Optimising digital marketing and social media strategy: from push to pull to performance

ABSTRACT

Social media and firm applications are two mobile service marketing mechanisms that rely on push or pull promotions to be effective. Literature, however, has yet to uncover how the promotions may complement each other when purposefully implemented. Our study examines this possibility in the grocery industry over three months. First, we create and manage a supermarket’s Instagram profile, posting to the account (push promotion). Next, we compare performance measures with a third-party mobile app (pull promotion), which provides aggregated customer views and access to the supermarket profile. A time-series analysis reveals a sequential chain from push promotion to pull promotion to performance, the temporal effect of a push to pull, and the mediating effect from push to pull to purchase with an elasticity of .23. Results are important to those balancing push and pull promotional efforts and those involved with digital marketing and promotion in retailing.

KEYWORDS:

• Instagram
• mobile marketing
• push and pull promotion
• marketing performance
• social media marketing
• time-series analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Note that the VARX model estimation produces beta values and coefficients that cannot be interpreted due to multicollinearity. For this reason, testing mediation through procedures such as bootstrapping (Pituch et al., 2006) or PROCESS (Hayes, 2017) is not feasible. We followed Baron and Kenny (1986) test for mediation, and we found additional support using Granger Causality tests and cumulative elasticities of push and pull promotional strategies. We adopted this technique from McCracken (2007) and others who apply the multiple time-series framework.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valter Afonso Vieira

Valter Afonso Vieira, PhD, is Associate Dean of State University of Maringá and was former PhD and MBA Coordinator. He was postdoc researcher at Fundação Getulio Vargas. His research focuses on marketing, sales, retail, salespeople balancing sales and service.

Marcos Inácio Severo de Almeida

Marcos Inácio Severo de Almeida, PhD, was visiting researcher at Coventry University, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. He is GRAMMA Research Lab coordinator and publishes in the field of marketing performance, machine learning and econometric social media models.

Colin B. Gabler

Colin B. Gabler, PhD, is O’Bleness Associate Professor and Director of The Center for International Business Education and Development (CIBED) at Ohio University. His research focuses on consumer behavior, disasters and supply chain management, frontline employees balancing sales and service and pricing Strategy. He is a Fulbright Scholar (2020-2021).

Ricardo Limongi

Ricardo Limongi França Coelho, PhD, is Associate Professor of Marketing at Federal University of Goiás and studies behavioral economics, econometric models, social media, and experimental design in marketing. He was visiting researcher at Cornell University and is ADMKT Research Group coordinator.

Milena Costa

Milena Costa is Master Science Student at Federal University of Goiás.

Miriam Pires da Costa

Miriam Pires da Costa is Master Science Student at Federal University of Goiás.