Social forces

Social forces are closely linked with culture and have significant implications for digital marketing.
Broadly speaking, the key factors which make up these forces are: social com- munities based on
demographic profile, social exclusion, and cultural factors.
In the previous chapter, we looked at demographics and consumer adoption of the web and found
great variation in terms of levels of Internet access, amount of usage and engagement in online
purchases. In this chapter, our interest is in the wider impact of demographic influences: changes in
populations. Why this is important is that the size and growth rates of populations have implications
for digital marketing strategy and planning. One highly important shift in demographic trends is that
for the first time in the history of the world over 50 per cent of the population lives in an urban
setting.
The world population is estimated at just under 7 billion, with 26.3 per cent being 14 and under, 65.9
per cent between the ages of 15 and 64 and 7.9 per cent over the age of 65. Population growth is
estimated to be 1.09 per cent. The expanding population means there is increasing demand on finite
resources. Changes in population are important to market- ers as they create new market
opportunities. Currently, emerging markets in Russia, India, Brazil and China represent market
growth but there are other demographic factors before making a major investment in developing
and accessing emerging markets – for example, two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults live in just
eight countries: Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan (CIA,
2011).
Analysis of demographic trends can reveal important issues, such as that there is a sig- nificant group
in each national population of at least a quarter of the adult population that does not envisage ever
using the Internet. Clearly, the lack of demand for Internet services from this group needs to be
taken into account when forecasting future demand. Furthermore, this raises the questions of social
isolation, or what the Oxford Internet Insti- tute called in its research into Internet usage: ‘Internet
disengagement’. Others consider this to be an aspect of ‘social exclusion’.
Social exclusion
The social impact of the Internet has also concerned many commentators because the Internet has
the potential effect of accentuating differences in quality of life, both within a society in a single
country and between different nations, essentially creating ‘informa- tion haves’ and ‘information
have-nots’. This may accentuate social exclusion where one part of society is excluded from the
facilities available to the remainder and so becomes isolated. The United Nations noted, as early in
the growth of the Internet as 1999, that parallel worlds are developing where:
those with income, education and – literally – connections have cheap and instantaneous access to
information. The rest are left with uncertain, slow and costly access . . . the advantage of being
connected will overpower the marginal and impoverished, cutting off their voices and concerns from
the global conversation.
Developed countries with the economies to support it are promoting the use of IT and the Internet
through social programmes, such as the UK government’s UK Online initiative, which operated
between 2000 and 2004 to promote the use of the Internet by business and consumers. The
European Commission (2007) believes that ‘e-Inclusion policies and actions have made significant
progress in implementing the goal of an inclusive knowledge-based society’. The Commission
recommends that governments should focus on three aspects of e-inclusion:
1 The access divide (or ‘early digital divide’), which considers the gap between those with and those
without access. Governments will encourage competition to reduce costs and give a wider choice of
access through different platforms (e.g. mobile phone or interac- tive TV access in addition to fixed
PC access).
2 The usage divide (‘primary digital divide’), concentrating on those who have access but are non-
users. Governments promote learning of basic Internet skills through ICT courses to those with the
highest risks of disengagement.
3 The divide stemming from quality of use (‘secondary digital divide’), focussing on dif- ferentials in
participation rates of those people who have access and are users. Training can also be used to
reduce this divide.

Cultural forces
The local language and culture of a country or region can dramatically affect the require- ments of
users of a web service. We discuss this issue further in Chapter 7 on website design. The types of
sites used (media consumption) and search engines used can also vary dramatically by country, as
discussed in Chapter 9. So it is important for situation analysis to review country differences.
Environmental and green issues related to Internet usage
The future state of our planet is a widely held social concern that is closely related to economic
issues. Although technology is generally seen as detrimental to the environment – think long- and
short-haul flights, TVs and electronic gadgets burning fuel when left on standby – there are some
arguments that e-commerce and digital communications can have environmental benefits. These
benefits are also often beneficial to companies in that they can make cost savings while positioning
themselves as environmentally concerned – see Digital marketing insight 3.7. If companies trading
online can explain these benefits to their customers effectively, as HSBC has done, then this can
benefit these online channels.
But what does the research show about how much e-shopping reduces greenhouse gas emissions? A
study by Finnish researchers Siikavirta et al. (2003), limited to e-grocery shopping, has suggested
that, depending on the home delivery model used, it is theoretically possible to reduce the
greenhouse gas emissions generated by grocery shopping between 18 per cent to 87 per cent
compared with the situation in which household members go to the store. Some of the constraints
that were used in the simulation model include: maximum of 60 orders per route, maximum of 3000
litres per route, working time maximum 11 hours per van, working time maximum 5 hours per route,
loading time 20 minutes per route, drop-off time 2 minutes per customer.