Best Practices in Digital Content Marketing for Building University Brands

This paper explores and proposes the use of digital content marketing as a means of brand-building for colleges and universities. The paper reviews and synthesizes literature on the state of the art in digital content marketing in order to identify best practices. Effective techniques, some based on empirical testing, are applied to the use of digital content marketing by higher education institutions

At the Intersection of Politics & Consumption: A Review of Ethical Shopping in America

This paper condenses the existing literature on ethical shopping in the United States with the goal of providing an up-to-date review of the topic. It profiles the ethical shopper and distinguishes the various institutions and instruments of political consumerism evident in the Fair Trade movement. It also provides recommendations for more rigorous study of moral consumer behavior and implications for implementing fair trade marketing strategies

From Ethical to Sustainable Consumption: An Exploratory Study of Students\u27 Familiarity with Mindful Consumption

This paper seeks to further the marketer\u27s understanding of ethical consumption by exploring differences in the way people perceive ethical consumption, mindful consumption, and overconsumption. The results support the idea that neither ethical nor mindful consumption designate a clearly defined set of practices. Researchers cannot count on even better- informed consumers to understand the full extent of ethical consumption possibilities or correctly apply more encompassing terms such as mindful consumption or overconsumption. As the construct of ethical consumption broadens to sustainable consumption, researchers will need to carefully operationalize the construct

A Framework for Using Customer Journey Mapping Alongside Digital Content Marketing to Build the College Brand

This paper illustrates how customer journey mapping can be applied in colleges and universities to facilitate content-rich branding. A customer journey map for higher education is created and illustrates how a student’s journey may be broken into phases of prepurchase, purchase, and postpurchase. Each stage is subdivided to show important touchpoints that occur in that stage. Touchpoints may be firm-initiated or customer-initiated, but research shows that customerinitiated touchpoints are becoming increasingly more numerous. The paper demonstrates how content-rich branding, through reliance on the use of relevant content, can be used to stimulate frequent positive customer-firm interactions. Customer journey analysis is part of the increasingly popular domain of customer experience management (CXM)

A Research Agenda for Advancing the Marketer\u27s Understanding of Ethical Consumption in a Post-Modern World

The attribution of moral significance to the choice of everyday consumer goods may well mean that personal consumption is increasingly viewed as an ethical exercise and not simply an economic transaction. Consumer behavior has emerged as an important moral battleground in the 21st century. Those in doubt of this statement need look no farther than their local Catholic church. In a church encyclical released 06.18.15, Pope Francis called for radical transformation not only of global politics and economics but of individual lifestyles in the battle to confront the environmental deterioration of Earth. An encyclical is a document that serves as an official communication of church teaching. Francis (the first pope from the Global South) wrote in Laudato Si (the first encyclical entirely devoted to environmental issues) that “humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and consumption to address the human causes that produce or aggravate environmental degradation and climate change” (Laudato Si, 2015). That such a high-profile religious communique would focus on human consumption and its consequences brings the marketing domain of consumer behavior squarely into the personal moral realm, as was the Pope’s intent some would argue (Stoll 2015). Consumer behavior, however, breached the moral domain two or more decades ago in a subfield of marketing known as ethical consumption (Pharr 2014). To consume ethically is to consume products that negatively affect neither man nor the natural world (Brinkman 2004). It extends to products that, not only through their consumption but also through their production or disposal, have a deleterious effect on people, society, nature, the environment, and/or animals

Facilitating the Choice of College Major Using the Consumer Decision Process, Content Marketing, and Social Media

This paper demonstrates how digital content and patterns of online engagement may be used at every stage of the consumer decision process to influence and inform the choice of college major. Implications and recommendations for college and departmental websites concerning how they can best assist prospective students in choosing a college major are highlighted throughout the paper. With its focus on process, this paper concretely shows how colleges and their academic departments can effectively leverage digital marketing and the consumer decision process to facilitate the college major choice process

A new view of electrochemistry at highly oriented pyrolytic graphite

Major new insights on electrochemical processes at graphite electrodes are reported, following extensive investigations of two of the most studied redox couples, Fe(CN)64–/3– and Ru(NH3)63+/2+. Experiments have been carried out on five different grades of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) that vary in step-edge height and surface coverage. Significantly, the same electrochemical characteristic is observed on all surfaces, independent of surface quality: initial cyclic voltammetry (CV) is close to reversible on freshly cleaved surfaces (>400 measurements for Fe(CN)64–/3– and >100 for Ru(NH3)63+/2+), in marked contrast to previous studies that have found very slow electron transfer (ET) kinetics, with an interpretation that ET only occurs at step edges. Significantly, high spatial resolution electrochemical imaging with scanning electrochemical cell microscopy, on the highest quality mechanically cleaved HOPG, demonstrates definitively that the pristine basal surface supports fast ET, and that ET is not confined to step edges. However, the history of the HOPG surface strongly influences the electrochemical behavior. Thus, Fe(CN)64–/3– shows markedly diminished ET kinetics with either extended exposure of the HOPG surface to the ambient environment or repeated CV measurements. In situ atomic force microscopy (AFM) reveals that the deterioration in apparent ET kinetics is coupled with the deposition of material on the HOPG electrode, while conducting-AFM highlights that, after cleaving, the local surface conductivity of HOPG deteriorates significantly with time. These observations and new insights are not only important for graphite, but have significant implications for electrochemistry at related carbon materials such as graphene and carbon nanotubes