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The purpose of this paper is to explore ethical issues related to pharmaceutical marketers’ social media efforts including the prevalence and forms of direct-to-consumer web 2.0 advertising (eDTCA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages across social networking sites (SNSs). One goal is to determine if these eDTCA posts comply with draft guidelines issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Content analysis of ten pharmaceutical marketers’ SNS posts documented the frequency and types of posts devoted to eDTCA, drug risks and benefits, CSR, and other purposes.

eDTCA represents about 35 percent of all pharmaceutical firm SNS posts and primarily communicates help-seeking messages via Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Firms also promote their ethical image through CSR-related posts. These posts primarily highlight employee-focussed and community-focussed initiatives. Analysis of consumer behavior in response to each post shows that eDTCA affects only liking of YouTube videos, but CSR increases behavior responses on all SNSs except LinkedIn.

Despite absence of final guidance, pharmaceutical marketers seem to abide by FDA draft social media guidance. In line with the FDA’s draft fair-balance regulations, almost all product-claim eDTCA posts state both benefit and risk information. Nevertheless, the FDA should issue final eDTCA guidance without delay consistent with traditional media direct-to-consumer advertising guidance. This should benefit consumers through consistency with their existing advertising literacy competencies.

The study represents an initial attempt to document ethical issues in the current state-of-the-practice of pharmaceutical social media marketing related to eDTCA and CSR.

This paper aims to understand what reflexivity means and explores which types of reflexivity could be applied within social marketing practice as a critical approach to overcoming failures.

This paper is a critical literature review.

The study proposes a typology for a reflexive approach to social marketing practice to overcome failures. The typology is built on self and critical reflexivity, simultaneously allowing social marketers to reflect on external and internal factors that may affect the individual's role and could negatively affect social marketing practice unless otherwise considered. The types of reflexivity discussed are not prescriptive; instead, the authors intend to provoke further discussion on an under-researched but vital area of social marketing.

The proposed typology is conceptual; an empirical investigation to gain social marketer's views would further enhance the effectiveness of the applications of the typology.

Social marketers could use the proposed typology for future practice.

This is the first study that conceptualises various types of reflexivity within social marketing practice to overcome failures.

Social marketers set out to undertake interventions that benefit society. However, at times, there can be inadvertent, unintended consequences of these interventions that can be seen as unethical. Such ethical issues can arise from the context, process, method and outcomes of interventions and often bring to the fore the “social fairness” of social marketing. Given that social marketing is aimed at societal benefit, the authors believe that the issue of social fairness is an important one in the context of ethical social marketing. With that in mind, the purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion of the application of a normative ethical framework, labelled the integrative justice model (IJM) (Santos and Laczniak, 2009), to social marketing. This amounts to a macro-social marketing ethical framework.

Conceptual broadening of a normative ethical framework.

The authors hold that the IJM provides several helpful normative guidelines for improving the “social fairness” of social marketing. As such, the presented normative framework of macro-social marketing ethics provides useful guidelines for future development of social marketing codes of ethics.

The macro-social marketing ethics framework provides practical guidelines for social marketers to assess ethical issues in social marketing.

The macro-social marketing ethics framework answers the call of Carter, Mayes, Eagle and Dahl (2017) for development of ethical frameworks for social marketers. It provides a reconciliation of multiple normative frameworks to give a set of guidelines for social marketers that are clear and non-contradictory.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into what social marketers see as trends, issues, and opportunities emerging within social marketing globally.

A global online survey was conducted among social marketing professionals who were invitees and pre‐registrants attending the Second World Non‐Profit and Social Marketing Conference. The 15‐minute survey was fielded from March 15‐30, 2011.

Respondents agree that social marketing is at a critical turning point in driving personal behavior and social change around the world. Many success stories lay the foundation for social marketing, but much remains to be done to realize its promise, including better marketing of its proven capabilities. Social marketers see the immediate future as ripe with opportunities for broadening the focus and applications of social marketing and realizing the promise of a growing and dynamic social marketing movement. Emerging developments also are expected to include the expanded importance of digital and social media, community and audience engagement, and public/private partnerships and corporate participation.

Findings underscore the success of social marketing and its growing importance globally. They point to the need to continue to evolve the science and art of social marketing, reflecting strong standards of practice while encouraging creativity and innovation; broaden its applications; better evaluate, package, and marketing proven benefits; and organize and strengthen professional organizations, training and development opportunities, and integration with and within related disciplines and fields such as environmental studies and public administration.

The survey is believed to be a unique, current assessment of social marketers across the globe, including varied professional backgrounds.

The reason for this paper is to better understand why many social marketing campaigns produce poor results and to propose a model to guide social marketing strategic planning to improve program outcomes.

This is a conceptual paper which discusses a new social marketing model to remove upstream causes of target social problems.

It appears that social marketing planning may be limited by over‐reliance on commercial marketing tactics and an over‐emphasis on individual behavior change. Finding upstream sources of social problems is a first step. However, social marketers must be willing to employ tactics to ameliorate structural, upstream causes of social problems.

The social marketing field needs to further its developmental progress by reducing its use of commercial marketing concepts and increasing its use of concepts from other fields like public health, political science, and social movements.

Practicing social marketers can improve their outcomes if they identify upstream causes of social problems and find ways to reduce their harmful effects.

There are major social implications because removing upstream sources of social problems will invoke opposition from powerful interests. A new array of complexity is involved in using activism as a tactic, which may be needed. Conflicts will have to be dealt with and responded to effectively.

The value of this paper is to enhance awareness of the self‐imposed limitations on social marketing strategies and to propose a means of removing these limitations and improving the ability to improve social well‐being.

This paper aims to provide guidelines for upstream social marketing strategy on to whom, how and when social marketers can undertake upstream social marketing.

This article is a conceptual piece using academic literature to justify and conceptualise an approach to communicating with and influencing upstream actors.

Specifically, it looks at the characteristics of policymakers targeted, then targeting methods, with a special focus on the use of media advocacy. Finally, a process of government decision-making is presented to explain message timing and content.

Specific criteria to judge time of decision-making and implementation guidelines are provided for social marketers.

In the case of complex social problems, such as obesity and environmental degradation, structural change is needed to provide people with the ability to change (Andreasen, 2006). Strategic social marketing has identified upstream social marketing as a method to influence structural change through policymakers (French and Gordon, 2015); however, literature in the area tends to be descriptive and there are no clear guidelines to its implementation (Dibb, 2014). This article seeks to provide those guidelines.

The proliferation of online brand communities has shifted control over brands from firms to consumers. Demonstrating how marketers can stimulate consumers to use these opportunities and engage with the brand in such communities, the purpose of this paper is to address the effectiveness of normative and utilitarian appeals commonly employed in practice for enhancing engagement intensity and brand equity in turn.

This paper presents two studies at an individual user level. The first study builds on matched data on marketing actions, user behavior, and user perceptions from a Facebook brand community. The second study uses an experiment with members of a firm-hosted online brand community. The authors employ seemingly unrelated regressions while controlling for self-selection.

Marketer-generated appeals have a positive effect on brand equity that is mediated by engagement intensity. However, the strength of these effects depends highly on community, user, and relationship characteristics.

Generally speaking, marketer-generated appeals are effective tools for marketers to build brand equity through enhanced user engagement. However, their effectiveness can be improved when managers use a targeted approach. To offer precise managerial guidance, this paper shows how entertainment value, content consumption asymmetry (e.g. whether a user prefers user-generated content over marketer-generated content), and membership duration increase or lower the impact of appeals in building the brand through engagement intensity.

The authors provide evidence that appeals designed to drive user engagement in online brand communities are effective tools for boosting brand equity.

Firms increasingly rely on content marketing to trigger user engagement in social media brand communities. The purpose of this paper is to examine how three generic types of marketer-generated content (affiliative, injunctive and utilitarian content) drive user engagement by considering distinct motivational paths and the role of users’ preference for intimate (vs broad) social networks.

The authors conduct a field survey and a scenario experiment among social media users across different brands from three different product categories. They examine the impact of marketer-generated content on user engagement while considering the moderating role of network intimacy (i.e. the mutual confiding within a user’s social network in terms of small social circles) and the mediating role of user motivations (i.e. autonomous vs controlled motivation for community membership).

The findings show that affiliative content (i.e. content that highlights shared values) drives user engagement through autonomous motivation, and utilitarian content (i.e. content that highlights tangible benefits) drives user engagement through controlled motivation. Notably, injunctive content (i.e. content that demands specific user behavior) is not a promising instrument to increase user engagement in social media brand communities when not targeted correctly.

The authors link three generic content types derived from literature on communal systems to user engagement, demonstrate the motivational underpinnings of their translation into engagement behavior and show that network intimacy can explain why the same content type can impact user engagement through two motivational paths.

The authors present three types of content that marketers can craft to trigger users to engage with a brand’s social media community and show when this content is most effective and why. By examining the moderating role of network intimacy, this research aims at providing targeting implications to social media marketers.

This research provides new insights on the effectiveness of marketer-generated content. The authors reveal two motivational paths that compete in explaining the overall effectiveness of different types of marketer-generated content to fuel user engagement. The authors further demonstrate that these relationships depend on the intimacy of a user’s circle of online friends.

Social media has fundamentally changed the consumer decision process, and in the last decade a more nuanced view of how consumers engage with brands has emerged. Instead of the traditional purchase funnel, consumers research products and services during an extended evaluation stage, and after purchase, they often enter into an open-ended relationship with the brand, sharing their experience with it using social media. This paper describes the new consumer decision journey, and then adds to the body of research on events and festivals management by applying this new model to events and festivals.

The study uses a case study methodology with a multi-method approach to analyze the use of social media at three major music festivals. Case studies offer depth and comprehensiveness for understanding a specific phenomenon, enabling inductive and rich description, and are specifically welcome in new situations where little is known about the phenomenon.

In general, the music festivals profiled are proactive in their use of social media, engaging with consumers throughout the consumer decision journey. In particular, social media is making the “evaluate” and “advocate” stages of the decision journey more relevant for festival marketers.

This paper provides an illuminating view of the use of social media in an event and festival context. It supports the theory previously developed in this area, and is further evidence of the powerful impact that new technology can have on consumer behavior. The results have important implications for both researchers and practitioners interested in the marketing of festivals and events.

Addressing calls for broadening social marketing thinking beyond “individualistic” parameters, this paper aims to describe a behavioural ecological systems (BEM) approach to enhance understanding of social markets.

A conceptual framework – the BEM – is presented and discussed within a context of alcohol social change.

The BEM emphasises the relational nature of behaviour change, where individuals are embedded in an ecological system that involves the performances of behaviour and social change within historical, social, cultural, physical and environmental settings. Layers of influence on actors are characterised as macro (distant, large in scale), exo (external, remote from individuals), meso (between the individual and environments) and micro (the individual within their social setting). The BEM can be applied to guide social marketers towards creating solutions that focus on collaboration amongst market actors rather than among consumers.

The BEM contributes to a broader holistic view of social ecologies and behaviour change; emphasises the need for social marketers to embrace systems thinking; and recognises that relationships between actors at multiple layers in social change markets are interactive, collaborative and embedded in dynamic social contexts. Importantly, a behavioural ecological systems approach enables social marketers to develop coherent, integrated and multi-dimensional social change programmes.

The underlying premise of the BEM brings forward relational logic as the foundation for future social marketing theory and practice. Taking this approach to social market change focuses strategy on the intangible aspects of social offerings, inclusive of the interactions and processes of value creation (and/or destruction) within a social marketing system to facilitate collaboration and interaction across a network of actors so as to overcome barriers and identify solutions to social problems.