Dealing with Integrated Marketing Communications’ Paradoxes in Social Ventures

ABSTRACT

The article explores the paradoxes that for-profit social ventures face when managing integrated marketing communications (IMC) and how they deal with and overcome the tensions that comprise these paradoxes. To investigate the nature of these paradoxes we integrated two theoretical perspectives: Service-Dominant Logic and Paradox Theory. While the former served as a lens to analyze social marketing phenomena, the latter is applied to comprehend and explore the underlying tensions within these social businesses in the communication setting. Following a multiple-case study based on interviews with founders, owners, and directors of Brazilian for-profit social ventures, we depicted how traditional marketing practices can lead both to problems and solutions manifested in the four IMC pillars (stakeholders, content, channels, and results). We recognize that properly managing stakeholders’ relationships aiming at the cocreation of value may result in valuable insights for dealing with tensions in all the four IMC pillars, and for achieving better marketing performance and higher social impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Social marketing
• S-D logic
• social ventures
• paradox
• integrated marketing communication

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the interviewees who made the research possible. We gratefully acknowledge the discussions regarding the implications and possibilities of the Paradox Theory for marketing conducted by Professor