Today is supposed to be the gloomiest day of the year, according to Dr Cliff Arnall, a former academic specialised in the field of psychology that devised a formula that is supposed to determine the gloomiest day of the year based on some rather grim factors. Beyond the validity of Dr Arnall’s depression score formula, some opportunities arise from events like this from a marketing perspective, and businesses have embraced rather happily Blue Monday to their calendar of marketing communication activities and promotional events.

You are being asked to make a theoretical contribution and to find theoretical research gaps. This can be a daunting task, especially when you don’t know what can be considered as a theory and what is not. This guide will point you in the right direction. What is a...

A challenge associated with the use of fan pages by a brand is to elicit engagement behaviours towards it, by attracting people’s attention and enticing them to click on the page to become a fan, or clicking on the content.

I was invited to give a talk on Facebook fan page engagement at the Social Media Summit in Dubai. This was based on part of the research that I have done for my PhD and some other new research avenues that I am currently investigating. What was interesting from this event, was how much relevance social influence marketing is having among marketing practitioners.

Social influence marketing employs social psychology principles to achieve marketing and business goals. It draws on the fact that as potential customers make a purchasing decision, they are being influenced by various forces. Within the field of social psychology, the concept of ‘social influence’ and its effect on individual behaviour, attitudes and beliefs is widely studied. Social influence has also of interest to marketers as consumer-to-consumer interactions are believed to affect consumer behaviour, attitudes, and feelings towards a product or brand. Trends towards brands being present in online environments, plus the innate human need to anthropomorphise objects to facilitate interactions with non-material objects make brand-consumer interactions within social media subject to similar effects.

Attracting a visitor to a website might mean using push media such as advertisements to attract website visitors the website or pull media in the form of high rank in search engine listing when the potential visitor will visit the website as part of their search...

For the second year, I had the opportunity to teach the Digital Marketing modules at Henley Business School at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I called the module #HenleyDigital, and some students have engaged with the hashtag on Twitter and...

Call for Participants Do you self-identify as a digital nomad? Are you active on Instagram? We are looking for participants for an academic study that investigates the following research questions: (1) How do digital nomads manage the representation of their identity...

In the current hyper-connected environment where companies and consumers interact, learning how to leverage social influence marketing techniques can be a source of competitive advantage for your business.

The landscape of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has shifted markedly in recent years, fuelled, by amongst other things, developments in technology and the rapid expansion of social media platforms. Social media use among Internet users and businesses is now widespread. From an SME perspective, companies have looked at social media channels as a cost-effective marketing tool, and consequently many organisations, big and small, have jumped onto the social media bandwagon over the last decade. True, early social media platforms allowed businesses to market directly to their potential and current customers at almost zero financial cost, however with a push towards monetisation and changes in the algorithms in many of the mainstream platforms is making this channel a more pay-to-play one. We propose that looking at social media not only as a marketing tool but also as a space where companies and customers can build meaningful relationship is the way forward.