Author Archives: Bhupesh Ahuja
With digital marketing now truly mainstream and the inarguable rise of Facebook, Twitter and other digital media, the word “Social” is part of every marketer’s must-know vocabulary. But what does it mean anymore?
The word has traditionally referred to broadening of ‘the political’–popular empowerment and the re-appropriation of civil society. Social as in “of public interest” pertains to social work, social issues, social service, social justice, social responsibility, social problem, social security. Commonly the word also alludes to being interactional. When I asked our VP of Social Media, Heidi Skinner, she said she always thought of “social” as “a party of people assembled to promote sociability and communal activity in offline activity. It was simple: People fell into two groups being ‘social’ or ‘anti-social.’”
In the marketing sphere, Kotler and Andreasen (author of Strategic Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations) defined social marketing as:
“differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society.”
In today’s context, the word “social” is seeing an inevitable evolution in perceptions. Read More
Working on a cult brand at CM that triggers nostalgic associations I was asked to create personas with a mandate that “we need to know a lot more about online consumer behavior”. But given the constraints it was evident that traditional surveys and focus groups are not the right options. Companies and researchers have traditionally relied on a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques to observe human behavior. While effective as standalone tactic, each approach is subject to bias and often proves costly and time-intensive.
Enter Netnography! Having studied it as part of my MBA curriculum I turned to this emerging field of research to mine consumer insights online. Now, with blogs, forums, social networks and the plethora of information posted in social media, data on consumer sentiment and opinion is readily available.
Simply put, netnography is ethnography done via the Internet. As Prof. Kozinets (Father of netnography and my professor in the university) puts it – “Traditional research methods like focus groups and surveys ask people questions in artificial surroundings and in an artificial way. Netnography is based upon the fact that people are already communicating about things that are meaningful to them in a natural way, as cultures and communities online.”
