Overview #
Corporate Social Marketing within Apps: Assessing Integration of Benchmark Criteria reviews health and banking apps to test how far social marketing benchmark criteria are embedded in corporate digital interventions. The research highlights where apps show genuine behaviour-change intent and where social marketing principles are only partially applied.
Abstract #
This paper assesses the boundaries of Corporate Social Marketing (CSM) by identifying the use of social marketing benchmark criteria and analyzing practitioners’ recognition of their use within mobile apps. The authors conducted a content analysis of 66 health apps. These targetted eating habits and/or physical activity, and 3 bank apps with saving appeals, to examine social marketing benchmark criteria prevalence.
The researchers analyzed a 40-question checklist (5 per criterion), with integration levels coded as 0 (none), 1-4 (partial), and 5 (full). Given concerns over for-profit legitimacy, the researchers assessed the value-driven motives behind interventions to ensure genuine societal commitment. Two social marketing practitioners were then interviewed to explore how their activities reflect a conscious use of benchmark criteria.
The content analysis of health and bank apps reveals that six of the eight French & Blair-Stevens (2006) benchmark criteria. Including customer orientation, behavior, exchange, competition, segmentation, and methods mix- are moderately to highly integrated. Insight often overlaps with customer orientation evidence and fails to emerge as a distinct core criterion, while theory remains the least integrated.
Interviews with the practitioners behind two health apps, iCook and StepUp, confirm the implicit integration of the six criteria. Both founders acted on personal motivations and drew on their cultural and social capital to address health challenges. Although they did not explicitly reference behavior change theories, they implemented key principles. Such as, gamification, community, personalization, and education. Their habitus and experience shaped how they integrated the benchmark criteria, underscoring the influence of practical knowledge and contextual factors.
The authors propose value-driven motives as an extra, CSM-specific criterion to assess the authenticity of for-profit-led interventions. This addition helps ensure interventions genuinely aim to improve societal well-being and reinforces the legitimacy of CSM. Despite ongoing debates about which criteria are fundamental, our findings suggest using six criteria. Including customer orientation, behavior, exchange, competition, segmentation, and methods mix. These serve as core components of CSM interventions. The researchers present these six criteria, along with value-driven motives, as a practical framework to guide social marketing managers in corporations in designing and implementing.
Access #
Natália Lemos – School of Economics, Management and Political Science, University of Minho, Portugal (id10974@alunos.uminho.pt); http://chrome-extensionhttps://rday.eeg.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/natalia_lemos.pdf
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Keywords #
CSM, Benchmark Criteria, Value-driven Motives, CSR.
