How do companies respond to consumer advocacy behavior in their digital marketing strategies?

Abstract

This study aims to confirm whether the series of marketing strategies designed by companies have followed the consumer process in product consumption with reference to the stages of the 5As: aware, appeal, ask, act, and advocate. Companies respond to these stages by implementing five market interventions: consumer affinitive direction, touch power strengthening, market preference enhancement, loyalty retain quality, and e-advocacy leverage capacity. An empirical analysis using AMOS was carried out on 352 online-based culinary business operators in Indonesia, a field that has experienced massive expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic. From the results of this analysis, it can be concluded that although the market interventions do not follow the exact same process as the 5A concept, in general, the stages followed by companies in online product marketing are compatible and parallel to those in the consumer process of product consumption. The various concepts of digital marketing strategies contribute conceptually to enhance the scope of e-advocacy theory from the perspective of strategic marketing, a field that has received limited research attention. AcknowledgmentI would like to acknowledge the support of the Research and Community Service Institute, Sebelas Maret University (SMU) Indonesia, which helped me fund and publish this study. I also express my appreciation to several undergraduate students, members of the research group of Behavioral Marketing, SMU, who have assisted in disseminating and collecting the data. Finally, I appreciate my lecturer colleagues from the Management Department of the Faculty of Economics and Business, SMU, who were always enthusiastically involved in discussing the problems and phenomena in this analysis.