The latest academic research on Digital Marketing?

A review of the Academy of Marketing 2014 Conference

The 2014 Academy of Marketing Conference took place in July in sunny Bournemouth on the south coast of the UK. Over 370 marketing educators from across the world gathered to share and discover the latest academic marketing practices over 3 days, with between 12 to 16 sessions a day!

In this post I have compiled what I found to be the most interesting research into digital marketing grouped into different research themes. You can see that research into social media marketing is strongly represented. I hope you find it useful if you're a researcher or a professional or full-time student focusing on online marketing.

What was interesting was the convergence between the academic and practitioner standpoints. There is a push to identify ‘managerial implications’ of much of the work being undertaken and here are my highlights:

Online communities

Dr Jan Breitsohl from Aberystwyth University is researching online communities and discovered that the most successful communities are those where the brand owner doesn’t post too much 'high functional' information. For example, the Apple community tends to rely on user information, rather than from the brand. In case where a brand adds too many 'how to' posts, the users feel their voice isn't needed, and don’t bother commenting as they don’t get the altruistic benefit for their contribution. Plus, instead of the term ‘lurking’ he used ‘social loafing’ which sounds friendlier!

There is a lot of work on how to deal with negative online consumer reviews and Dr Christian Brunner from the University of Reading, UK  shared insights that we may have been aware of but it’s more scary when there is research to underpin the findings.

• 4 out of 5 consumers don't buy because of negative online reviews
• Weak brands benefit from multiple reviews more than strong brands
• The worst thing a company can do is nothing, i.e. not respond to complaints
• Strong brands don't necessarily benefit from reviews

Facebook

Dr Lillian Clark has been conducting research into Sponsored/Suggested Posts on Facebook. Aware of the recent issues of Facebook contagion, she mentioned that few people had noticed the MyPersonality app which gave Facebook access to 4m users' personality types and usage several years’ ago. It’s nearly accepted that consumers understand we will keep their data, the real issue for business is explaining what we plan to do with their data, how it will be used and the consumer benefits. What was also interesting was that Lillian’s research predicted the end of the sponsored post, before it happened!

Facebook is always encouraging brand and company page owners to post several times a day. At the moment with so few posts being seen by the fans due to the change in algorithm (see our Facebook hub page for more) there is clearly an issue with consumers suffering information overload. Georgios Tsimonis from Athens University of Economics & Business in Greece has been researching this field and commented that 3 posts was the optimum from businesses. He added that “consumers don’t want too many promotional messages and they certainly don't want promotional messages via brand pages.” Another issue following Facebook contagion was developing clear policies on use of data.

Twitter

Dr Torgeir Aleti Watne from Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria shared some great insights into how Australian ‘Mass Brewers’ and ‘Craft Brewers’ Communicate with Consumers through Twitter. One interesting fact was that companies with more creative tweets, specifically ‘lexical diversity’ have more followers. So when you’re creating your content plan for Twitter, make sure you’re not using the same words over and over!

Showrooming and Webrooming

Dr Julia Wolny from the University of Southampton is looking at Showrooming and Webrooming.

You’re probably aware of show-rooming but have you heard of web rooming? It’s the reverse where consumers search online and buy in store.  Both are big issues for retailers. Julia is looking at customer journeys and is trying to create a segmentation system and has identified three journey types:

• Impulsive Journeys: Impulsive buying can be triggered by packaging and it helps if the product can be returned.
• Balanced Journeys: These take place when the users may be triggered by emotion; seeing an ad, reading a review etc. They get excited about the product and then seek confirmation. Seek online sources such as reviews in blogs and YouTube as well as asking friends.
• Considered Journeys: The pre-shopping or orientation stage is the most important. These shoppers gather information all the time. Re forums and watch YouTube videos and maybe buy later. One fascinating fact that has arisen from the research to date is that when shoppers are in the pre-shopping or ‘orientation stage’, they don't consider themselves to be shopping, they’re simply carrying out research!

Crowd funding

Alice Bonasio at Bournemouth University is looking at the success factors of crowd funding campaigns and so far she’s revealed that for a campaign to work you need 30% in first few days! As well as a fan club (she called them 'energisers') to support the project. Another interesting point was that crowd-funding is about more than the money, it’s also about significant publicity. Remember Oculus who went on to be bought by Facebook? They started their business via Kickstarter.

Useful links

Dr Paul Harrigan from The University of Western Australia, Perth shared a useful link for gathering consumer insights quickly, Mechanical Turk  which has been mentioned previously in Smart Insights.

Dr Rachel Ashman from The University of Liverpool shared http://www.shoogleit.com/ which enables retailers to transform basic video. As their website says “Just shoot a short video of an object then use our online tool to split the video into frames, finally add interactivity.”

And are you conducting research into online marketing we should share? Do let us know!