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Social media: The new hybrid element of the

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Business Horizons (2009) 52, 357365

www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor

Social media: The new hybrid element of the

promotion mix
W. Glynn Mangold a,*, David J. Faulds b
a
b

College of Business & Public Affairs, Murray State University, Murray, KY 42071, U.S.A.
College of Business Administration, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, U.S.A.

KEYWORDS
Integrated marketing
communications;
Social media;
Consumer-generated
media;
Promotion mix

Abstract The emergence of Internet-based social media has made it possible for
one person to communicate with hundreds or even thousands of other people about
products and the companies that provide them. Thus, the impact of consumer-toconsumer communications has been greatly magnified in the marketplace. This article
argues that social media is a hybrid element of the promotion mix because in a
traditional sense it enables companies to talk to their customers, while in a nontraditional sense it enables customers to talk directly to one another. The content,
timing, and frequency of the social media-based conversations occurring between
consumers are outside managers direct control. This stands in contrast to the
traditional integrated marketing communications paradigm whereby a high degree
of control is present. Therefore, managers must learn to shape consumer discussions
in a manner that is consistent with the organizations mission and performance goals.
Methods by which this can be accomplished are delineated herein. They include
providing consumers with networking platforms, and using blogs, social media tools,
and promotional tools to engage customers.
# 2009 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. All rights reserved.

1. Social media, the promotion mix,

and integrated marketing
communications
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is the
guiding principle organizations follow to communicate with their target markets. Integrated marketing communications attempts to coordinate and
control the various elements of the promotional
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: glynn.mangold@murraystate.edu
(W.G. Mangold), djfaul01@louisville.edu (D.J. Faulds).

mixadvertising, personal selling, public relations,

publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotionto
produce a unified customer-focused message and,
therefore, achieve various organizational objectives (Boone & Kurtz, 2007, p. 488).
However, the tools and strategies for communicating with customers have changed significantly
with the emergence of the phenomenon known as
social media, also referred to as consumer-generated media. This form of media describes a variety of
new sources of online information that are created,
initiated, circulated and used by consumers intent
on educating each other about products, brands,

0007-6813/$ see front matter # 2009 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2009.03.002

358

W.G. Mangold, D.J. Faulds

services, personalities, and issues (Blackshaw &

Nazzaro, 2004, p. 2).
Social media encompasses a wide range of online,
word-of-mouth forums including blogs, companysponsored discussion boards and chat rooms,
consumer-to-consumer e-mail, consumer product
or service ratings websites and forums, Internet
discussion boards and forums, moblogs (sites containing digital audio, images, movies, or photographs), and social networking websites, to name
a few. As illustrated by Table 1, social media outlets
are numerous and varied.
The 21st century is witnessing an explosion of
Internet-based messages transmitted through these
media. They have become a major factor in influencing various aspects of consumer behavior including awareness, information acquisition, opinions,
attitudes, purchase behavior, and post-purchase
communication and evaluation. Unfortunately, the
popular business press and academic literature offers marketing managers very little guidance for
incorporating social media into their IMC strategies.

Table 1.

Examples of social media

 Social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook,

Faceparty)
 Creativity works sharing sites:
 Video sharing sites (YouTube)
 Photo sharing sites (Flickr)
 Music sharing sites (Jamendo.com)
 Content sharing combined with assistance
(Piczo.com)
 General intellectual property sharing sites
(Creative Commons)
 User-sponsored blogs (The Unofficial Apple Weblog,
Cnet.com)
 Company-sponsored websites/blogs (Apple.com,
P&Gs Vocalpoint)
 Company-sponsored cause/help sites (Doves
Campaign for Real Beauty, click2quit.com)
 Invitation-only social networks (ASmallWorld.net)
 Business networking sites (LinkedIn)
 Collaborative websites (Wikipedia)
 Virtual worlds (Second Life)
 Commerce communities (eBay, Amazon.com,
Craigs List, iStockphoto, Threadless.com)
 Podcasts (For Immediate Release: The Hobson
and Holtz Report)
 News delivery sites (Current TV)
 Educational materials sharing (MIT
OpenCourseWare, MERLOT)
 Open Source Software communities (Mozillas
spreadfirefox.com, Linux.org)
 Social bookmarking sites allowing users to
recommend online news stories, music, videos,
etc. (Digg, del.icio.us, Newsvine, Mixx it, Reddit)

Therefore, many managers lack a full appreciation

for social medias role in the companys promotional
efforts. Even though social media is magnifying the
impact consumer-to-consumer conversations have
in the marketplace, methods for shaping those conversations have not yet been articulated.
The purpose of this article is threefold. First, we
propose that social media be considered a hybrid
component of the promotional mix and therefore be
incorporated as an integral part of the organizations IMC strategy. The second purpose of the article is to compare and contrast the traditional
communications paradigm that relied on the established promotional mix, elements which were developed and refined over the past 100 years, with
the new communications paradigm which incorporates social media. Finally, we discuss methods by
which marketing managers can shape the consumerto-consumer conversations which are now driving
the marketplace to a greater extent than ever
before.

2. Social medias hybrid role in the

promotion mix
It has long been acknowledged in marketing management circles that successful IMC strategies clearly
reflect the values articulated in an organizations
mission statement and contribute to the fulfillment
of the organizations performance goals. To accomplish these objectives, the elements of the promotion
mix are carefully coordinated so the information
transmitted to the marketplace through these elements consistently communicates a unified message
that broadly reflects the organizations fundamental
values.
For example, the promotional efforts conducted
by Procter and Gamble (P&G) or General Electric
(GE) illustrate the underlying values of these organizations as articulated in their respective mission
statements and statements of strategic principles
(General Electric, 2008; Procter and Gamble, 2008).
When these two organizations entered the social
media arena, they carefully crafted their communications with the marketplace to consistently reflect their organizational values. By doing so, both
organizations acknowledged the importance of incorporating social media into their IMC strategies
and promotional efforts.
GE and P&Gs use of social media demonstrates
that this media has two interrelated promotional
roles in the marketplace. First, social media enables
companies to talk to their customers, and second, it
enables customers to talk to one another. Social
media also enables customers to talk to companies;

Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix

however, this role is market research-related rather
than promotion-related and, therefore, is outside
the scope of this article.
The first role of social media is consistent with the
use of traditional IMC tools. That is, companies can
use social media to talk to their customers through
such platforms as blogs, as well as Facebook and
MySpace groups. These media may either be company-sponsored or sponsored by other individuals or
organizations.
The second promotion-related role of social media is unique: customers can use it to communicate
with one another. In his book The New Influencers,
Gillin (2007) points out that Conventional marketing wisdom has long held that a dissatisfied customer
tells ten people. But that is out of date. In the new
age of social media, he or she has the tools to tell 10
million (p. 4) consumers virtually overnight. Gillin
illustrates this potential power by recounting the
story of Vincent Ferrari, a blogger who posted an
audio recording of his encounter with an AOL customer service representative. The representatives
persistent attempts to convince Ferrari not to cancel his account offended listeners sensibilities to
the extent that approximately 300,000 of them
requested to download the audio file. The story
went viral as it was picked up by thousands of
other bloggers and websites. It eventually drew the
attention of such mainstream media as The New
York Post, The New York Times, and NBC. It can be
presumed that AOLs management was embarrassed, to say the least.
In a sense, this second role of social media
enabling customers to talk to one anotheris an
extension of traditional word-of-mouth communication. But as the Vincent Ferrari story illustrates, the
uniqueness lies in the magnitude of the communication. Instead of telling a few friends, consumers
now have the ability to tell hundreds or thousands of
other people with a few keystrokes! The question for
managers becomes: How can this power be harnessed for the benefit of the organization? While
companies cannot directly control consumer-toconsumer messages, they do have the ability to
influence the conversations that consumers have
with one another. Methods for accomplishing this
are presented in section 4.
We argue that social media is a hybrid element of
the promotion mix because it combines characteristics of traditional IMC tools (companies talking to
customers) with a highly magnified form of word-ofmouth (customers talking to one another) whereby
marketing managers cannot control the content and
frequency of such information. Social media is also a
hybrid in that it springs from mixed technology and
media origins that enable instantaneous, real-time

359

communication, and utilizes multi-media formats

(audio and visual presentations) and numerous delivery platforms (Facebook, YouTube, and blogs, to
name a few), with global reach capabilities. The
emergence of a highly educated, historically affluent, and an increasingly skeptical and demanding
consumer population facilitates its acceptance in
the marketplace.
Consumers ability to communicate with one another limits the amount of control companies have
over the content and dissemination of information.
Christopher Vollmer and Geoffrey Precourt (2008)
underscore this in their book, Always On. As they
note, in the era of social media consumers are in
control; they have greater access to information and
greater command over media consumption than
ever before (p. 5).
This shift in the information control needle is
dramatically influencing the way consumers receive
and react to market information (Ramsey, 2006;
Singh, Veron-Jackson, & Cullinane, 2008). Consequently, marketing managers are seeking ways to
incorporate social media into their IMC strategies
(Li & Bernoff, 2008). The traditional communications paradigm, which relied on the classic promotional mix to craft IMC strategies, must give way to a
new paradigm that includes all forms of social media
as potential tools in designing and implementing IMC
strategies. Contemporary marketers cannot ignore
the phenomenon of social media because it has
rapidly become the de facto modus operandi for
consumers who are disseminating information on
products and services.

3. Paradigms: Traditional vs. new

communications
In the traditional communications paradigm, the
elements of the promotional mix are coordinated
to develop an IMC strategy, and the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications are dictated by the organization in collaboration with its
paid agents (advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations consultants).
The flow of information outside the boundaries of
the paradigm has generally been confined to face-toface, word-of-mouth communications among individual consumers, which has had minimal impact on the
dynamics of the marketplace due to its limited dissemination (Mayzlin, 2006). This paradigm has served
as a framework for developing IMC strategies during
the post-World War II era (Muniz & Schau, 2007). Its
long shelf life appears to be largely due to the high
degree of control over the communications process
that it affords businesses.

360

W.G. Mangold, D.J. Faulds

However, in the era of social media, marketing

managers control over the content, timing, and
frequency of information is being severely eroded.
In the new paradigm, information about products
and services also originates in the marketplace. This
information is based on the experiences of individual consumers and is channeled through the traditional promotion mix. However, various social media
platforms, many of which are completely independent of the producing/sponsoring organization or its
agents, magnify consumers ability to communicate
with one another. This groundswell (Li & Bernhoff, 2008) has profoundly affected all aspects of
consumer behavior, and has bestowed consumers
with power they have not previously experienced
in the marketplace.
In the new communications paradigm (see
Figure 1), marketing managers should recognize
the power and critical nature of the discussions
being carried on by consumers using social media.
The impact of the interactions among consumers in
the social media space on the development and
execution of IMC strategies is illustrated by the
following points:

 The Internet has become a mass media vehicle for

consumer-sponsored communications. It now represents the number one source of media for consumers at work and the number two source of
media at home. The Internet reaches more than
60% of all United States consumers for an average
weekly usage rate of more than 100 minutes
(Rashtchy, Kessler, Bieber, Shindler, & Tzeng,
2007).
Figure 1.

The new communications paradigm

 Consumers are turning away from the traditional

sources of advertising: radio, television, magazines, and newspapers. Consumers also consistently demand more control over their media
consumption. They require on-demand and immediate access to information at their own convenience (Rashtchy et al., 2007; Vollmer &
Precourt, 2008).

 Consumers are turning more frequently to various

types of social media to conduct their information
searches and to make their purchasing decisions
(Lempert, 2006; Vollmer & Precourt, 2008).

 Social media is perceived by consumers as a more

trustworthy source of information regarding
products and services than corporate-sponsored
communications transmitted via the traditional
elements of the promotion mix (Foux, 2006).
The above trends have severely diminished the
usefulness and practicality of the traditional communications paradigm as a framework for developing IMC strategies. The new communications
paradigm, on the other hand, requires several important changes in managements attitudes and
assumptions about IMC strategy formulation. First,
marketing managers must accept the reality that a
vast amount of information about their products
and services is being communicated by individual
consumers to other consumers via social media
forums. Second, consumers are responding to this
information in ways that directly influence all
aspects of consumer behavior, from information

Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix

acquisition to post-purchase expressions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Third, consumers are turning away from the traditional elements of the
promotion mix; in particular, they are reducing their
reliance on advertising as a source of information to
guide their purchase decision-making. Finally, managers who are accustomed to exerting a high level of
control over company-to-consumer messages must
learn to talk with their customers, as opposed to
talking at them, therefore influencing the discussions taking place in the social media space.

4. Shaping the discussions

As indicated earlier, social media has amplified the
power of consumer-to-consumer conversations in
the marketplace by enabling one person to communicate with literally hundreds or thousands of other
consumers quickly and with relatively little effort.
Managers cannot directly control these conversations. However, they can use the methods delineated below to influence and shape these discussions in
a manner that is consistent with the organizations
mission and performance goals. These methods have
been gleaned from a review of the popular business
press and academic literature, as well as from discussions with representatives from advertising
agencies, public relations firms, and corporations
that have begun to use social media successfully.

4.1. Provide networking platforms

Consumers like to network with people who have
interests and desires that are similar to their own.
Organizations can leverage this desire by creating
communities of like-minded individuals. These communities can center on shared interests and values.
For example, Unilevers Dove (2007) brand beauty
products launched a Campaign for Real Beauty to
bring together like-minded people who wish to enhance girls and womens self-esteem by helping to
establish realistic standards of beauty. Roadrunner
Records website, www.roadrunnerrecords.com, includes a forum section to bring together fans of rock
and metal music. The Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain 2008 presidential campaigns
used their online presence to gather supporters
together and provide information. Facebook groups
and other forms of online communication have
sprung up around Steven Spielbergs movie Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and
other films.
Similarly, a number of online communities exist
to serve the needs of new mothers, including BabyZone.com, Michiganmoms.com, and Kentuckiana-

361

moms.com. These sites provide various types of

information for mothers and parents, along with
opportunities for interaction through message
boards, forums, and chat rooms. Companies that
can benefit from communicating with moms may
want to have their employees contribute to the
conversations that are occurring there, under conditions of full-disclosure. Such sites may also provide
excellent sponsorship opportunities.
Networking opportunities do not have to be based
in social media in order to be effective. For example, Harley-Davidson sponsors rallies for motorcycle
enthusiasts who are members of the Harley Owners
Group1, and Jeep sponsors Jeep Jamborees for offroad enthusiasts. A recent Harry Potter book was
released in bookstores at 12:01 a.m. to adoring fans
who had lined up for hours waiting to purchase the
book. The experience of participating with likeminded individuals in these highly anticipated
events becomes memorable and is likely to be
talked about for years to come. Many of these
individuals will choose to talk about their experiences through social media as well as through traditional word-of-mouth.
The Harley-Davidson rallies and Jeep Jamborees,
like many networking opportunities, are intertwined with opportunities for consumers to experience the companies products, as well as get to
know the people who use them. Such experiences
can also be vicarious in nature. Toyota provides a
link from its website to a blog written by a father
and son team who have embarked on annual 5,000
mile adventures to the Arctic Circle, Baja Mexico,
and other unusual destinations in their Toyota FJ
Cruiser (Toyota, 2008a). Readers can respond to
each blog by posting their own observations and
insights. They can also post their own stories from
the road at www.ToyotaOwnersOnline.com.

4.2. Use blogs and other social media

tools to engage customers
Consumers feel more engaged with products and
organizations when they are able to submit feedback. For example, Toyota enables its customers to
provide feedback on a broad range of issues via its
Open Road Blog (Toyota, 2008b). The feedback
comes in the form of criticism, accolades, and
helpful suggestions. Taken as a whole, this feedback
contributes to a sense of community in which honest,
open communications are encouraged and customer
engagement is enhanced. Interestingly, Toyota identifies the constituency of its blog as extending beyond
customers to include other bloggers, journalists,
automotive enthusiasts, consumers, and even
competitors.

362
Roadrunner Records website enables consumers
to submit feedback through a poll section in which
readers respond to various questions posed by the
website administrators. It also enables and encourages fans to review concerts and albums, and to
even submit photographs and various forms of visual
art.

4.3. Use both traditional and Internetbased promotional tools to engage

customers
People are more likely to communicate through both
word-of-mouth and social media when they are
engaged with the product, service, or idea. This
engagement may come naturally for supporters of
causes, political candidates, and trendy new technological products. However, it can also be creatively stimulated for products and services which
generate less psychological involvement of customers.
For example, Pepsi (2008) uses its Pepsi Stuff
online customer loyalty program to engage consumers by enabling them to redeem points for MP3
downloads, television show downloads, CDs, DVDs,
electronics, and apparel. Campaign participants are
also allowed to participate in sweepstakes drawings
for larger prizes, such as home theater systems and
trip giveaways. Coca Cola (2008) has a similar campaign entitled My Coke Rewards.
Contests can be used to engage customers.
Procter and Gambles Gillette brand sponsored
the $30,000 GillettePhenom contest, in which online participants were asked to create a short video
showcasing their skill in a ball sport. The sport could
include the biggiesbasketball, baseball, soccer,
football, golf, tennisthe less obvious onesvolleyball, water polo, cricket, rugby, croquetand
even the foosballs and Super Balls of the world.
Videos were submitted and evaluated by a panel of
judges after being uploaded via the individuals
YouTube account. The top 25 videos were then voted
on by website viewers to determine the ultimate
winner.
Such online voting gives Internet users a sense of
ownership and increased engagement. American
Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and similar television
shows have successfully engaged their viewers by
enabling them to either go online to vote for their
favorite performer or submit their votes via text
messaging. Doves 2007 Campaign for Real Beauty
enabled consumers to create advertisements
which were voted on by a panel of judges. Online
viewers were then allowed to vote on the five semifinalists, with the winning entry being shown during
the 2008 Oscars (Greenberg, 2007).

W.G. Mangold, D.J. Faulds

Jamba, Inc. and Dole Food Company have joined
together to ask customers to submit their favorite
smoothie recipes to the jambafruit.com website.
Entrants are eligible for a Healthy Escape Getaway at a Four Seasons hotel in Westlake Village,
California, where they will be offered spa treatments and various healthy living consultations. The
7-Eleven convenience store chain successfully drove
its Slurpee products 18-24 year-old target market
to the Slurpee.com website through a joint promotion with Guitar Hero, a product which focuses on a
similar target market. In this campaign, buyers of
the Full Throttle Frozen Blast Slurpee product were
able to go to Slurpee.com to enter codes found on
their drink cups. Winning codes were randomly
selected, and the winners received such prizes as
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith games, Xbox 360 consoles, Microsoft Points, and posters featuring the
promoted products.
Similarly, FLW Outdoors (2008) is a major organizer of fishing tournaments, including the wellknown Wal-Mart FLW tour. It also sponsors the $1
million online FLW Fantasy Fishing competition in
conjunction with the Wal-Mart FLW tour. Participants in the online competition identify the professional anglers they believe will place highest in each
Wal-Mart FLW Tour event. The winners of the Fantasy Fishing competition are those who most successfully select the pro anglers.
Enabling consumers to see others using the product can entertain and engage customers while communicating product benefits. BMW utilizes both its
own website, www.bmw.com, and YouTube to provide breathtaking pictures and videos of BMW automobiles in use. Some companies have encouraged
consumers to submit photos or recorded footage of
the product in action. A recent promotion for
Procter and Gambles quick-clean product Swiffer
(2008) challenged consumers to create short videos
describing how they left their old cleaning method
for a new romance with Swiffer. The contest itself
drew a considerable amount of attention. Then, the
top 10 videos were posted to YouTube and consumers
were allowed to vote on the winner.
Online games provide a natural and obvious venue for engaging and entertaining. Mattel (2008)
makes available a variety of online games for its
Hot Wheels1 line of toys. These games are designed
to entertain its target audience while selling the
product. Send to a friend links make it easy to tell
others about the games. In addition, a link for
parents explains Mattels policies regarding the
games and suggests parental guidelines for those
concerned about their childs Internet safety.
Warner Brothers did a masterful job of engaging
its young audience in preparation for the release of

Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix

its 2008 film The Dark Knight. The studio used an
approach sometimes referred to as alternate reality gaming (ARGN, 2006) to present a complicated
concoction of multiple websites, a virtual scavenger
hunt, a non-virtual scavenger hunt, and role playing
to keep the audience engaged and talking to others
about the movie.

4.4. Provide information

Consumers are more likely to talk about companies
and products when they feel they know a lot
about them. For example, Mattels website,
www.mattel.com, is replete with information
about its many toy products. While much of the
information is intended for the children who use the
toys, an unobtrusive Grown-Ups & Parents section offers valuable information about the companys website practices and things parents can
do to keep their children safe while they are online.
Procter and Gambles Ask Julia portion of its
website, www.pg.com, provides detailed information on a variety of subjects that may be of
interest to consumers of the companys products.
Subject categories include personal and beauty,
house and home, health and wellness, baby and
family, and pet nutrition and care. Similarly, the
Science Behind the Brands portion of the website provides detailed information about the companys product innovations, its research and
development efforts, and the scientific foundations
for products in such categories as hair care and
dandruff treatment, skin care, beauty care, and
fabric and home care.
DuPont also provides a great deal of detailed
information about its products, as well as information related to the use of its products. For instance,
consumers seeking information about its StormRoomTM in-home shelter product can visit a website
to find information about the DuPontTM KEVLAR1
which reinforces the StormRoomTM (Dupont, 2008).
Links are also provided to sites that offer in-depth
information about storm preparedness.

4.5. Be outrageous
People talk about things they find to be somewhat
outrageous. For example, Burger King played a joke
on its customers by telling them that its lead item,
the Whopper, was no longer being sold. Their reactions were then recorded on video. Abbreviated
versions of these reactions became the focal point
of a new advertising campaign. Viewers were also
encouraged to go to the related company website,
WhopperFreakout.com, to see expanded video versions of customers reactions.

363

4.6. Provide exclusivity

People like to feel special. Feelings of being special
can be produced by offering products, information,
and special deals that are available exclusively to a
subset of consumers. For example, Unilever offers
its readers coupons and product samples from
Doves Campaign for Real Beauty. Roadrunner
Records enables online participants to subscribe
to weekly e-newsletters and to preorder new albums. It also provides daily news pertaining to the
heavy metal music community and an updated list
of heavy metal tours. Participants are also allowed
to hear new songs before they are released to the
general public and to watch various artists music
videos.

4.7. Design products with talking points

and consumers desired self images in
mind
Products and services should be designed with talking points in mind, to stimulate word-of-mouth and
social-media-based conversations. For example, in
his book The Anatomy of Buzz, Emmanuel Rosen
(2002) pointed out that Apple intentionally designed
the iMac to be different from Windows-based personal computers. He also suggested that digital
cameras should be designed to look different from
traditional film cameras in order to leverage the
power of word-of-mouth communication. Similarly,
JetBlue Airlines has stimulated a considerable
amount of communication by making leather seats
and televisions available to its customers, a practice
not usually encountered on budget airlines.
Products that are fun, intriguing, highly visible,
easy to use, and which engage the emotions are
more likely to stimulate conversation than products
that do not meet these criteria (Dobele, Lindgreen,
Beverland, Vanhamme, & van Wijk, 2007; Dobele,
Toleman, & Beverland, 2005). Therefore, the communication element must be considered when deciding on the product concept, as well as colors,
shapes, sizes, packaging, and other factors.
Organizations seeking to build talking points into
their product design should also remember that simple things are easier to remember and communicate
than complicated things. They should also make sure
their competitive advantage is clear. Price, quality,
and value propositions often underlie such competitive advantage. In fact, some research suggests that
price, quality, and value are common talking points in
traditional word-of-mouth communication (Mangold,
Miller, & Brockway, 1999). If customers clearly understand why they should buy one product instead
of another, their understanding is likely to be

364
communicated through consumer-generated media,
as well as through traditional word-of-mouth.
Finally, people are more likely to talk to others
about products when those products support their
desired self-image, or the way they want others to
see them. For example, the iPhone is likely to be
bought, used, and discussed among consumers who
want to be seen as cool or comfortable with
the latest technology. BMW automobiles are likely
to be discussed among those auto enthusiasts who
value performance and the ultimate driving experience. This suggests that both product design and
promotion efforts should be undertaken with the
desired self-image in mind.

4.8. Support causes that are important to

consumers
People tell others about things to which they
are emotionally connected. Organizations can leverage emotional connections by embracing one or
more causes that are important to their customers.
For example, ice cream producer Ben and Jerrys is
known for supporting various causes that are important to the companys founders and, presumably, to
its customers. These causes center around such
priorities as investing in the nations children, promoting social and environmental concerns, supporting family farms, and avoiding the consumption of
meat from cloned animals.
Product Red (2008) is among the best known
cause-related campaigns. Participants in the campaign sell products that are red in color and then
dedicate a portion of the revenue from those products to the Red campaign. The money raised is used
to fight AIDS and other diseases in Africa, and to
support the communities in which those diseases
are in an epidemic state. Corporate participants
include Motorola, American Express, Gap, Converse,
Hallmark, and Dell. Specific products and brands
include Emporio Armani, Apple iPod, and Windows
Vista.
Customers may also be emotionally linked to
finding cures for such diseases as cancer, diabetes,
and heart disease. These linkages may be related to
their personal health conditions or to the health
conditions of those around them. Other emotional
linkages include environmental issues, animal
rights, education, and child welfare.

4.9. Utilize the power of stories

Stories can be memorable. The more memorable
they are, the more likely they are to be repeated.
When one of the authors of this article visited a local
shoe repair shop for the first time, its proprietor told

W.G. Mangold, D.J. Faulds

him the story of how he got into the shoe repair
business. It seems that as a child, the owner of the
shop had an annoying habit of loitering in front of a
shoe repair shop in his Chicago neighborhood. The
old Italian cobbler who owned that shop told the
boy, If you are going to hang around all day, your
time can be spent more productively inside the
shop than outside. Consequently, he began giving
the boy odd jobs after school, which eventually led
to greater involvement in the repair of shoes. As
the story unfolded, it became clear that the Italian
cobblers old-world craftsmanship had been transmitted to his young apprentice. Such stories create
vivid memories that are likely to be repeated in
social media, as well as traditional word-ofmouth.

5. From one-way traffic to multiple

avenues
IMC has traditionally been considered to be largely
one-way in nature. In the old paradigm, the organization and its agents developed the message and
transmitted it to potential consumers, who may or
may not have been willing participants in the communication process. The control over the dissemination of information was in the hands of the
marketing organization. The traditional elements
of the promotion mixadvertising, personal selling,
public relations and publicity, direct marketing, and
sales promotionwere the tools through which control was asserted.
In this article, we argue that marketing managers
should include social media in the promotion mix
when developing and executing their IMC strategies.
This is consistent with Boone and Kurtzs (2007)
assertion that the objective of integrated marketing
communications is to coordinate all [emphasis
added by authors] promotional activities of the firm
to produce a unified, customer focused promotional
message (p. 488).
Accomplishing this requires the adoption of a new
communications paradigm that acknowledges the
pervasiveness of information now being exchanged
among consumers in the social media space. This
new paradigm considers social media to be a hybrid
element of the promotion mix in that it combines
some of the characteristics of traditional IMC tools
with a highly magnified form of word-of-mouth
communications in which marketing managers cannot control the content and frequency of such information. This contrasts sharply with the
hegemony managers are accustomed to exercising
over all aspects of information distribution in the
traditional paradigm. However, marketing managers

Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix

do have the ability to shape the discussion by using
the methods described in this article.
Although marketing managers cannot control information disseminated through social media, ignoring the realities of the impact of information
transmitted through these forums on consumer behavior is tantamount to surrendering the communications process to the vagaries of the marketplace.
By including social media in the promotion mix,
these new communication formats are given a home
in standard marketing management practices and
theories. This new-found home for social media
provides managers with a better understanding of
social media and a framework for incorporating it
into their IMC strategies, thus more effectively
communicating with their target markets.

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