Messages Not Getting Through: Societal Marketing to the Rescue

Advertising overload. Communication overload. Information overload. We are now in an era where companies are increasingly finding it hard to get messages through to target audiences. This overload of advertising, communication, and information makes it difficult for audiences to pay attention to all these messages—they are roughly all sending the same message. But what might make a company's message stand out in this overload? Good companies; that is, companies that link up with good causes or promote sustainable products/services/ideas. The articles put together for this special issue mainly deal with matters relating to Societal Marketing, in industries varying from Tourism, to Sports, to Wine, and in an international context with research carried out in Thailand, Italy, Portugal, and Greece.

The first article by Teerakapibal explores the causal relationship between tourism expansion and exports growth and sustainable tourism using Thai macroeconomic data and specifically utilized international tourist arrivals data published on the Thai Ministry of Tourism and Sports website. For this investigation the author estimated a series of bivariate Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models and conducted Granger causality tests in order to investigate the short-run equilibrium relationship between international tourist arrivals and export volume. The findings showed that tourism marketing programs can be used to induce international trade growth, but also that exports promotion programs are an alternative means to reinforce tourism industry development.

The conceptual article presented by Susnienė and Žostautiene explores corporate social responsibility development opportunities from the marketing culture perspective with an aim to contribute to the understanding of the role of marketing culture elements. As corporate sustainability and social responsibility research highlight new challenges and opportunities for businesses, the research focuses on the company's ability to practice socially responsible initiatives from a corporate and marketing culture perspective and create new opportunities for operations, management, and marketing. Their investigation resulted in a framework that suggests marketing culture is a precondition for CSR development.

Loureiro and Kaufmann examine the antecedents and consequences of affective commitment toward recycling and environmental preservation. Their study hypothesized that individuals whose recycling and environmental preservation has great meaning for their inner self and a positive influence on the way others see them will be more committed to recycling. Findings based on a sample of 364 university students in Portugal revealed the importance of pleasant arousal in reinforcing self-expressive recycling in order to increase the affective commitment. Committed individuals seem to be more willing to sacrifice for the cause and spread the word in its favor.

Through a study carried out in Greece, Koronios, Psiloutsikou, Kriemadis, Zervoulakos, and Leivaditi identify the key variables in the sport sponsorship relationship and examine the impact of sponsor image on one major behavioral outcome: fans' purchase intention. They further investigate the role of sport activity involvement and team attachment in enhancing the sponsor's image among football fans. Sports sponsorship and the importance of societal marketing seem to blend well in this interesting article.

Aiming to examine the impact of the wine consumption trend on Italian and foreign wine companies' economic performance, Bresciani, Ferraris, Santoro, and Nilsen found that addressing environmental challenges, as a means of societal marketing, actually yielded a high return on equity. By studying official local and foreign company statistics, this research also sought to investigate the effect on wine consumption post-economic crisis.

Finally, Fiore, Vrontis, Silvestri, and Contò sought to verify whether web and social-media marketing's actions evidencing increased knowledge of the expectations of the end-consumer, the presence on social networks, the use of wine clubs, and societal marketing strategies affect product improvement. An exploratory survey was carried out in the wine sector in Italy using a dual methodology by means of research triangulation and by examining 204 websites. Consistent with previous research, digital technologies are considered an important driver that affects and impacts a firm's decisions related to improving the products' quality, as do CSR actions. The long history of a company has, however, a negative influence on decision processes related to product improvement; in effect, a “young” company is certainly more willing to interact with the customer taking cues from digital and societal strategies to improve its performance.

I hope that the articles presented in this special issue provide useful insights and trigger interest for further research. Moreover, I would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and time and, of course, Professor Hooshang M. Beheshti, the editor of the Journal of Promotion Management for inviting me to put together this special issue.

Yioula MelanthiouGuest [email protected]