of activity and the content of the messages provides interesting insights into the communication models of the companies and the influence of factors such as time, country and the specific social media platform used.

The authors analyze the communication of the most sustainable businesses on social media during the pandemic, adopting a highly innovative approach. The particular originality of this study lies in the parallel analysis of two different countries that were simultaneously shaken by the pandemic in very similar circumstances. This study also presents a novel use of graphical representation tools in terms of companies’ behavior for health communication on social media.

El objetivo de esta investigación es determinar cómo las marcas reconocidas como las más sostenibles en Italia y España han desarrollado acciones de comunicación durante la pandemia del Covid-19 y si estas empresas se han involucrado realmente en la sensibilización pública de la pandemia. Nos centramos específicamente en las empresas sostenibles dado que la Comunicación en Salud se considera una tarea importante de responsabilidad social corporativa.

Para responder a estas preguntas, hemos utilizado datos de actividad en medios sociales (Twitter e Instagram) de estas marcas en España e Italia, extrayendo los posts y hashtags asociados que cada una ha publicado a lo largo de la pandemia para procesarlos usando técnicas de análisis y visualización de redes sociales.

El análisis detallado tanto de los niveles de actividad como del contenido de los mensajes permite obtener conclusiones interesantes sobre los modelos de comunicación de las empresas y la influencia de factores como el tiempo, el país y el medio social concreto utilizado.

Analizamos la comunicación realizada por las compañías más sostenibles en medios sociales durante la pandemia, adoptando un enfoque muy innovador. La particularidad de este estudio radica en el análisis paralelo de dos países diferentes que fueron sacudidos simultáneamente por la pandemia en circunstancias muy similares. Este estudio también conlleva un uso novedoso de herramientas de representación gráfica en términos del comportamiento de las empresas para Comunicación en Salud en medios sociales.

本研究的目的是确定在意大利和西班牙被认为是最可持续发展的品牌在Covid-19大流行期间是如何开展传播行动的, 以及这些公司是否真正参与了提高公众对该大流行病的认识。我们特别关注可持续发展的公司, 因为健康传播被认为是企业社会责任的一项重要任务。

为了回答这些问题, 我们使用了这些品牌在西班牙和意大利的社交媒体活动数据（Twitter和Instagram）, 提取了每个品牌在整个大流行期间发布的帖子和相关标签, 并使用社交网络分析和可视化技术进行处理。

通过对活动水平和信息内容的详细分析, 可以得出关于这些公司的传播模式以及诸如时间、国家和所使用的特定社交媒体等因素的影响的有趣结论。

我们分析了最可持续的公司在大流行期间在社交媒体上进行的传播, 采取了一种非常创新的方法。这项研究的特殊性在于对两个不同国家的平行分析, 这两个国家在非常相似的情况下同时受到大流行病的冲击。这项研究还包括在社交媒体上对公司健康传播行为的图形表示工具的新颖使用。

This paper aims to explore how entrepreneurs use social media (SM) to develop their organisational identity within business networks.

A single embedded case study was used comprising a case firm entrepreneur and eight connected network actors within an artisan food context in Ireland. Data was collected using an in-depth interview complemented with content analysis of networked firms’ Facebook posts (N = 1,652) over a three-year period.

This paper identifies four common network processes through which entrepreneurs can leverage SM to develop their organisational identity within networks. The processes are network relating, collaborating within networks, interacting with trends and connecting with community.

Findings are limited to the Irish artisan food sector and explore identity development through a single SM platform. The applicability and variation of use of the processes across industries would serve to further refine the processes identified.

Practically, the four processes through which identity within a network can be developed using SM can help entrepreneurs to access and position themselves within business networks, gain access to resources and overcome the classic limitations of newness and smallness.

This paper provides a conceptual framework illustrating the processes involved in developing entrepreneurial organisational identity within business networks using SM. This paper adds to a growing literature that places interaction at the heart of identity development and responds to calls to further understanding of the process of identity development for entrepreneurial ventures.

The purpose of this study is to review and analyze the status of word-of-mouth (WOM) research in the business-to-business (B2B) context and discuss and identify new possible future directions.

A systematic review was conducted and 36 articles on B2B WOM were collected to evaluate the current state of the literature and clarify possible future research directions.

This thematic analysis categorize these articles into three themes: WOM generation, WOM usage and reference marketing. Under each theme, the authors reveal research findings unique to B2B research and different from business-to-consumer (B2C) WOM research. This study identifies several research questions that should be addressed by future research.

Both academic researchers and business practitioners recognize that WOM plays an essential role in B2B marketing. However, no review paper focuses on WOM in the B2B context. Findings in the B2C WOM literature suggest that WOM substantially influences firms’ performance, but that managers cannot simply attempt to extrapolate B2C findings to the B2B arena. By synthesizing and assessing prior research on WOM in the B2B context, this study contributes to a better understanding of the B2B WOM phenomenon and facilitates future research on this topic.

Females are underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), both in the workforce and in universities. Low self-efficacy and limited access to role models are key factors preventing retention of female STEM students enrolled in university degrees. This paper aims to report on one social marketing pilot programme that was co-designed to increase self-efficacy in females currently enrolled in STEM programmes.

The Co-create, Build and Engage (C-B-E) framework was applied. Process and outcome evaluations were conducted using a repeated measure design to assess pilot programme effectiveness.

A significant increase in self-efficacy and high satisfaction rates were observed for STEM students that attended the bias literacy workshop. Social advertisements raised awareness for available STEM specific university services.

This paper outlines the application of the C-B-E framework. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study delivers the first scientific paper reporting an outcome evaluation for a social marketing programme seeking to retain women enrolled in university STEM degrees.