A review of research discussed at the Academy of Marketing 2016 Conference
Academic research example into digital marketing with branded storytelling from Microsoft
The Academy of Marketing Conference is the annual gathering of marketing educators and researchers from across the globe based at a different university in the UK each year.
This year’s event took place at Newcastle Business School and was chaired by Professor Fraser McLeay, along with Professor Helen Woodruffe-Burton and Dr David Hart.
Over four days delegates explored 25 different aspects of marketing, from Arts and Heritage and B2B marketing, from Political marketing to Travel and Tourism. The research feeds back into digital strategy and has an impact on how we deliver marketing.
My own favourite is, unsurprisingly, the E-Marketing and Digital marketing track. Attending is a great way of staying ahead and ensuring I’m not missing new developments. Here's my summary of the main research projects that were presented.
Businesses recovering from major #fails
Karen Jones, a doctoral researcher teaching at Aston University, presented her findings on ‘social media service failure recovery’. This is when there’s an online disaster and the extreme steps that companies take to recover. One great example she shared was how the Alamo Cinemas addressed an unhappy client who complained when the manager ejected her, for using her mobile phone (against all their rules). It’s worth a listen, but the language is suitable for adults only!
Finding the elusive research participant
One of the challenges with research is getting ‘participants’ – that’s people to you and me, to take part. People are busy, surveys can be dull and you start the survey only to discover that you’ve selected the wrong person! Sounds familiar? Samanthika Gallage a PhD student at the University of Nottingham shared an interesting way to find willing subjects – a website! Call for participants is a dedicated website that allows researchers to explain what they need to explore, create a page and promote their work. I know all the professors reading this are shrieking that it’s a biased sample, but if that’s factored into your findings, it may be the reason why so many top business schools are using the platform.
Community management
Denitsa Dineva a PhD student from Aberystwyth University shared findings of types of community management. Whether you are running the community management for a high street retailer or a smaller operation, community management involves different approaches and Denista explored three options for organisations:
- No moderation
- One-off interventions
- Pre-emptive moderation
Denitsa and her colleagues also identified 5 styles of conflict management from censorship (we’ve removed this because it’s offensive) to deferral (can you DM us so customer services can help). It’s a growing area and we look forward to seeing more on this.
Branded content
Bjoern Asmussen and others from Oxford Brookes University Business School explored the understanding of ‘branded content’. Their research to date has shown that the definitions depend on the source. This means that future advertisers will need to be more explicit in telling their viewers, readers or listeners, that a piece of content has indeed been paid-for.
The speed of brand content recognition was also discussed by Dr David Houghton of the University of Birmingham. He explained how the use of metaphor helped interpretation. This is a critical issue when looking at ads on social media platforms.
David Colley from the University of Huddersfield also explored brand storytelling in social media and his key takeaways were:
- Create compelling content that’s non-product explicit
- Bring meaning to the brand, show it’s real
There were some great examples of this in action from David and for me, one example in particular stood out, the story of Tom Kay who set up Finisterre. Microsoft, which is these days a typical major corporation that makes promotional videos to showcase Office 365 or cloud computing, adopted a different approach. No one realised until the end of the video that it was a Microsoft video. It was just a great story.
[Editor's note: Thanks to Annmarie Hanlon for sharing the latest academic research topics. Annmarie previously covered the Academy of Marketing conference research summary in 2014]
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