Two-stage taxonomy for measuring success in social marketing practice

Abstract

Purpose: Given the lack of understanding of social marketing success in theory and practice, this study aims to investigate how social marketing experts conceptualize success. Design/methodology/approach: In this qualitative study, the authors conducted an open-ended online questionnaire with 48 worldwide social marketing experts, most with more than 20 years of experience in the field. The authors analyzed data using topic modeling, a machine-learning method that groups responses/terms into cluster topics based on similarities. Keywords in each topic served to generate themes for discussion. Findings: While behavior change is mentioned as paramount to conceptualizing success, participants prefer to use more tangible and less complex forms to define/measure success, such as campaign recall uptick. In addition, lack of funding was considered an important factor in measuring success. This study provides a two-stage taxonomy to better understand success in social marketing. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to conceptualize success in social marketing practice.