How to Create a Customer Journey Map

According to Salesforce, 80% of senior-ranking marketers state that a cohesive customer journey is absolutely critical for success. These marketers understand how a customer or user journey map can streamline processes and provide customers with a consistent...

Call for participants – Immersive technology in tourism

We are excited to invite you to participate in a ground-breaking study that explores the impact of immersive technologies on the tourism industry. Your valuable insights will contribute to advancements in the field and help shape the future of tourism experiences....

Online Research – Using the Internet and Social Media

In Chapter 6 of the second edition of Research Methods for Business Management, I expand on how the Internet and Social Media can be used to gather both primary and secondary data to answer many (if not all) of your research questions in your business dissertation.

How to find a good marketing dissertation topic

t’s that time of the year when MSc students around the world start thinking about their marketing dissertation topics. A few years ago I wrote a post on “How to choose a dissertation topic in marketing” for INYIYD. I decided to create an updated version of that post...

Interview at Business Breakfast: Generating positive engagement on Facebook fan pages

I was invited on the 26th of June to the show Business Breakfast in Dubai to discuss a bit about our paper "The influence of brand immediacy in consumer engagement behaviours: A revised social impact model".  I spoke about how social immediacy (who you're friends...

Engagement behaviours on Facebook Fan pages

Facebook offers companies several options to contact and communicate with their customers. Four behaviours are possible for a Facebook brand page user. Users can decide to look into a page of a brand and “Like” the page, which will lead to being able to see further messages from the brand later in his Facebook newsfeed. Furthermore, once that content is displayed, the platform allows users to “react” to the content, leave a comment on the content, and share the content with others. This post examines more in detail all these engagement behaviours.

What is a theory?

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...

Performance marketing: is your agency ticking the right boxes?

Performance marketing in the UAE is like the latest Lamborghini: everybody wants it, many people talk about it, but at the end, it is very rare to see it in action. No matter if we are speaking about Google AdWords or Facebook Advertising, most advertisers are using soft or no metrics when it comes to analysing their campaigns. They are satisfied with “something is happening” but they do not really care whether they are getting some returns on their investment or not.

Consumer engagement as a key performance metric in social media

The concept of consumer engagement is used in advertising and among marketing practitioners, ranking consumer engagement as one of the top priorities of online marketing activities. Among the reasons behind this interest are that consumer engagement is associated with consumer trust, satisfaction and loyalty and commitment, all of them strong indicators of long-term sales, word-of-mouth and brand advocacy.

The science of marketing: How applying research in marketing can improve the SME business?

I am pleased to have been invited to deliver a workshop at the SME world summit 2016 at The Atlantis Hotel in Dubai this March 15th. This will be a great opportunity to disseminate some of the latest research in digital marketing that can help SMEs reach their business objectives through digital channels.

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Social Media Summit 2016: social influence marketing on the rise

Social Media Summit 2016: social influence marketing on the rise

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.

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A guide to social influence marketing in online environments

A guide to social influence marketing in online environments

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.

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Engagement behaviours on Facebook Fan pages

Engagement behaviours on Facebook Fan pages

Facebook offers companies several options to contact and communicate with their customers. Four behaviours are possible for a Facebook brand page user. Users can decide to look into a page of a brand and “Like” the page, which will lead to being able to see further messages from the brand later in his Facebook newsfeed. Furthermore, once that content is displayed, the platform allows users to “react” to the content, leave a comment on the content, and share the content with others. This post examines more in detail all these engagement behaviours.

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Building customer relationships one tweet at a time

Building customer relationships one tweet at a time

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.

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#STEP2016 Reached over 22M users on Twitter

#STEP2016 Reached over 22M users on Twitter

One of the most important conferences for start-ups in the MENA region took place this week: STEP 2016. The second edition of what it is very likely to become the hippest start-up gathering in the region had a combination of big players in the region (“the unicorns”) and very enthusiastic entrepreneurs that are looking to become the next big thing. The conference had also a very interesting line up of speakers from the region and beyond.

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The journey to successful content marketing in a highly cultural diverse setting: insights from Dubbizle in the UAE

The journey to successful content marketing in a highly cultural diverse setting: insights from Dubbizle in the UAE

A couple of weeks ago we had the pleasure to host Nadia Zehni, head of marketing at Dubbizle, the leading classified website in the UAE as part of the guest speakers invited to talk to our IMM students. Our Advances in Digital Marketing class had the opportunity to see how real organisations develop and implement their content marketing strategy, and to see that in fact the models that are taught in the lectures are implemented in marketing practice (you know all this set clear objectives, choose content types, measure results, etc.).

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Consumer engagement as a key performance metric in social media

Consumer engagement as a key performance metric in social media

The concept of consumer engagement is used in advertising and among marketing practitioners, ranking consumer engagement as one of the top priorities of online marketing activities. Among the reasons behind this interest are that consumer engagement is associated with consumer trust, satisfaction and loyalty and commitment, all of them strong indicators of long-term sales, word-of-mouth and brand advocacy.

read more
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