Harnessing social listening to explore consumer cognitive bias: implications for upstream social marketing
Dr Michael Mehmet researches in the area of social listening and have applied qualitative techniques in the area of policy development, social marketing, business practices, tourism and environmental management. He has developed several frameworks to better understand how meanings are created, conveyed and interpreted in digital media. In particular, fabric that tracks communication across multiple platforms concerning multiple stakeholder groups. He is now focusing on improving upstream social marketing to better influence social, tourism and health policy at a state and federal level and giving a voice to the voiceless, within our community.
ISSN: 2042-6763
Article publication date: 2 October 2021
Issue publication date: 23 November 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how upstream social marketing can benefit from using social media commentary to identify cognitive biases. Using reactions to leading media/news publications/articles related to climate and energy policy in Australia, this paper aims to understand underlying community cognitive biases and their reasonings.
Design/methodology/approach
Social listening was used to gather community commentary about climate and energy policy in Australia. This allowed the coding of natural language data to determine underlying cognitive biases inherent in the community. In all, 2,700 Facebook comments were collected from 27 news articles dated between January 2018 and March 2020 using exportcomments.com. Team coding was used to ensure consistency in interpretation.
Findings
Nine key cognitive bias were noted, including, pessimism, just-world, confirmation, optimum, curse of knowledge, Dunning–Kruger, self-serving, concision and converge biases. Additionally, the authors report on the interactive nature of these biases. Right-leaning audiences are perceived to be willfully uninformed and motivated by self-interest; centric audiences want solutions based on common-sense for the common good; and left-leaning supporters of progressive climate change policy are typically pessimistic about the future of climate and energy policy in Australia. Impacts of powerful media organization shaping biases are also explored.
Research limitations/implications
Through a greater understanding of the types of cognitive biases, policy-makers are able to better design and execute influential upstream social marketing campaigns.
Originality/value
The study demonstrates that observing cognitive biases through social listening can assist upstream social marketing understand community biases and underlying reasonings towards climate and energy policy.
Keywords
Citation
Mehmet, M., Heffernan, T., Algie, J. and Forouhandeh, B. (2021), "Harnessing social listening to explore consumer cognitive bias: implications for upstream social marketing", Journal of Social Marketing, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 575-596. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSOCM-03-2021-0067
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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