Social Marketing, Quality of Life, Well-Being, and Violence Against Women: Analysis of the Hashtag #MeToo

Abstract

This case shows how social networks and, specifically, Twitter can be used as social marketing tools to improve women’s quality of life and well-being. It has focused on gender violence and sexual abuse, one of the factors that measure Women, Peace, and Security Index (WPS). Violence against women and sexual abuse are discussed in this case through the hashtag #MeToo. This hashtag represents the MeToo movement, a social movement that played a crucial role in the online mobilization by utilizing messages and appealing hashtags during the social movement. The methodology is based on data mining techniques and, the virality (number of tweets shared and published) of the messages with the mentioned hashtag is analyzed. The results show that countries with higher values in the WPS index are not those where the messages have been most shared. Also, there are differences between countries according to message content, posts shared, and emotional tone.

In conclusion, it has been shown that Twitter is useful as a social marketing tool to combat gender violence and increase the women’s quality of life, because of the high impact that these issues have achieved on social networks. It has led to more awareness in society to this social problem. Also, it favors the deployment of public powers to tackle it.

Teaching Notes

Answer to Question 1. Do you think that gender violence campaigns can influence people’s behavior? Justify your answer from the perspective of Social Marketing.

Currently, gender violence has boomed worldwide. According to UN data, 35% of women worldwide have suffered physical and sexual violence by partners or someone else at some point in their lives. Women who have suffered physical or sexual violence from a partner have higher rates of depression and a greater chance of having an abortion. Especially striking is the number of women murdered by gender-based violence worldwide: the total number is 87,000 dead women, of which 58% (about 50,000) were murdered by their partners or family members (UNODC 2019).

One of the most common problems regarding acts of gender violence is that they remain invisible, and women do not usually request help from the relevant authorities. We are dealing with a type of “invisible” violence that can be understood as any behavior, physical or verbal, active or passive, that threatens the emotional integrity of the victim, in a continuous and systematic process in order to produce intimidation, devaluation, feelings of guilt or suffering (León 2012). In this context, social marketing can enhance visibility since gender-based violence campaigns can encourage women to talk about the abuse they have suffered. If they do it on social networks, these women’s voices can become the voice of a community. This community claim can contribute to make laws harder or to improve preventive measures and care for victims. Besides, movements like #MeToo have had a significant impact on social networks, arise interpersonally in community networks, and do not take long to impact society’s culture (Aguado-Peláez 2019).

Three examples of campaigns that have had a high social impact are specified in Table 9.3.

Table 9.3 Examples of gender-violence campaigns on social media

Answer to Question 2. Do you think Twitter could be an effective social marketing tool?

This question can be answered by considering two aspects. Firstly, Twitter’s importance as a communication channel in social marketing, where discourses on social causes encourage citizens to participate, and secondly, putting some examples of social movements that have had an impact on Twitter through their hashtags.

Regarding the relationship between social marketing and social networks, it is necessary to comment that organizations should focus on understanding social networks’ use. It will provide the opportunity to offer exciting content to the public, which will lead to greater dissemination and visibility of the information. In this way, organizations will be able to work on determining how to transform their supporters into vocal promoters of their causes (Bernhardt et al. 2012).

In this sense, Twitter is a participatory and collaborative online media that enables users to contribute information about a topic. The development of microblogs like Twitter reflects the human desire to share and consume information and knowledge. In the case of tweets, these can be understood as micro discourses that can support collective mobilization processes (Gualda et al. 2015). It may be since activists can initiate speeches that are not usually carried out in other media (Penney and Dadas 2014). On the other hand, hashtags are often used to create spaces where users talk about specific topics, such as racial justice, gender equality, or health-related issues (Kuo 2018). These hashtag communities have tremendous power to shape conversations and mobilize users. Furthermore, they do not require users to follow each other, separating hashtag-based communities from follower networks (Bruns and Burgess 2011).

Answer to Question 3. Do you think it is necessary to create specific indicators for the analysis of women’s well-being and quality of life? Justify your answer.

Well-being and quality of life are multidimensional concepts that include those factors that affect the material, social and psychological state of positively or negatively (Tonon 2015). Therefore the quality of life will depend on the coverage of the needs and problems of citizens. Gender-based violence and sexual abuse are problems that affect the well-being of women and that are not included in the general indicators on the quality of life and well-being. These differences have led to the creation of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) indicator, which includes the singularities of gender in well-being. The results of this work have shown that countries that rank first in the WPS index are not the ones that have published the most messages with the hashtag #MeToo. Since fewer abuses and gender violence, women in these countries do not feel threatened and are countries with less inequality.