Perception and Awareness of Youth Toward the Social Advertising Campaigns Being Run by Private Brands

Introduction

Internet technologies are fast changing the pace of organizational communication and public relation. One such IT tool used for enhanced communication is social media. Social media platforms in today’s time are not used for exchange of messages for socialization but also for business purposes and achieving societal goals (Qudah et al, 2020). When it comes to internet technologies for advertisements and campaigns, social media comes to be the most useful tool as on social media the personalized preferences and user behavior can be better understood (Henderson & Bowley, 2010). Social media marketing and campaigns refers to the activities carried out on social networking sites like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and the like for creating awareness. These social media platforms are now a day, an indispensable part of modern advertisements, campaigns and publicity. Big companies like H&M, Ben and Jerry use social social media for getting success (Chen, 2017).

In this competitive era of the 21st century it is very much important for firms to ensure higher awareness of their brands. For creating awareness, consumer engagements are very much required and as in the current era the younger generations spend more time on social media so advertising or campaigns on social media proves to be highly effective (Ahmed, 2020). However, reaching the marketing message to the younger generation is one of the very challenging tasks. The consumption pattern of the younger generation is found to be different from the older generations. The new generation uses social media for multiple purpose including entertainment, brand awareness, business purpose and the like. Therefore, designing advertisements and campaigns appropriately would decide the success.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) recommends the definition, “Advertising is any paid form of non-personal communication and promotion of ideas, goods and services by an identified sponsor”. Advertising is a strong force of communication and a very important marketing tool that helps in selling goods, services, images, as well as ideas through various channels of information and persuasion. The advertisements which publicize social concerns of human beings are called Social Advertisements. Social advertising are basically those advertisements which are aimed at social causes, welfare and well-being of the society. In other words, such advertisements create awareness among the people, inform and educate them about socially relevant issues like the Environment, Health, Family Welfare, Literacy etc. The objective of social advertisements is to communicate social causes, social issues, ideas or message to the general public like Pulse Polio, Save the Girl child, No Smoking, Save Our Tigers etc. Primarily, the main aim of social advertising is Image building, Action Inuring, Giving Awareness, Information of non-commercial causes etc. The advertising techniques used to promote commercial goods and services can be used to inform, educate and motivate people about non-commercial issues, such as HIV/AIDS, energy conservation, political ideology and deforestation. “Advertising justifies its existence when used in the public interest – it is much too powerful a tool to use solely for commercial purposes.” Advertising, in its non-commercial behavior, is an educational tool which is very powerful & is capable of getting close to and motivating large audiences. Public service advertising, non-commercial advertising, public interest advertising, cause marketing, and social marketing are different terms for the use of sophisticated advertising and marketing communications techniques on behalf of non-commercial, public interest issues and initiatives.

Though there are abundance of studies on social media marketing studies specifically related to perception and awareness of youth towards the social advertising campaigns being run by private brands are found to be very negligible. This study thus, makes an attempt to first highlight the research gap with help of systematic review of literature and thereby discuss the identified gap with the help of empirical data gathered from the survey. The literature review section is divided into certain thematic areas highly relevant for the study. The following sections delineates the same.