IS SOCIAL MARKETING HAVING AN INFLUENCE ON PANDEMIC COVID'19? - A REVIEW BASED STUDY


Indrajit Ghosal1*, Khushbu Agarwal2


1Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Poornima University, Jaipur, India

2Pacific Academy of Higher Education & Research University, Udaipur, India


*Corresponding Author’s Email: ghosal.m1981@gmail.com


ABSTRACT

The application of commercial marketing principles and technologies to influence target audiences' voluntary behaviour to enhance their lives or the society in which they live is known as social marketing. Since its inception in the early 1970s, Social Marketing (SM) has made tremendous progress and created a significant positive influence on social issues such as fitness, damage avoidance, society concern, and, more recently, monetary health. Our research focused solely on India, and this study examined how Social Marketing can have a large influence during the COVID – 19 epidemics, along with the good and bad effects of Social Marketing in COVID – 19 in India, using a variety of reviews.


Methods: For this study, a systematic Literature review using the PRISMA approach was undertaken for the last one and a half years, from January 2020 to July 2021, on the current COVID condition. The Article has been collected from many good databases with good index like ABS, ABDC, Scopus, WOS and Science Direct. For this investigation, Researcher have searched digital marketing, restricted to the title, ‘Digital marketing’, ‘Effect of SM’andCOVID’19 lockdown.


Results: Since the pandemic has been down for only 1.6 years and very little bit article have published based on current title, this study found 53 manuscripts in the literature (scientific), but only 23 were qualified as per the scientific criteria.


Discussion: This review paper focused on the favorable impact of Social marketing in post the Covid'19 digital world.


Keywords: Social Marketing (SM); Positive & Negative Effect; Post Covid Pandemic; Marketing Strategy; Covid 19 & Indian Community


INTRODUCTION

Marketing must include a social and environmental attitude because it is a social and management strategy; nevertheless, few organizations are concerned about this. In the 1970s, social marketing evolved as a unique profession as Western countries recognized the importance of environmental attitudes. SM is the practice of changing the public's behaviour and opinions (target group) to achieve social, economic, political, and business objectives. Consumers, organizations (social, political, corporate, etc.) and the public are becoming conscious of the business world's long-term objectives, which are referred to as social marketing. Kotler & Zaltman (1971) defined Social Marketing as “the design, implementation and control of programs calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas and involving considerations of product designing, pricing, statement, delivery and Marketing research”. “The design, implementation, and control of programmes meant to impact the acceptability of social concepts, comprising considerations of product design, pricing, statement, delivery, and marketing research,” according to Kotler & Zaltman (1971). In the words of Andreasen, “social marketing is the application of commercial marketing technologies to the analysis, planning, execution, and evaluation of programmes meant to affect target audiences' voluntary behaviour in order to regain their personal happiness and that of their society." In today’s world, social showcasing ways of thinking are being utilized as beneficial outcome in developing nations in regions like wellbeing advancement, populace control, and climate protection, financial turn of events, bigotry, and human rights. Nowadays, online shopping is a rapidly developing trend. Consumers are increasingly turning to the internet to purchase goods and services, obtain product information, or simply browse for entertainment. As a result, the importance of online shopping environments in the total relationship between marketers and their clients is growing (Koo, Kim, & Lee, 2008; Ghosal, Prasad, & Behera, 2020). The philosophy of India has been distributing with issues, for example, poverty, populace blast, and lack of education, lower capital arrangement and other social issues as adverse consequence in COVID – 19 pandemic times. The growth strategies so far accepted brought about corruption in social, ecological, and medical services, so the need of utilization of social advertising standards is felt promptly to improve the existence Indian resident. The concept SM is very oldest as its beginnings can be found in development strategies, social restructuring campaigns in olden days. One prominent social reforms development, for example, annulment of sati (Self-immolation) system, elimination of untouchability, stoppage of child marriages and girl child education were effectively coordinated during Pre-independence period in India.


This research aims to identify the adaption for Social Marketing in India, notably in the context of the COVID-19 Pandemic, as well as its positive and negative impact. It may assist marketers in comprehending the current Social Marketing (SM) scenario in a fresh light.


LITERATURE REVIEW


  1. Based on Social Marketing

    Many customers did not consider government publications and product labeling to be reputable sources of food safety information. Rather than relying on social marketing, consumers choose to consult cookbooks for knowledge (Buzby & Ready, 1996). According to McKenzie-Mohr & Smith (1999), the goal of social marketing is to urge societies to change through interventions focused on people and to achieve major behavioral change. The Social Marketing drives are custom-made to target people that share mutual interest and who were expected to adopt the anticipated behavior using incentives and elimination of barriers”. A study done by Sarkar & Ghosal (2018) on Facebook proved how social media impact in Small Business Industry.

    Adaptive social monetary system needs to be targeted and there is a need to make it more adaptive. It needs our attention and care like a sapling. The nurturing part of sapling is with us, but proper care and attention doesn’t guarantee that it would certainly become a tree with lots of leaves and fruits/vegetables. Each sapling needs unique care like the proportion of sunlight, water, fertilizer etc. in the same way there is unique feature in each community (Glouberman & Zimmerman, 2002). Hence, a study of a design of marketing promotion is vital to recognize the sentiments in all senses of the market which is targeted. Nowadays it is assumed that social advertising is an independent discipline with its relevance to extensive social goals. Therefore, marketer should focus on pioneering and better flexible method to the Social Marketing mix (Keller, 1998). According to the theoretical framework developed by Stead et al. (2007), it can be concluded that “combined with the use of consumer research to help translate theoretical constructs into acceptable and persuasive interventions, is an important pre-requisite for the effectiveness of Social Marketing”.


  2. Positive Effects of Social Marketing

    Social Marketing (SM) should not be viewed as an unbiased tool for influencing individual behaviour; rather, it should consider the social and physical elements that influence that behaviour (Hastings & Donovan, 2002). It can be said that “the positive effect of Social Marketing in public health comprise programs like rise in physical activity, increase in fruit and vegetable consumption, smoking cessation, and sexually spread disease prevention etc. For success of social advertising, several business advertising strategies may be applied”. These may be social exchange idea, audience segmentation, the 4 Ps of the marketing drive (Grier & Bryant, 2005). As per Rose & Dade (2007), the ecological actions and effect of values in energetic behavior and rising consciousness were victorious, which consider the local conditions. According to Storey, Saffitz, & Rimon, (2008), Social Marketing creates an intangible effect that comes in form of making transformation in buying behavior. The product provides an edge in terms of improved health or reduction in sickness. Social media marketing helps a lot and very beneficial for the individuals who wishes to change their behavior for benefit of society or for societal transformation. Behavioral change in Social Marketing Can be attained via the creation, communication, transport and change of an aggressive social advertising that induces deliberate alteration in the end spectators, and outcomes in the benefit to the communal transformation campaign’s recipients, companions, and humanity at large (Dann, 2010).


  3. Negative Effects of Social Marketing

    “Social Marketing can have a significant negative impact on public behaviour if Social Marketing campaigns were deployed keeping in view traditional marketing strategies and plans” (Motwani, Shrimali, & Agarwal, 2014). The majority of those who said that Social Marketing has a significant impact on people's voluntary behaviors constituted nearly half of the population (Bach & Alnajar, 2016). According to Zeng et al. (2017), the increasing complexity of social networks and user behaviour, it was very challenging for advertisers to formulate their strategies of selecting proper initial seed users in their Social Marketing efforts. In this study, they tackled this challenge by proposing an agent-based propagation model and injecting it into typical social networks with three types of structures, i.e., Erdos- Renyi random graph, Watt-Strogatz small world graph, and Barabasi-Albert scale-free graph. They instantiated this agent-based model with demographic characteristics extracted from real-world census data collected in China. By investigating the diffusion process of advertising, information in these social networks, was compared with the performance of advertisers’ targeting and influencing strategies. In an investigation on fault appeal, the author determined that raising guilt might lead to shameful responses in the target audience. This may give rise to negative consequences. According to author, guilt appeals are more likely to result in positive responses whereas shame appeals may result in negative responses. Hence, to make a guilt appeal effective, disgrace messages need to be eliminated (Bennett, 1998).


  4. COVID-19 and its Correlates in Indian Community

    A total of 1071 COVID-19 positive cases (including 49 abroad individuals) were recorded in 27 states/union territories in India as of March 30, 2020, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW). As per the record data, among those were the 99 cases that were treated and discharged, one individual who relocated, and 29 deaths among them. All the positive cases were in hospitals for isolation, and the contamination was traced and quarantined domestically. In India, unfold of the early disorder can be traced mainly through the close observation and inspection of the foreign nationals who visited our nation as tourists from the disease affected countries and secondly due to the mass immigration of Indian nationals from overseas. While the pandemic situation was getting worse in India, the government officials were trying to take appropriate measure to control it by many ways such as lockdown of the complete country for 21 days and sealed the boundaries to restrict the cross-border movement of individuals and in emergency cases if they allowed to enter in the geographical boundaries of the country then they have to strictly follow the isolation guidelines. For them the government has decided of quarantine facilities organized by the Indian Military without delay from the airports and seaports for at the very least 14 days. Community health teams were also promoted to spread awareness about the chances of spread and protecting measures that one can use to defend themselves and others.


    RESEARCH METHODOLOGY


    This study concentrated categorically on extensive study of secondary data, which were composed from different government and private reports, publications from various websites, books, newspapers, journals, and magazines.


    Search Criteria

    Article searching was performed electronically to locate peer-reviewed articles from various Scopus, ABDC, ABS, Science Direct and web of science by means of the subsequent search terms Social Marketing and COVID-19 stress and benefits, restricted to the title, ‘Social Aspect’ and ‘Customer perception’, COVID lockdown.


    Selection Strategy

    For incorporation of the article in the study, electronic medium was used. The study has to be published after COVID-19 pandemic situation and covered at least one of the above conditions or variables that has been consider for the current article. Those articles must also use the term quality of Marketing in Society and Customer.


    Narrative reviews, non-peer reviewed articles, and such article with very less information and area has not covered that is required for the current study are mainly excluded from the review.


    Chart, box and whisker chart Description automatically generated


    To make the criteria more authentic and reliable, database blind review was conducted with the proposed inclusion criteria, and to eliminate possible publication, result was navigated and if the one review does not agree with another review, the methodological quality of all included studies was assessed.


    Data Extraction

    With articles properly selected, data were extracted using a format that included author’s name, publication year, population studied, used instruments and main results.


    RESULT

    1. As per the findings of the various studies in ROL it was observed that around 33.90% of respondents were aware and their level of awareness was moderate or high, which was adversely connected to marketing quality (p<0.01).

    2. As far as challenges in sales are concerned 22% of the respondents feel the presence of the same and there was 21% of the difference exists in the physical and psychological aspects of sales.

    3. It was found that on the standard perceived stress scale, there was no significant difference in the effect of Social Marketing with respect to the gender i.e., male, and female respondents.

    4. It was found that male community who lives with their family and involved in daily physical work or task have higher score on the psychological & mental component values (p<0.001).

    5. As per the recent literature it was found that awareness towards the covid situation is very much dependent on the media coverage and panic buying behavior is also highly influenced due to this content.

    6. Majority of the literature showcase that there were no significant relationships between gender, frequency of awareness, sales during covid 19 phase.


DISCUSSION


Human being needs to work on their immunity to win in such circumstances of epidemics and pandemics. Such attacks not only create a danger for our lives but also, they are harmful and develop other negative consequences for individuals and society. If we talk about the latest scenario, then covid pandemic attack is very troublesome for human life. To control the situation govt. has taken various steps and measures including a massive lockdown of around 21 days. This review paper tried to review the existing literature to judge that whether Social Marketing can have a large impact during the COVID – 19 epidemics, as well as the good and bad consequences of Social Marketing in COVID – 19 in India, using a variety of reviews (Motwani, Shrimali, & Agarwal, 2014).


Social leaders had been put on Social Marketing strategies in regions like safety of human rights, abolition of caste-ism and racism. From 1970s the western countries have acknowledged environmental attitude towards developing strategies (Baghmar & Agarwal, 2014). Business corporations had been applying Social Marketing methods for application in their business rules satisfying clients, long term welfare of the society, attracting buyers, motivating and education the people.

As per the study by Saha & Dutta (2020), if we look at the negative aspect of lockdown, it is found that quarrel and fight happen more than the common days in lock down. One of the reasons might be the isolation from the society and friends because of which they didn’t get any change and must spend their whole day with their family only.


As per study by Saha & Dutta (2020), it was concluded that majority of people have developed a new habit in the phase of lock-down period. People started indulging in new leisure activities like reading books, art, cooking, writing, learning musical instruments, etc. but there is contradiction in the observation of other studies like they reported that due to lack of resources there was a reduction in other stress bursting activities.


Rather people are investing their time more on mobile phones and their screen time has increased significantly which is creating an adverse effect on their health. Studies reported that people more prone to stress related diseases like insomnia and depression.


Market has become a general issue across nations, societies, and ethnic gatherings (Wong, Wong & Scott, 2006). The study done by Chatterjee & Ghosal (2014) describes the present status and facilitators of E-Commerce in India, analyses the present trends of E-Commerce in India, and examine the barriers of E-Commerce in India and the Overall E-Commerce will increase exponentially in coming years in the emerging market of India.


CONCLUSION


The current study brought into light that market stress keeps on being a staggering issue influencing a client's emotional well-being and prosperity. The study found that female customers are more concerned about their academic activities, and that customers aged 18 to 25 years are more vulnerable to the impact of lockdown. They are stressed because of the inability to accept the paradigm shift in market activities and prolonged period of COVID-19 restrictions. This study showed high to moderate levels of stress among customers in India during the COVID-19 outbreak. This is most likely due to the mandatory curfew and online shopping. The Covid-19 related interruptions highlight key challenges and provide an opportunity to more assess in Business sector.


Managerial Implications of Social Marketing

In current years, Social Marketing is fascinating the interest of non-profit organizations like educational institutions, hospitals and Government organizations and non-Govt. organizations for selling their services. Social advertising strategies are also used positively in fitness advertising programs together with family welfare, coronary heart care, human organ donations, physical fitness, and immunization, consciousness towards AIDS, smoking and drinking. Social Marketing methods are being applied in significant regions including provision of secure drinking water, soil conservation, upkeep of untamed life existence, forestation, protection of surroundings and so forth.


The developing strategies adapted to these points areaccountable for all sorts of pollution (air, water, sound) imbalanced ecology and have endangered the very presence of human beings. For instance, detergents used for cloth washing is liable for water pollutants and lack of aquatic lives. Popular plastic products aren't disposable and create environmental glitches. All forms of motors upload to air and sound pollution. On the contrary, the govt. has to spend crores of rupees on oil import bill. A wide variety of studies have shown that consumables like tobacco products, some of the cosmetic products are injurious to health. Still these products are being sold in the market. McDonalds and Kentucky, the pioneers of ‘Fast meals Culture’ are making huge earnings at the cost of consumer health. The uncaring approach of marketers has brought irreversible loss to human being and the universe. Incorrect advertising strategies are creating huge health troubles, pollution, and ecological imbalance. Thus, the remedial measures and the cost of it must be borne by the organizations that are making huge profits out of it.


Future Prospect Directions of Social Marketing

In the 21st century, social advertising standards could positively benefit the organization, for example social, medical wellbeing, political and business issues. The customers can change the financial and a natural framework, Information Technology has made correspondence frameworks enthusiastic, conveying, and compelling. So, the whole world has become a ‘Global Village’. In the word of Marshal Goldsmith “new technologies, new organizations and the rise of global village will have a yield effect on our sense of community in the years ahead. Two trends stand out: the explosion of our potential to communicate instantaneously and enormously across the globe and, closely aligned with our ability to create communities of our choice”. In days to come, social marketers should acknowledge data innovation to fabricate relationship with target gatherings, acquiring backing of the majority to social change crusades, wellbeing advancement in health care sector and establishing awareness regarding environment protection for themselves and for future generations.


Conflict of Interests

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors are thankful to the institutional authority for completion of the work.


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