Best Practices in Diversity Management

Each year, Diversity Inc. puts out a Top 50 list recognizing companies with outstanding diversity practices. A new study in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly samples these top performers to reveal what it is they are doing to successfully manage a diverse workforce–as well as the broad benefits these practices bring. Author Juan M. Madera of the University of Houston writes:

The analysis of the organizations’ specific practices revealed the following seven complementary and highly related categories of diversity management practice: corporate diversity council, diversity training programs, supplier diversity, employee networking and mentoring, cultural awareness, support for women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender network programs and same-sex benefits. The result of these policies is a highly diverse workforce and relatively diverse management in the sample firms.

Click here to read more in the article, “Best Practices in Diversity Management in Customer Service Organizations: An Investigation of Top Companies Cited by Diversity Inc.,” published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

College Drinking Prevention: A Social Marketing Approach

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Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Erika Beseler Thompson, assistant director for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention Programs at North Dakota State University. Her article, “The Impact of a Student-Driven Social Marketing Campaign on College Student Alcohol-Related Beliefs and Behaviors,” co-authored by Frank Heley, Laura Oster-Aaland, Sherri Nordstrom Stastny, and Elizabeth Crisp Crawford, all of NDSU, was published in the March 2013 issue of Social Marketing Quarterly.

In the spring of 2010, the NDSU President’s Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs enlisted the help of communication students in Dr. Elizabeth Crawford’s advertising practicum course to create a social marketing campaign that focuses on reducing the consequences of students’ high-risk drinking decisions. This “Before One More” campaign was intended to help students understand when one more drink can become one too many, and teaches them how to make lower-risk decisions related to alcohol consumption.

The council was thrilled to have students involved in the creation and implementation of this campaign and felt this involvement and the resultant enthusiasm would lead to a more impactful campaign and reductions in high-risk drinking behaviors. We decided to assess the campaign to determine whether it was impactful in its current form or if changes were needed.

The study findings confirmed what we had suspected – using students to tailor socially relevant messages for their peers led to increased acceptance and fit of the message. Unsurprisingly, we also found that the more interactive elements of the campaign were more engaging to students and those students who were already low or moderate-risk drinkers (versus abstainers or high-risk drinkers) were most affected by the campaign messages.

The results of this study have been used to make changes to the “Before One More” campaign to increase its appeal and effectiveness with our students.

Click here to read the paper, “The Impact of a Student-Driven Social Marketing Campaign on College Student Alcohol-Related Beliefs and Behaviors,” in Social Marketing Quarterly.

Greek Crisis: How Social Marketing Can Help

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Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Dr. Periklis Polyzoidis of the Democritus University of Thrace in Komotini, Greece, whose article “Social Marketing in Greece: Time to Wake Up!” was published in the Social Marketing Quarterly March 2013 issue.

Greece is facing an enormous economic and social crisis. The expansion of social problems has made the use of social marketing imperative. The fact that, with very few exceptions, the term social marketing has not been adopted by the Greek scientific community was very  disappointing.

On a practical level, social marketing has a presence in Greece but has not developed to its full capacity. It seems that there are many possibilities for the further development of social marketing in Greece. Some scientists and practitioners believe that it will blossom very soon – we hope that they are right.

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Read the article in the latest issue of Social Marketing Quarterly.

Dr Periklis Polyzoidis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Policy and Administration at Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, where he completed his PhD thesis on the role of nongovernmental organizations that are active in the field of social care, under the supervision of Professor Maria Petmesidou. He studied business administration at the Department of Economic Sciences, School of Law and Economic Sciences, Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki and economics at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany. His areas of research are in the filed of non governmental organizations, voluntarism, social quality and social marketing.

Philip Kotler on Marketing With a Conscience

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In the latest edition of the American Marketing Association’s Marketing News, Philip Kotler, the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, explains why “marketing needs a conscience”:

​In the 1960s, during the heyday of tobacco advertising, one of the tobacco companies wanted to hire me as a consultant. I declined and told them that I would rather promote anti-smoking than smoking. I am sure that the company concluded that I was anti-business. The real answer is that I had a conscience, something that most companies at the time didn’t think should play a role in marketing.

My conscience was formed by the writings of early critics of marketing, including John Kenneth Galbraith (The Affluent Society), Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring). They wrote about marketers neglecting citizens’ needs in the public sector, about the manipulative power of advertising and how pesticides were poisoning our water supply.

You can read the complete article at marketingpower.com (registration required). Then, head over to Social Marketing Quarterly for the latest articles on marketing with a conscience, including “The Science of Goal Setting: A Practitioner’s Guide to Goal Setting in the Social Marketing of Conservation,” published on December 27 by Daniel Hayden and Fangzhou Deng, both of the Rare conservation group in Arlington, VA:

Goal setting within social marketing campaigns is art and science. An analysis of Rare Pride conservation campaigns shows the quantitative, replicable relationship among the impact of these conservation campaigns with diffusion of innovation theory, and collective behavior theory that can guide marketers to set better goals. Rare is an environmental conservation organization that focuses on reducing community-based threats to biodiversity through a social marketing campaign called Pride. Pride campaigns work by removing barriers to change (whether they are technical, social, and political or something else) and inspiring people to make change happen. Based on the analysis of historical Pride campaign survey data, we found that the starting percentage of engagement has a great influence on the percentage change at the end of the campaign: The higher the initial adoption level of knowledge, attitude, and behavior change, the easier these measures are to improve. The result also suggests a difference in the potential of change with different audience segments: It is easiest to change influencer, then general public, and finally resource user who are the target of the social marketing campaign. In this article, we will analyze how to use diffusion of innovation and collective behavior theories to explain the impact of campaigns, as well as how to set more attainable goals. This article is consistent with similar research in the field of public health, which should help marketers set goals more tightly, allocate resources more effectively, and better manage donor expectations.

Click here to read the article and here to sign up for e-alerts so you don’t miss upcoming research from Social Marketing Quarterly.

Great Opportunities, Significant Challenges in Social Marketing

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Social Marketing Quarterly focuses on the theoretical, research and practical issues confronting academics and practitioners who use marketing principles and techniques to benefit society. Stan Polit, a 2012 Masters graduate from George Mason University’s Department of Communication, published “The Organizational Impacts of Managing Social Marketing Interventions” in the June 2012 issue of SMQ.The article examines “how socially oriented organizations can damage their legitimacy as change agents and community partners by not evaluating the true costs of employing marketing techniques,” providing warnings and recommendations to those who manage social marketing efforts. Mr. Polit kindly provided the following insights about his work.

What made you interested in the topic?

Social marketing has always been an attractive tool for organizations wishing to adopt some of private sector’s best ideas for the purposes of improving the public good.  Never has this been more true than now. With the recession straining the resources available to many nonprofit and governmental organizations, social marketing techniques are once again poised to help redefine what constitutes the sector’s “best practices.”  Unfortunately, great opportunities come with significant challenges.  Past research has widely documented the benefits socially focused organizations can accrue through employing marketing practices.  However, there is a lack of scholarly discussion about the losses to credibility that often result from organizations using business-like practices to enhance their position as social change partners.  My goal is to help academics and practitioners navigate these issues by examining both the benefits and challenges of managing marketing practices within the social change marketplace.

Stan Polit is a graduate from George Mason University’s Strategic Communication Master’s program.  His research in the areas of strategic communication and marketing management has been featured at numerous national conferences including the National Communication Association National Convention and the National Social Marketing in Public Health Conference.  He is currently pursuing a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Click here to receive e-alerts about the latest research from Social Marketing Quarterly.

Facebook, Twitter, Blog? How To Get Your Message Out

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With traditional and new media channels abound, finding the right one for your organization can be a challenge. Social Marketing Quarterly’s new article “Changing Channels: A Theory-Based Guide to Selecting Traditional, New, and Social Media in Strategic Social Marketing” evaluates online video sharing (e.g., YouTube), online social networking (e.g., Facebook, Google), microblogs (e.g., Twitter), weblogs, mobile applications and more from a social marketer’s perspective:

New and social media allow organizations to meet McGuire’s (1984) prescription to reach people multiple times, from multiple sources and in multiple settings (McGuire, 1984), and practitioners see social media as an opportunity to increase transparency in their communication (DiStaso & Bortree, 2012). An additional attraction of new and social media technologies is their low relative cost compared to that of more traditional advertising (Long, Taubenheim, Wayman, Temple, & Yu, 2010). However, along with this savings is also a loss of message control (Neff, 2011).

We have moved to an era of dialogic communication campaigns in which the public has more power in controlling message design and delivery. And while organizations are increasingly turning to social and new media for social marketing, sometimes with successful results (Abroms, Schiavo, & Lefebvre, 2008), efforts are not always theory-driven or evidence-based.

The following review of extant literature of channel selection theory informed the application of media richness theory and the concept of medium control. The research question explored here is what channel characteristics should campaign designers consider and assess when selecting the most effective channels for disseminating their messages. This article prescribes a process and typology for strategically selecting channels in social marketing campaigns.

Click here to read the article by Christy J. W. Ledford of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, published on September 28, 2012 in Social Marketing Quarterly, and here to learn more about the journal.

Get notified about the latest theoretical, research and practical issues confronting academics and practitioners who use marketing principles and techniques to benefit society: sign up for e-alerts at sagepub.com.

Publish Your Business Communication Research!

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Business Communication Quarterly, the only refereed journal devoted solely to the teaching of communication in the workplace, is now accepting submissions.

Benefits of Publishing in This Journal
When you publish in Business Communication Quarterly, you will benefit from:

• Rigorous peer review of your research
• Prompt publishing
• Guaranteed targeted, multidisciplinary audience
• High visibility for maximum global exposure

About the Journal
Business Communication Quarterly (BCQ) is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the teaching of business communication. It aims to present the many interdisciplinary, international, and organizational perspectives that characterize the field. It is an official journal of the Association for Business Communication (ABC).

Submit Papers In These Areas
Articles in BCQ present a variety of theoretical, applied, and practical approaches and perspectives. We invite you to submit papers in any of the following areas:

• program design and assessment
• the impact of technology
• global and multicultural issues
• qualitative and quantitative research on classroom teaching
• case studies of best practices

Articles should be submitted via the Manuscript Central online submission system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/bcq, and authors should follow the submission guidelines provided here.

Video: Building Partnerships With Social Marketing

How can you develop successful partnership efforts that help your organization become one that others seek to engage?

In this video Q&A, Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ) co-editor Lynne Doner Lotenberg and Darcy Sawatzki, both of Hager Sharp, talk about bringing ‘Best Bones Forever’ — a national bone health campaign targeting U.S. tween girls — to life through partnership building. They explain why partnerships are so important to such programs, which aim to be catalysts for change.

Read their article, “Building Partnerships to Build the Best Bones Forever! : Applying the 4Ps to Partnership Development,” co-authored with Ann Abercrombie of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in SMQ’s March 2012 edition. To learn more about Social Marketing Quarterly, please follow this link.

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