The Role of Community Management in Sustainable Marketing

ICIS 2023 2023 International Conference of Interdisciplinary Sciences No. Issue: 1 | Review and Perspective | pp.19-26 The Role of Community Management in Sustainable Marketing Ainul Luthfiana, Deby Santyo Rusandi, Arisyahidin, Eka Askafi Magister of Management, Postgraduate Program, Universitas Islam Kadiri. * Correspondence : [email protected] Abstract : Sustainable marketing requires studying consumer behaviour to design appropriate communication messages so they can convey business values effectively. Responsive marketing tends to act as a market controller rather than being controlled by the market. Therefore, studies are needed that respond to pressures, behaviour and habits, trends, and market impacts to find out the most appropriate strategies and processes to capture the direction of the strongest specific desires of the market. Identifying meaningful consumption patterns is an important strategy in optimizing sustainable marketing which in practice can reduce excessive media use, reduce unnecessary waste of time and effort, and can focus more on specific education for communities based on their core needs. Therefore, this case study and the literature review find that community works role in Doesoen Kopi Sirap, Semarang Regency, Indonesia, concludes that community management is crucial in implementing sustainable marketing. Keywords : Sustainable marketing, community management, consumer behaviour. 1. Introduction Businesses that use sustainable marketing techniques can benefit both the environment and their own bottom line. Organizations must fund sustainability projects in order to practice sustainable marketing. However, it can also boost employee engagement, assist regulatory compliance, boost brand loyalty, and boost revenues. Sustainable marketing can help an organization's relationship with the environment and its stakeholders. As a result, these techniques can help firms boost brand loyalty, employee satisfaction, regulatory compliance, and revenues. Page 19 ISSN: 2715-713X ICIS 2023 2023 International Conference of Interdisciplinary Sciences Lunde (2018) has expanded on the sustainability perspective of the triple bottom line. Sustainable marketing is defined as endorsing products and services that lessen environmental damage while morally enhancing the quality of life (QOL) of customers and other stakeholders. Global stakeholders, both now and in the future. In accordance with the call for TBL, Lunde has proposed a five-dimensional GREEN framework for long-term innovation marketing (Elkington, 2018). These five dimensions' initial letters, which together form the acronym "GREEN," are as follows: A. Globalized value exchange market that is not just focused on buyers and sellers but also on society, suggesting that businesses would take part in charitable endeavors that benefit both local communities and people in other societies. B. Conscientious environmental behavior (which suggests reducing damage to the environment) C. Sustainable business practices that are equitable (meaning that value is created for all stakeholders, including the disadvantaged or marginalized) D. Sustainable ethical consumption (which implies that for consumption to be as ethical as possible, supply chains and businesses must operate ethically), and E. Essential well-being and quality of life (implying the role of businesses that make up a large provisioning system composed of a diverse set of businesses that leads to an improved quality of life for consumers). Amid global concerns about climate change and the negative impact of humans on the environment, sustainability has become a major focus in various aspects of our lives, including business. One important approach to supporting sustainability is through ―sustainability marketing.‖ Over the last five decades, sustainability has evolved as a significant macromarketing concept. Beginning in the 1960s with concerns about the world's finite resources limiting economic expansion, sustainability thinking has evolved to include societal issues as well as ecological and environmental considerations in economic and governance operations. Governments and corporations must collaborate to address the myriad global issues associated with climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, Page 20 ISSN: 2715-713X ICIS 2023 2023 International Conference of Interdisciplinary Sciences diminishing resources, and the socioeconomic inequalities that define continued world hunger and poverty. Stopping or reversing unsustainable production and consumption that was previously sought as part of market-driven business activity is an important aspect of this quandary. Marketing, with its market-driven consumption-oriented activities, may have intentionally or unconsciously aided these unsustainable production-consumption processes (Seth & Parvatiyar, 2020). Organizations that participate in genuine sustainable marketing may foster brand loyalty among ecologically and socially conscientious customers. A commitment to a brand based on its perceived ideas and values is referred to as brand loyalty. Customer retention rates can be increased if firms effectively relate their brand image to a wider environmental or social objective, such as the battle against climate change or discrimination. Customers that show brand loyalty are more likely to purchase, even if competitors offer cheaper costs. Repeat business requires less advertising than new client acquisition and can account for a significant part of income. 2. Methodology This research implemented a qualitative method and the case study approach to study the uses of community management in Doesoen Kopi Sirap, Semarang, Central Java. The data was discovered by monitoring the practices of the business process, conducting an in-depth interview with several important stakeholders, and organizing a focus group discussion to get consensus on the study subject. 3. Result and Discussion Doesoen Kopi Sirap is a village in Semarang Regency which has abundant coffee plantations. We conducted case studies on stakeholders, especially those who personally sell local roasted coffee beans up to a minimum of 400 kg every month. In-depth observations and interviews were carried out from September to November 2023 to examine how the community management was worked by Wahkid Budi Utomo (the key person of Doesoen Kopi Sirap) to keep in touch with permanent customers and also open markets for his coffee products. Based on the results of in-depth interviews and Page 21 ISSN: 2715-713X ICIS 2023 2023 International Conference of Interdisciplinary Sciences observations, we identified the community management practiced at Doesoen Kopi Sirap as follows: Figure 1: Community management practices of Doesoen Kopi Sirap Customers are at both the start and the finish of the value chain in today's globalized and dynamic marketplaces. Due to the unstoppable process of digital transformation, one of the greatest benefits of entrepreneurship in a situation like this is the ability of entrepreneurs to seize opportunities and find innovative ways to meet customer expectations, which in turn transforms the market and the world at large. The ability of consumers to obtain information and purchase goods and services offered even outside national borders is one of the effects of globalization (Guerola-Navarro et al., 2020). This implies the requirements, aspirations, and anticipations of clients. One of the major forces promoting the economic development of society is therefore marketing, which is defined as the management of business relationships with consumers within the market. More specifically, entrepreneurial marketing is defined as a potent combination of marketing instruments and the inventive and transformative power of entrepreneurship. In light of this, customer relationship management, or CRM, has become the most popular strategy and management tool in recent decades. It is specifically intended to manage effective marketing strategies by managing customer Page 22 ISSN: 2715-713X ICIS 2023 2023 International Conference of Interdisciplinary Sciences relationships and consistently and effectively managing client-focused information and actions (Al-Omoush et al., 2021). This is particularly significant for the entrepreneurship industry. Companies establish communities — or adopt community management strategies throughout the organization — to foster true relationships among its clients, sponsors, and audiences. These practices will walk you through the stages and best practices for developing and managing an audience-focused community. According to Tribe, community management is the collective effort of developing an inclusive community through various types of contact with a company's consumers, staff, and partners. It is the process by which a corporation takes advantage of opportunities to engage with its consumers (both in person and through digital media) by establishing a network through which all participants may communicate, share, and grow a sense of belonging. Community management is quickly becoming a go-to technique for many firms and is widely accepted. Market interaction begins with the selection of a trustworthy exchange partner, a person prepared to trade or buy a product of interest who is regarded as honest and dependable (Sibai, et al. 2015). In order to successfully modify a habit, environmental cues that automatically trigger habitual behavior must be disrupted. However, the efficacy of downstream interventions—which neglect to address the performance contexts and socio-structural factors that sustain habits—may be constrained by an individual's daily lifestyle. Understanding behavioral change as a process enables us to see some types of discrepancies between attitudes and behavior as tentative changes made by individuals. It also means that SMEs will need to implement different interventions at different stages of the process in order to influence individual behavior in the context of sustainable consumption. Depending on an individual's stage of change, different decisional balance dimensions influence different behavioral changes. This emphasizes the need for successful segmentation and targeting based on stages of change in marketing campaigns related to social, environmental, and sustainable issues. This emphasizes how crucial it is to tailor behavior change interventions, both upstream and Page 23 ISSN: 2715-713X ICIS 2023 2023 International Conference of Interdisciplinary Sciences downstream, to the unique stage segments that each social, environmental, or sustainability campaign is targeting (Carrigan, et al, 2011). Online communication has become the primary means of exchange between businesses and consumers. Establishing and maintaining online relationships, which are characterized as interpersonal communications facilitated through online platforms, poses both opportunities and challenges for businesses. Relationship marketers have access to a vast and ever-changing toolkit for managing customer relationships online in contexts such as e-commerce, social media, online communities, mobile, big data, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality, all while keeping up with the exponential advancements in computing technology (Steinhoff, et al, 2019). Optimizing social media as community management is a potential approach to be developed. At the moment, online marketing practices have gone well so that product sales have reached targets. This means that product knowledge and the values it instills can be conveyed well to consumers. Thus, if community management is carried out further, it can slowly provide awareness for consumers to shift to environmentally friendly consumption practices without reducing brand awareness and economic dependence on products that have been consumed for a long period. Therefore, advance planning of sustainable marketing strategies is needed to achieve meaningful consumption patterns, an important strategy in optimizing sustainable marketing which in practice can reduce excessive media use, reduce unnecessary waste of time and effort (packaging, distributing, etc.), and can focus more on specific education for communities based on their core needs. 4. Conclusion It was found that the community management is already implemented in the business process of Doesoen Kopi Sirap to optimize the roasted coffee beans selling. Thus, in order to enhance the quantity of goods sold, they must strengthen community management so that it is not managed just by one person. The community management system should be captured, organized, and documented in central documents of management so the succession could be worked effectively even if the key person must Page 24 ISSN: 2715-713X ICIS 2023 2023 International Conference of Interdisciplinary Sciences be changed. It means that the community management also takes the urgent role of brand awareness to get effective more on long term customer’s needs thus decreasing the unnecessary time and effort waste of media waste for marketing. 5. Acknowledgment This study is thanks to Pascasarjana, Islamic University of Kadiri for the material support so the research could be done, reported and published as the ICIS 5 proceeding. 6. References : Al-Omoush, K. S., Simón-Moya, V., Atwah Al-ma’aitah, M., & Sendra-García, J. (2021). The determinants of social CRM entrepreneurship: An institutional perspective. Journal of Business Research, 132, 21–31. Carigan, Marilyn., et al. (2011). Fostering Responsible Communities: A Community Social Marketing Approach to Sustainable Living. Journal of Business Ethics (2011) 100:515–534. Elena, Cherchia Alina. (2016). Social Media- a Strategy in Developing Customer Relationship Management. Procedia Economics and Finance, 39, 785-790. Guerola-Navarro, V., Oltra-Badenes, R., Gil-Gomez, H., & Gil-Gomez, J. A. (2020b). Customer relationship management (CRM): A bibliometric analysis. International Journal of Services Operations and Informatics, 10(3), 242– 268. Lunde, M. B. (2018). Sustainability in marketing: A systematic review unifying 20 years of theoretical and substantive contributions (1997–2016). AMS Review, 8, 85-110. Peterson, Mark., et al. (2020). Sustainable Marketing and Consumer Support for Sustainable Businesses. Sustainable Production and Consumption (10) 2020. Sheth, Jagdish N. & Parvatiyar, Atul. (2020). Sustainable Marketing: Market-Driving, Not Market-Driven. Journal of Macromarketing, 1-16. Sibai, Olivier, et al. (2015). Social Control in Online Communities of Consumption: A Framework for Community Management. Psychology of Marketing, Vol 32(3), 250-264. Page 25 ISSN: 2715-713X ICIS 2023 2023 International Conference of Interdisciplinary Sciences Steinhoff, Lena., et al. (2019). Online relationship marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2019) 47:369–393. Van Dam, Ynte k. & Apeldoorn, Paul. A. C. (1996). Sustainable Marketing. Journal of Macromarketing. https://aicontentfy.com/en/blog/benefits-of-community-management-for-acquisitionand-retention accessed at 8th December, 2023. Page 26 ISSN: 2715-713X