Herding Behavior And Its Influence In Social Marketing

What are the conditions for herding behavior (people doing what others are doing) in a social marketing or pro social behavior context? Explore how a social marketer (pro social cause) could encourage positive herding behavior. In your answer provide examples of social behaviours (eg on line sharing of information and activities, behaviour change movements) that have transmitted through communities or networks.

Analysis

The following essay is based on the herding behavior in social marketing. The herd behavior effectively describes how individuals in a group could act collectively without centralized direction. The human beings are the only species that demonstrate this herd behavior; however, the decisions people make based off it influence several aspects of people’s lives. Herd behavior is referred to the tendency of making decision based on the actions of others. The existing studies have proved that it takes a minority of five percent to influence a direction of crowd. Several marketing theories are developed on the concept that human beings are logical creature. In addition, at one particular point in the purchase decision process, the individuals could take careful amount of all available information before making the final decisions. The purpose of the essay is to evaluate the influence of herd behavior of individual in social marketing. In order to make the evaluation in the following essay, many journals on herd behavior, decision making and aspects of social marketing have been analyzed in the following essay.  Moreover, the analysis has been supported with examples and other evidences.

Some individuals believe that herd behavior is the tendency for individuals to mimic the actions of a large group. Nonetheless, some people might not essentially make the same choice like others; where others certainly do.  According to Luo and Lin (2013), there are two significant reasons behind the occurrence of herd behavior such as the social pleasure of conformity as well as common rationale. It is observed that most people are very sociable and carry a natural desire to be accepted by a large group instead of being branded as outcast.  On the contrary, common rationale also appears as the reason. More specifically, if an individual is convinced that a particular idea or course remains irrational or incorrect, the individual might still follow the herd. This usually occurs where the individuals have little experience regarding the context. As put forward by Lee and Lee (2012), herding is a core concept underlying several collection phenomenon in an increasingly connected world like recent global financial crisis.

The existing studies on herd behavior imply that people are unintended to act individually and stand out from others if others are unintended to act accordingly. Thus, it can be mentioned that social marketing is influenced by such individual behavior. Social marketing is not treated as science but it is largely treated as the professional craft that relies on several scientific disciplines to generate programs developed to influence human behavior on large scale (Ciuti et al. 2012). The marketers tend to target purchase behavior, product choice behavior as well as product promotion behavior. It is not that people are asked to talk favorably about a particular brand, product or service.

Conditions for Herding Behavior in Social Marketing

When a group of people implements the same actions, others start relying on those actions and they end up making the same choice (Burakov 2014). Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that marketers play a significant role in influencing those individuals. This means that if the marketers convince one or two individuals or product features, others tend to follow the same path. For example, in a departmental store, the sales person takes the responsibility of their own units. Thus, when a customer looks for a beauty product but not in particular, the sales person convinces her about a particular product. Hence, the customer gains the confidence or relies on the sales person because she/he thinks that sales person have more experiences in this context than others. Therefore, eventually, the customer ends up making the purchase. Likewise, when other individuals see one person buying a particular product in same category that she/he was looking for, make the decision of buying. This example indicates that people are positively or negatively influenced by their external surroundings.

In the literature, it is observed that Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzshe were among the first individuals to criticize what they referred as “crowd” and “herd morality” as well as the herd instinct in human society. According to Cohen et al. (2013), identified herd behavior in human to explain the phenomena of great number of individuals acting in the same way. In this context, Al-Shboul (2012), defined economic behavior with respect to the social influences such as emulation, where some individual in a group could mimic the other members of higher status. On the other side, it has also been identified that large-scale market trends often begin as well as end with the periods of frenzied purchasing or selling. Hence, the observers tend to cite these scenarios as the clear example of herding behavior, which could be irrational as well as driven by the emotion.

If the marketers want to use larger influence over consumer behavior, they could learn to acknowledge that people do not act autonomously but certainly follow what other individuals follow. It is also started that identifying the herd instinct has significant consequences for marketers. Initially, it describes why mass behavior remains so difficult to change. For example, it can be added that several public policy initiatives seek to demonstrate a significant change in people’s behavior. Likewise, most change programs within the organizations fail to generate the radical alternation in employee behavior existing in the objectives.  In addition to this, it is also studied that in social marketing theory, the marketers are seen to be changing this large behavior.

Positive Herding Behavior Encouragement in Social Marketing

Eventually, people have the experience, analytics as well as practical tools to understand, describe and reshape it. As put forward by Lefebvre (2012), putting the consumers at the heart of the business is supposedly is the major aim of the business. Thus, yet, for example in spite of the rightly praised exception- Tesco, iPod , the marketing activity seeks to exhibit the sort of significant sustainable change in consumer behavior that people imagine.

The next step of marketers is to look at marketing as consumer to consumer (C2C) instead of business to consumer (B2C) (Krumme et al. 2012). This refers to the recognition that significant relationship may not exist between the organization and given customer; however, it could exist between consumers and other individuals. Hence, the marketers should focus on developing social meaning as well as utility, which refers to the things that assist the social interaction instead of forcing meaning on individual.  More specifically, can be devised to be attractive and interesting enough to become talked about in the first place. In addition to this, the social marketers should also change the ways in which they consider about targeting. Hence, Burakov 2014) commented that acknowledgment of people’ herd behavior or attitude keep changing the way some media players are assessing the media channel network.

When most of media world is becoming excited regarding shifting from counting audiences to counting the based on how they are engaged with the medium, different large agencies like Naked has suggested that real currency of world media needs to be to extent in which one individual conveys the message  to other individual beyond this. For example, readership an agency could reach least number of individuals via an advertisement program in the Guardian than In Daily Telegraph. However, each Guardian reader could influence many times compared to the number of people follows Telegraph (Luo and Lin 2013). Furthermore, it is also observed that this is significant as well as represents the first major move away from considering about media’s channels’ down. In this context, Wymer (2011) commented that traditional and digital media have significant so far because they serve and guide the advisers harness the strength of social networks. Moreover, the marketers should concentrate on the most influential consumers, which mean the customers who hold the largest swing over the majority of their peers. The marketers tend to understand the kinds and sources of influence that help to shape buyers’ behavior. Hence, the marketers tend to think about their opinions, actions and decisions-making process. Eventually, in social marketing, the marketers should learn to live with the uncertainty. Since mass behavior is the outcome of human to human communication, it could be complex and adaptive (Burakov 2014). However, it is eventually unstable and it remains difficult to anticipate.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be mentioned that the increase of social networks generated a large deal of interest among the marketer in developing the interaction. However, these efforts should not be mistaken for a digital age phenomenon. It is understood that humanity has always instinctively provided to be as a herd species.  The brand people consume and the way the people consume are because of other individuals in the surrounding. Therefore, in social marketing, it is the right time to harness this herd behavior of people for the betterment of marketing. This study can be further extended focusing on the customer base of an organization. To learn the herd behavior of individuals the customers should be surveyed.

References 

Al-Shboul, M., 2012. An examination of herd behavior in the Jordanian equity market. International Journal of Economics and Finance, 5(1), p.234.

Burakov, D.V., 2014. How to Measure Herd Behavior on the Credit Market?. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 5(20), p.516.

Ciuti, S., Northrup, J.M., Muhly, T.B., Simi, S., Musiani, M., Pitt, J.A. and Boyce, M.S., 2012. Effects of humans on behaviour of wildlife exceed those of natural predators in a landscape of fear. PloS one, 7(11), p.e50611.

Cohen, M.J., Brezis, M., Block, C., Diederich, A. and Chinitz, D., 2013. Vaccination, herd behavior, and herd immunity. Medical Decision Making, 33(8), pp.1026-1038.

Gu, J., Li, L., Xu, Z. and Fujita, H., 2015. Construction of a technology adoption decision-making model and its extension to understanding herd behavior. Knowledge-Based Systems, 89, pp.471-486.

Krumme, C., Cebrian, M., Pickard, G. and Pentland, S., 2012. Quantifying social influence in an online cultural market. PloS one, 7(5), p.e33785.

Lee, E. and Lee, B., 2012. Herding behavior in online P2P lending: An empirical investigation. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 11(5), pp.495-503.

Lefebvre, R.C., 2011. An integrative model for social marketing. Journal of Social Marketing, 1(1), pp.54-72.

Lefebvre, R.C., 2012. Transformative social marketing: co-creating the social marketing discipline and brand. Journal of Social Marketing, 2(2), p.118.

Luo, B. and Lin, Z., 2013. A decision tree model for herd behavior and empirical evidence from the online P2P lending market. Information Systems and e-Business Management, 11(1), pp.141-160.

Wymer, W., 2011. Developing more effective social marketing strategies. Journal of Social Marketing, 1(1), pp.17-31.