Search results

The purpose of this study is to propose environmental efficacy as the perception of social, physical resource and temporal factors at one’s disposal that promote or impede behavior. In this exploratory study, four focus groups and a two-country survey provide support for a new environmental efficacy construct as an adjunct to self and response efficacies.

This research examines environmental efficacy within the context of workplace safety. The research engaged participants from four focus groups as well as a survey of 358 young Canadian males and 494 young American males to test the proposed construct.

First, qualitative responses from the focus groups supported environmental efficacy as a viable construct. Second, a factor analysis demonstrated environmental efficacy is distinct from self- and response efficacies. Third, regressions demonstrated that environmental efficacy predicts motivation to act, above and beyond self- and response efficacies.

As an exploratory study, only a limited number of scale items were included. The research was conducted within the workplace safety context, using young males, and the stimuli involved the use of fear appeals. These restrictions warrant additional research in the area of environmental efficacy.

This study suggests that further development of the environmental efficacy construct may offer social marketers a more effective means of identifying and addressing barriers to desired behavior change. Such a measure should allow social marketers to improve understanding of the importance of environmental forces.

This research introduces a novel concept, environmental efficacy, and demonstrates that it is a distinctive and useful concept for understanding motivation to act. This concept is potentially valuable to social marketers seeking to enhance the effectiveness of their programs. It offers a tool to help identify barriers that can thwart the effectiveness of interventions.

This study builds on previous discussion of an important area for both academics and academic journals – the issue of reviewers inappropriately asking for (or “coercing”) citation of their own work. That situation creates an opportunity for (hopefully a small number of) academics to engage in unethical behaviour, often with the goal of increasing their citation count. This study aims to draw attention to this often-overlooked issue, critically considering potential reviewer motivations and offering possible remedies.

This study reviews literature and critically discusses this issue, offering a typology for coercive citation suggestions and sharing previously unpublished commentary from Editors of leading journals.

This study provides a typology of reviewer motivations for coercing citations, suggests potential remedies and considers the positive and negative impacts of these suggestions.

This study identifies an area known from multiple discussions to be important to academics and Editors, where many want changes in journals’ practices. In response, this study provides recommendations for easy changes that would decrease the opportunity for unethical behaviour by reviewers and also, for some journals, improve the quality of reviews.

The purpose of this study is to develop and test a theoretical framework to examine business purchase decisions using the concept of “values” (personal values (PV), organizational values (OV) and values-congruency).

The data for the study were collected from members of the Supply Chain Management Association of Canada. The relationships between perceived PV/OV/ values-congruency (IVs) and perceived role values played in business purchase decisions (DV) were hypothesized. Three factors, namely, humanity, bottomline and convention were identified using exploratory factor analysis. The hypotheses were tested using polynomial regression, which is a preferred method for measuring congruency or fit (Edwards, 1994).

Perceived humanity (humaneness or benevolence) values of an organization were found to have a positive relationship with the perceived role that humanity and convention (risk aversion or compliance) values played in business purchase decisions. Perceived purchase function formalization within buying organizations was also found to have a positive relationship with the perceived role of humanity, bottomline and convention values played in business purchase decisions.

The study drew a relatively small convenience sample from a single industry association/country with a low response rate. It used the perceived role of values instead of behavioral intention or actual behavior to measure business purchasing behavior. McDonald and Gandz’s (1991; 1993) list of values may be more suitable to measure OV than PV. The study only considered the buyer side of purchase decisions and values to have positive characteristics.

Buying organizations may consider formalizing their purchase functions, clarifying their humaneness/benevolence and risk aversion/compliance values to their employees and vendors and incorporating them in the purchasing criteria/process. Similarly, selling organizations may benefit from considering these values of customers to position their products and services for better sales outcomes and business relationships.

The study explores the role of values in business purchase contexts by proposing and testing a theoretical framework. The study has implications for practitioners and academics in the field and identifies several areas for future research.

Twitter provides an ideal channel for a non-profit organisation (NPO) to add value to its corporate partners by providing the ability to send tweets to its own network of followers. This research aims to examine the extent to which one NPO used Twitter for this purpose and discuss the implications.

The research examined tweets sent by a large US-based charitable organisation, Toys for Tots (T4T), across two Christmas periods. All tweets that mentioned or retweeted T4T’s corporate partners were analysed.

The findings show surprisingly limited mentions of partners by T4T, with many never mentioned, and markedly fewer mentions of partners in the second period. Separate analysis of partner tweets retweeted by T4T revealed that none was modified to add value for T4T and/or for the partner, and many were unrelated to T4T, raising a risk of alienating T4T’s followers.

Only one NPO was examined, and the study focused on Twitter, with limited analysis of T4T’s Facebook posts. However, the relatively low, decreasing and largely indirect promotion of partners in T4T’s tweets suggests a lack of strategic use of Twitter by T4T.

Coupled with other research, the results show the need for this and other NPOs to more effectively use Twitter to reinforce partnerships with corporate partners.

The results demonstrate the failure of a major US charity to use Twitter to add value for its corporate partners. Even in the unlikely event that this NPO is an isolated case, the results show the need for NPOs and their corporate partners to work together to provide reciprocal benefits.

Through a bibliometric analysis and scientific mapping, this study aims to examine research in the field of social marketing over the past 50 years and to propose a future research agenda.

A bibliometric analysis based on keyword co-occurrences is used to analyze 1,492 social marketing articles published from 1971 to 2020. The articles were extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. SciMAT software was used, which provides a strategic diagram of topics, clusters, networks and relationships, allowing for the identification and assessment of relational connections among social marketing topics.

The results show that advertising, fear and children were some of the driving themes of social marketing over the past 50 years. In addition, the analysis identifies four promising areas for future research: consumption, intervention, strategy and analytical perspectives.

This analysis can serve as a reference guide for future research in the field of social marketing. This study focused on quantitative analysis. An in-depth qualitative analysis would be a valuable future extension.

This research offers a unique systematic analysis of the progression of social marketing scholarship and provides a guide for future research related to social marketing. Importantly, this work suggests crucial issues that have not yet been sufficiently developed.

This paper aims to assess the interactive impact of dispositional threat orientation and affirmation (both self-affirmation and self-efficacy) on the effectiveness of fear appeals.

A 3 × 2 × 2 × 2 fully crossed, mixed experimental design is used. The study is conducted through an on-line survey platform. Participants are nationally representative in terms of age, gender and geographic location within the USA.

Threat orientation impacts individuals’ responses to fear appeals. Control-oriented individuals respond in a more adaptive manner, heightened-sensitivity-oriented individuals are a “mixed-bag” and denial-oriented individuals respond in a more maladaptive manner. Affirmations (both self-affirmation and self-efficacy) interact with threat orientation in some cases to predict response to threat.

This research used a cross-sectional approach in an on-line environment. A longitudinal study with a stronger self-affirmation intervention and self-efficacy manipulation would offer a stronger test.

Social marketers should consider whether their primary target market has a general tendency toward a particular threat orientation when considering the use of fear appeals. Social marketers should consider the potential benefits of a self-affirmation intervention.

Individuals’ personality dispositions impact how they respond to fear appeals, which may explain why some seemingly well executed fear appeals are unsuccessful whereas others succeed.

Little or no research has examined the use of self-affirmation to overcome the challenges posed by dispositional threat orientation. This research gives an early glimpse into how these issues interplay.

This article aims to propose that increased guidance on the implementation of social marketing principles for sustainability issues can advance both implementation and empirical evaluation. The primary goal of this paper is to ignite further empirical investigation of social marketing for sustainability by first presenting benchmark criteria for one social marketing model – community-based social marketing (CBSM) – and second, applying this framework to the case study of musician Jack Johnson’s “All at Once” (AAO) campaign.

The research design is twofold. First, based on Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s CBSM model, a series of 21 benchmarks for assessing the key components of an effective CBSM initiative was developed. Second, this tool was applied to information gathered from Jack Johnson’s extensive outreach promoting AAO initiatives including reports, videos as well as interviews and in-person meetings with the Jack Johnson team.

Application of the benchmark criteria to the Jack Johnson case study showed that seven out of the 21 benchmarks were integrated into the AAO campaign; seven were partially integrated and seven were not integrated in the program’s design. In particular, the use of commitments, incentives, norms and social diffusion was clearly present as was a final evaluation of the full-scale implementation of the campaign.

The CBSM benchmarks are meant as a starting point to further assess and compare the effectiveness of CBSM initiatives. Further research should be done to explore how criteria should be weighted and which of the 21 principles need to be present in the design and implementation of an effective CBSM program.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, summarize and assess literature focused on developing social marketing programs for Aboriginal people.

The authors conducted a literature search and review of research papers concerning social marketing and Aboriginal populations over the period 2003-2013.

The research reveals very little published research (N = 16). The literature points to a wide range of findings including the importance of segmenting/targeting and avoiding pan-Aboriginal campaigns; cultural importance of family and community; the importance of multi-channels; universal value of mainstream and Aboriginal media outlets, use of print media, value of elders and story-telling for message dissemination; increasingly important role of Internet-based technology; need for campaign development to reflect Aboriginal culture; and importance of formative research to inform campaign development.

Considerable research is warranted to better develop more effective social marketing campaigns targeted to Aboriginal audiences to improve health outcomes for such groups across the globe.

This paper provides a baseline foundation upon which future social marketing research can be built. It also acts as a call to action for future research and theory in this important field.