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Digitalisation has increased the importance of online forms of marketing, including social media (SM) marketing, for entrepreneurial firms. This paper aims to identify digital engagement strategies and tactics in developing SM marketing capability.

The study uses ethnographic content analysis of an entrepreneurial firm and a network of business-to-business (B2B) actors to classify 1,248 B2B Facebook posts and Twitter tweets from a case of an artisan food producer in addition to semi-structured interviews with 26 networked actors.

The authors derive a range of digital engagement strategies (8 in total) and tactics (15 in total) for the four defining layers of SM marketing capability, namely, connect, engage, co-ordinate and collaborate.

This research focuses on a case study and a network of B2B actors within the artisan food sector. However, the strategies and tactics are applicable to other entrepreneurial firms and contexts.

The digital engagement strategies and tactics are of direct practical benefit to entrepreneurial firms willing to learn and develop SM marketing capability in interaction with their B2B partners.

This study investigates three under-researched areas, SM as it relates to B2B relationships, and entrepreneurship, and marketing capability gaps in an era of rapid digitalisation. The definition of SM marketing capability and associated digital engagement strategies and tactics are new to the extant literature moving forward the understanding of SM B2B marketing in theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that the choice of marketing tactics is influenced by the company's external environment. It aims to illustrate the marketing tactics suggested for a complex, turbulent environment, when marketing and the environment are viewed through a complexity lens.

A marketing mix model, derived from complexity literature, was assessed via a multiple case study to identify the type of marketing mix suggested for a complex, turbulent environment. The study was exploratory, using in‐depth interviews with two companies in the IT industry.

The results tentatively confirmed that the more successful company used a destabilizing marketing mix, and suggest that using complexity theory to develop marketing tactics could be helpful in turbulent environments.

The findings are limited by the study's exploratory, qualitative nature and the small sample. Generalizing should be done with care and therefore further research with larger samples and in different environments is recommended.

The paper will benefit marketers by emphasizing a new way to consider future marketing activities of their companies. The model can assist marketers to identify the tactics to use, dependent on the nature of their environment.

Most work on complexity in marketing has concentrated on strategy, with little emphasis on tactics and the marketing mix. Therefore, the paper is an important contribution to the understanding of marketing mix choices, of interest to both practising marketers and marketing academics.

Prior research has examined the sociopolitical force as simply a part of all types of environmental pressures, yet we argue that this force calls for a unique examination of marketing's role in firm responses to sociopolitical pressures. Understanding the degree to which firms attempt to manage forces and pressures in the external business environment is key to understanding marketing's role in impeding vs aiding public policy initiatives, and is the problem this research investigates.

Using structural equation modeling, data from 71 firms demonstrate that managing the sociopolitical force is, in fact, distinct from managing the other four market-based forces – consumer demand, supplier power, competition and technological shifts. Managing the sociopolitical force is shown to require fundamentally different skills and resources.

Results suggest that firm sociopolitical receptivity drives attempts to influence this unique external business environmental force, in turn limiting marketplace sociopolitical receptivity. Furthermore, attempts to influence such a unique force relies on resource-light marketing resources, which limits resource-heavy marketing.

Managing a political force with marketplace ramifications involves strategy that utilizes marketing, but is driven by relationships with social and political agents. This is truly an environmental management concept distinct from the management of the other four market-based forces. The analysis in this study demonstrates that managing another environmental force (i.e. competition force) involves different receptivity influences and marketing tactic outcomes.

This study aims to examine what parents from across the USA know about online advertising/marketing tactics directed at children, their familiarity with these tactics and what they believe about the appropriateness of using these promotional methods to target children.

The online survey company Qualtrics was used to collect data from 500 parents in the USA. Parents had to have at least one child between the ages of 5 and 14 to participate. To ensure socio-economic diversity, half of the participants had an associate degree or more of schooling while the other half of participants had some college or less. Participants were given vignettes describing 11 different online advertising/marketing tactics and were asked how familiar they were with each tactic, whether they could identify the tactic by name, at what age they believed their child could understand the promotional intent of the tactic and the age that they thought it was ethical to use this tactic with children.

The results revealed that parents were only moderately familiar with many of these advertising/marketing tactics and had difficulty identifying most of them by name. In addition, parents reported that, on average, most 11-year-old children would understand the purpose of these marketing approaches and that it was ethical to target children with them.

The results of this exploratory study offer researchers some key insights into how American parents perceive online advertising that targets children.

Today marketers operate in globalised markets, planning new ways to engage with domestic and foreign customers alike. While there is a greater need to understand these two customer groups, few studies examine the impact of customer engagement tactics on the two customer groups, focusing on their perceptual differences. Even less attention is given to customer engagement tactics in a cross-cultural framework. In this research, the authors investigate customers in China and UK, aiming to compare their perceptual differences on the impact of multiple customer engagement tactics.

Using a quantitative approach with 286 usable responses from China and the UK obtained through a combination of person-administered survey and computer-based survey screening process, the authors test a series of hypotheses to distinguish across-cultural differences.

Findings show that the collectivists (Chinese customers) perceive customer engagement tactics differently than the individualists (UK customers). The Chinese customers are more sensitive to price and reputation, whereas the UK customers respond more strongly to service, communication and customisation. Chinese customers’ concerns with extensive price and reputation comparisons may be explained by their awareness towards face (status), increased self-expression and equality.

The findings challenge the conventional practice of using similar customer engagement tactics for a specific market place with little concern for multiple cultural backgrounds. The paper proposes strategies for marketers facing challenges in this globalised context.

Several contributions have been made to the literatures. First, the study showed the effects of culture on the customers’ perceptual differences. Second, the study provided more information to clarify customers’ different reactions towards customer engagement tactics, highlighted by concerns towards face and status. Third, the study provided empirical evidence to support the use of multiple customer engagement tactics to the across cultural studies.

Contemporary practitioners of content marketing (CM) often suggest their discipline is an ancient one, yet mainly limit its origins to the custom-published magazines of the late 1800s. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize some of the many definitions of CM and to report the first scholarly history of its development and practice.

This study’s purposes led to the following research questions: To what extent were CM strategies and tactics used before the 20th century? How have the uses and characteristics of CM changed or remained the same over time? Sources included general histories focusing on the earliest uses of advertising and promotions and edited book chapters and journal articles on the histories of branding and early print advertising, marketing and advertising practices in ancient and medieval periods and the development of consumer cultures around the world.

Research findings support three conclusions: CM existed much earlier than often acknowledged; has emerged as a unique marketing discipline, strategically and tactically distinguishable from the others (e.g. advertising and sales promotion); and possesses objectives, strategies and tactics that have remained remarkably consistent in practice across the millennia.

The research supports several insights to the history of marketing and the practice of CM. Some of the CM strategies and tactics identified in this paper, for instance, have previously been concluded to be part of advertising’s history. Findings also reveal that many of advertising’s American pioneers actually used CM to persuade 19th-century businessmen to adopt widespread advertising. In addition, the emphasis on interactive, digital media in CM definitions offers a likely explanation for the recent enthusiasm behind CM as a response to global trends in consumer preferences and global competition, as well as why contemporary CM practitioners have often failed to recognize they are practicing a “new” discipline that has actually been in use for thousands of years.

Financial constraints recently confronting performing arts organizations propel them to employ various marketing tactics to not only win new visitors but also to maintain its current clientele. Fostering a long-term relationship with clients is regarded a vital solution to a survival-related predicament these organizations face. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of four marketing tactics – personalization, two-way communication, preferential treatment, and rewarding – on the dimensions of customer relationship, namely, satisfaction, trust, and commitment.

Data to test the various research hypotheses were collected through a survey with 252 clients of a performing arts venue in a Dutch city. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

Results reveal that extension of rewards to and maintaining a two-way communication with clients of a performing arts venue positively influence their satisfaction with, trust in, and commitment to the performing arts venue. Personalization of services impacts commitment only. However, the effect of preferential treatment on the three relationship dimensions is not statistically significant. Additionally, analysis shows that satisfied customers are more likely to trust the performing arts venue, although clients’ satisfaction with and trust in the performing arts venue do not influence their commitment to the venue.

Research into the ways to strengthen customer relationships in the performing arts is still scarce. The current research aims at investigating the impact of several marketing tactics on customer relationship measured in terms of satisfaction, trust, and commitment and shows how performing arts venues can strengthen their bonds with customers.

‘Marketing information’ is one of the litanies of electronic publishing in the 1990s. But who really knows how to market electronic information?

Considers cooperative negotiation tactic use in early stages of business‐to‐business buyer‐seller relationships. Specifically, it addresses a serious gap in the study of individual difference effects on cooperative negotiation, an area that has received little academic attention. In doing so, insight is provided on an area that marketing researchers say needs attention now. We conduct a study where subjects take the role of a salesperson. They make offers, or respond to buyers’ offers, to negotiate. Subjects indicate what offers they would make, or what counteroffers they would respond with. Results support the notion that individual differences in intrinsic motivation (operationalized as autonomy causality orientation) affect the use of cooperative offers, but do not affect counteroffers, due possibly to reciprocation.