Perceived Organizational Support - Effectuating Digital Marketing Communication and Facilitating Sustainable Development Goals 3, 8 and 16: An Integrative Literature Review

1. Introduction

Digital marketing communication (DMC) is a fast-growing practice in marketing. It has received the attention of practitioners and scholars alike by dint of exhibiting important outcomes positively associated with organizational marketing goals. The benefits comprise rapid information gains, enhanced organizational productivity, knowledge expansion, quicker outcome measurements and feedback (Tiago & Veríssimo, 2014). DMC is formally defined as any communication between businesses and consumers that is accomplished via digital or electronic media (Shankar et al., 2022). Recent years have witnessed a remarkable increase in organizations’ DMC activities. The Statista Research Department (SRD, 2023) has estimated global digital advertising expenses in 2021 to have clocked 522.5 billion U.S. dollars. This is forecasted to escalate to 836 billion dollars by 2026. Global spending on social media advertising in 2021 cost an estimated 116 billion U.S. dollars (SRD, 2023). It is estimated that this figure would reach record levels of 262 billion by 2028. These figures bear testimony to the rapid expansion of DMC endeavors of organizations.

Nonetheless, when extolling the virtues of digital marketing activities, one should not overlook the fact that these activities are touched by a “dark side” (Tarafdar et al., 2014). Prior research informs us that whenever there has been an unrestrained and invasive exposure to digital technologies, employees have suffered from adverse physical and mental consequences like technostress, burnout, job dissatisfaction, turnover intentions (Fuglseth & Sørebø, 2014), role ambiguities and role conflicts (Tarafdar et al., 2014). Sadly, this dark side of DMC, wherein it takes its toll on the employees that perpetuate it, is often brushed away in scholarly discourse. When delineating the determinants of success of an organization’s DMC, the dimension that most often tends to be overlooked is the humane one. This is ironical because strategies, resources, and innovations notwithstanding, it is the human resource that forms the mainstay of an organization’s functioning. A marketing strategy no matter how good, can only be as good as the employees responsible for operationalizing it. Furthermore, employees form salient points of contacts between organizations and customers via engagement in customer services and complaints resolutions. Hence, their contribution in eliciting organizational DMC success cannot be ignored. It is incumbent on organizations to recognize employees’ contribution and support them in the face of unique job challenges. Marketing employees are especially vulnerable to experiencing job-stress (Tarafdar et al., 2014). This is on account of the diverse professional roles they are expected to play in servicing multiple groups, and the unnatural expectations held of them to grapple IS as well as interpersonal relationships with equal ease. Increasingly permeable work-family boundaries and changing market dynamics compound the problem and mark a predisposition for them to suffer from role-conflicts and role-ambiguities. This impacts sales adversely (Tarafdar et al., 2014). Besides, employees engaged in DMC (henceforth referred to as DMC employees) face the added burden of being constantly exposed to technology, and consequent technostress with subdimensions of techno-overload, techno-insecurity, techno-invasion, techno-uncertainty, and techno-complexity (Ragunathan et al., 2008). Against these complex contexts, it is imperative that organizations cultivate HR and offer them support. Importantly, this support should be ‘perceived’ by employees in a positive light.