Digital Campaigns for Social Change

Over the last decades, storytelling methods have become increasingly popular to be used as a marketing tool. And therefore, many companies are starting to realise that good storytelling elements are central to strategic management tools (Denning, 2006). Another development in marketing strategies is integrating the widespread concerns about social issues and the environment (Peattie, 2001). Surprisingly, most research on the field tends to be conceptually driven (see Barnes, 2003; Dowling, 2006; Driscoll & McKee, 2007; Larsen, 2000). Therefore, there is not much empirical research analysing corporate stories and what they consist of within brand communities. Moreover, this is especially not the case for NGO’s, non-profit organisations, and social enterprises (Spear & Roper, 2013). This study aims to start filling this gap by combining storytelling theory and practice to test the effectiveness of storytelling elements in digital marketing campaigns of non-profit organisations for social change (Spear & Roper, 2013). Moreover, despite increasing specialization in the field, most organisations still need help in learning effective ways to make use of storytelling techniques (Denning, 2006). The present study, therefore, also helps enable organisations to fully benefit from using storytelling techniques relating to the social good in their marketing campaigns. By taking the case study of Tunga, more insights will be gained in understanding how the social good story of an organisation can be used most effectively to build a successful marketing campaign and eventually a successful corporate brand. More specifically, this study will focus on two aspects of an online marketing campaign, namely storytelling in blogs and in online advertising. Moreover, through a quantitative automated experiment that tests nine different stories and nine advertisements on the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it was concluded that the most effective storytelling strategies in telling the social good story of Tunga are focusing the messages on the identity and reason to believe of Tunga. Moreover, it is likely that this will be the most effective and efficient on Twitter. These insights can be the starting point of building a successful online marketing campaign on multiple channels. However, it is also important to keep in mind that it requires a tremendous amount of planning, effort and refinement before brands start to see the results of a successful online marketing campaign (Johansson, 2016).