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
communities
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 marketers
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 significant
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 Institute
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 ‘information
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 interactive
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 differentials
in participation rates of those people who have access and are users. Training
can also be used to reduce this divide.
