Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 11 COMPETING THROUGH THE EVOLVING MARKETING MIX
Social media marketing
Kotler et al. (2017) propose that the world we operate in has seen a major power shift from 
the vertical to the horizontal:
In a world where the horizontal, inclusive and social forces trump the vertical, exclusive 
and individual forces, customer communities have become ever more powerful. They are 
now more vocal. They are not afraid of big companies and big brands. They love to share 
stories, good and bad, about brands.
Social media marketing 1.0: viral marketing
Viral marketing involves creating a marketing message with the intention that people will 
forward it to friends. This has a significant advantage over ‘spam’ messaging in that the 
friend will have some level of credibility, which may cause the message to be viewed more 
sympathetically. While not unique to the Web, Internet-based technologies have greatly 
facilitated easy use of this type of marketing.
The paint maker Dulux, for example, wanted to sell more paint to British women. 
Rather than indiscriminately bombarding women with email messages to ‘buy more paint’, 
the company created a website featuring a ‘belly fluff’ game and emailed 10,000 women 
invitations to play. In the event, 13,000 did play. The company estimates that one-third 
of the people entering the competition received the email forwarded from a friend (The 
Guardian, February 2002).
Viral marketing can also be ‘led’ by customer-driven interaction. For example, in 
December 2018, Iceland, the British frozen-food supermarket, struck a partnership with 
Greenpeace, the environmental organisation, to run its 90-second animated film Rang-tan 
as its Christmas 2018 advert. The actress Emma Thompson, a Greenpeace ambassador, nar-
rated in the commercial the story of an orangutan called Rang-tan whose habitat is being 
destroyed by the growth of palm oil plantations. The body that approves ads for TV banned 
the Iceland commercial on the basis that it was political, as it was originally created by 
Greenpeace. This triggered a massive response on social media: within a week, the ad went 
viral and was viewed by more that 15 million people who shared it on Twitter. The video, 
posted on Iceland’s YouTube channel, received nearly four million views and was shared 
over 615,000 times on its Facebook page. A pinned Tweet on the Iceland Foods account 
received over 90,000 re-Tweets and more than 8,000 likes were clicked on the official Ice-
land Foods Instagram account. A petition to get the ad released on TV attracted more than 
670,000 signatures (Rogers, 2018).
Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) estimates that a high-quality email distribution 
list should generate a response rate (purchase) of around 6 per cent. A list created through 
panning will generate just 1 per cent. Viral marketing, on the other hand, has achieved 
response rates of between 25 and 50 per cent (Forrester Research, quoted in The Guardian, 
February 2002).
Nestlé uses viral marketing for its Nescafé products, including Blend 37. In one cam-
paign, 20,000 Nescafé drinkers were emailed invitations to click onto a weblink to enter 
a prize draw for tickets to the Silver Historic Festival in August 2001. The top 36 scores 
won VIP passes to an event at the Silverstone racing circuit (Precision Marketing, 29 
June 2001).
Social media marketing 2.0
Social media marketing can be considered as the second generation of social media market-
ing, when viral marketing was the first one. The main difference is the ‘extensive feedback 
to the company itself (double arrows back to the company)’ (Opresnik et al., 2017). Social 
media (that is, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tumblr) are vehicles for carrying 
content (either company-created or user-created content) and can be used to create further 
value for current or potential customers. The Internet essentially supports a pull strategy. 

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DISTRIBUTION STRATEGIES
Opresnik et al . follow the ‘6-C model of social media marketing’ to explain the creation and 
maintenance of consumer engagement: 
The company and content it originally creates. The control that it eventually hands over 
to to online communities of interest (including influencers) and customers (a subset of a 
community) and conversations that ensue.
With 57 per cent of the world’s population using the Internet, 45 per cent active on 
social media, 67 per cent unique mobile users and 42 per cent active social mobile users 
(see www.smartinsights.com ) in 2018, and growing, social media marketing is no longer 
optional. However, still in its infancy it is experiencing an unparalleled level of change and 
fluidity that makes developing social media marketing strategies difficult ( Ford, 2018 ). Nev-
ertheless, companies such as Airbnb, Uber and Yelp have succeeded in developing business 
models based around social commerce. 
Airbnb, in particular, has mixed the right balance of global strategy and local implemen-
tation. Critical to the company’s success is the use of local influencers (individuals who can 
influence the actions/decisions of a loyal group of local online followers with regard to their 
particular level of expertise) to drive brand awareness through a series of cleverly designed 
campaigns ( Backaler and Shankman, 2018 ).