Tag: Marketing

Academic Spotlight: Professor Mario Vafeas

Author sarahcawthra | Posted on

Meet Mario Vafeas, Professor of Marketing and Leader of the Applied Marketing Research Group

With a background in consultancy and an interest in research with real-world impact, Professor Mario Vafeas brings industry insight and academic rigour together in his work. In this conversation, he reflects on how marketing relationships, collaboration and organisational engagement can drive better outcomes for both businesses and employees.

Firstly, what prompted your transition from consultancy into academia?

I think some people have a natural inclination towards academic work. Even when I worked in industry, I never really stepped away from academia. I completed an MBA part time and then a PhD. After that, it felt like a natural progression to move fully into academic life.

Before making the switch, I tried teaching as an associate lecturer while still in consultancy. I really enjoyed it, the combination of research and teaching really appealed to me. So in 2010, I made the move into academia full time and I’ve never looked back.

Do you ever miss working in industry?

Not really, because I don’t feel I’ve ever left it. I’ve always stayed engaged with external firms through my research and projects like Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.

“My role brings together teaching, academic research and external engagement, that mix is what I enjoy most. It’s not a complete departure from industry, it’s more of an evolution.”

Could you share a project where your research has been translated into practice?

For many years, I focused on ‘value co-creation’ – how organisations work together to create value rather than delivering it unilaterally. My research explored how marketing agencies and their clients in the creative industries can collaborate more effectively to strengthen relationships and outcomes.

That work attracted a lot of interest from agencies and clients alike. I’ve delivered workshops, seminars and consultancy sessions to help them apply these ideas in practice. Helping them to improve collaboration and get more value from those partnerships.

More recently, I’ve been working with my colleague Dr Ed Little on something a little different, a concept called ‘workplace alienation’ (when employees feel disconnected from their work). We’ve explored how ownership models shape engagement and motivation by comparing conventional organisations with employee-owned firms. (Examples of such firms include John Lewis and Aardman Animations.)

Our findings are generating interest from both businesses and organisations like the Employee Ownership Association, who are exploring how our insights can help promote employee ownership and ultimately reduce alienation at work.

How has your industry experience influenced your research interests?

It’s been fundamental. My early career in consultancy was all about managing relationships between agencies and clients. I was fascinated by why some relationships thrived while others broke down.

That curiosity led to my PhD, which examined how creative agencies and clients could build longer-lasting, more effective partnerships. In the creative industries, around 80 per cent of client-agency relationships don’t last beyond five years – that’s incredibly inefficient. My research looked at what makes these relationships work better and last longer, which continues to inform my work today.

What advice would you give to early-career researchers hoping to make meaningful contributions in marketing?

“Find topics that sit at the intersection of academic value and practical relevance. It’s important that your research contributes to academic knowledge but also that it can be applied and have real-world impact.”

I’ve always tried to ensure my work ticks both boxes: that it’s publishable and interesting to academic audiences, but also something I can share externally with businesses or practitioners. When those two worlds overlap, that’s where the most valuable research happens.

Outside academia, what inspires your thinking?

A lot of my ideas come from everyday life. My research on workplace alienation, for example, grew out of personal experiences – wondering why service quality varies so much between firms and realising it’s often linked to how motivated employees feel.

We all have personal experiences as consumers and collaborators. Reflecting on those moments often sparks new questions and sometimes, new research ideas.

Find out more about Mario, his research and how to get in touch here.

Confronting alienation: What can we learn from employee ownership?

Author ripleywk | Posted on

Last Monday (16 June), our Applied Marketing Research Group hosted what turned out to be a truly enlightening half-day event at Bristol Business School. The topic—”Confronting alienation: What can we learn from employee ownership?”—struck a chord with delegates, and I’m excited to share some of the key insights from our latest research.

The Problem We’re Tackling

Workplace alienation isn’t just an academic concept—it’s a real issue affecting countless employees across the UK. When people feel disconnected from their work, lacking control or purpose, it impacts not just their wellbeing but also organisational performance. This is what drove my colleague Ed Little (Associate Head of Department for Postgraduate Marketing and Events Programmes) and I to investigate whether employee ownership could offer a solution.

What We Discovered: The Five ‘Cs’

Our research reveals that co-ownership can indeed reduce workplace alienation, but it works through five critical mechanisms—what we call the five ‘Cs’:

  • Control: Giving employees genuine say in decision-making
  • Care: Creating an environment where people feel valued and supported
  • Congruence: Aligning individual values with organisational purpose
  • Cohesion: Building stronger team bonds and collaboration
  • Community: Fostering a sense of belonging and shared identity

These aren’t just theoretical concepts—we’ve seen them play out in real organisations, creating more engaged and satisfied workforces.

However, our research also uncovered something crucial that organisations need to understand: employee ownership isn’t a magic bullet. When implemented poorly or without careful consideration, it can actually increase alienation for some individuals. This finding challenges the assumption that employee ownership is universally beneficial and highlights the need for thoughtful, strategic implementation.

Learning from the Experts

The event brought together some remarkable speakers who brought these concepts to life. James de le Vingne, CEO of the Employee Ownership Association, shared invaluable insights from across the sector.

Panellists included Richard Gosden from the John Lewis Partnership (the UK’s largest employee-owned business) and Katie Scott, MD of Interactive Learning & Development (an employee-owned SME).

Research with Purpose in Action

This work exemplifies what we mean by “Research with purpose” here at UWE—one of our RISE pillars. We’re not just publishing papers; we’re actively helping organisations create work environments that maximise employee satisfaction, self-realisation, job meaningfulness, and performance.

The response has been incredibly encouraging. Several organisations that attended have already invited us to conduct ‘pre-post’ studies to help them reduce employee alienation in their own workplaces. This is exactly the kind of real-world impact we strive for.

What’s Next?

The feedback from delegates was overwhelmingly positive. Samuel Moles from Stephens Scown LLP captured it perfectly: “Brilliant new research from the Business School at UWE that shows employee ownership can address workplace alienation. Really valuable insight for businesses. Thanks Mario and Ed. More research please!”

And more research is exactly what we plan to deliver. The first stage of our study has been published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management, but this is just the beginning. We’re excited to work with forward-thinking organisations to explore how these insights can be applied in practice.

The Bigger Picture

As we face ongoing challenges around employee engagement and workplace satisfaction, understanding the nuanced relationship between ownership structures and alienation becomes increasingly important. Our research suggests that when done right, employee ownership can be a powerful tool for creating more fulfilling work experiences—but the emphasis must be on doing it right.

If you’re interested in learning more about our research or exploring how these findings might apply to your organisation, I’d love to hear from you. After all, the best research happens when academia and practice come together to solve real problems.

Professor Mario Vafeas is Professor of Marketing at Bristol Business School, UWE Bristol. His research focuses on value co-creation, customer experience, and workforce dynamics.

Encouraging people to drive less

Author ripleywk | Posted on

Author: Tom Bowden-Green

Cars undoubtedly offer many benefits, but they also contribute to pollution and congestion within our cities.  Many national and local governments around the world are therefore trying to reduce car use where alternatives are available.  The long-term aim is the improvement of public health, through both increased exercise and better air quality.

This type of marketing; for broader public benefits, is often referred to as social marketing.  Previous collaboration between practitioners and academics here in Bristol has, for example, included work to increase exercise and reduce alcohol consumption.  Social marketing also offers many opportunities to investigate and apply a range of psychological theories outside of a typical academic environment.

From an academic perspective, there are many theories that explain our motivation to drive a car, and likewise our potential motivation to stop.  We recently worked with a local authority to understand motivation to drive less according to Self Determination Theory (SDT).  SDT is a theory developed many years ago, which differentiates broadly between behaviour that is internally-driven (intrinsic) and that which is guided by external reward or punishment (extrinsic).

Generally-speaking, the theory suggests that intrinsic behaviour is more likely to lead to longer-term commitment.  Social marketers seeking changes to behaviour are therefore keen to develop techniques that encourage intrinsic behaviour.  In relation to driving, this might mean less reliance on fines and penalties for example.

Overall, our research found that the strongest motive for driving less is ‘identified’ motivation: a blend of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation where a person ‘identifies’ the personal benefit of adopting a new behaviour to meet their own own goals. 

We then also sought to understand what communicators can do to encourage such behaviour.  For example, the ‘social proof’ principle suggests that behaviour is often adopted when we see others who we perceive as similar to us.  Using this principle, communicators often present case studies to encourage others.  However, our findings on this project suggest that whilst people are able to recognise the motivation shown by others within case studies, they don’t seem to use motivation as a dimension for judging similarity.  This means that whereas people perhaps judge similarity according to gender, they don’t seem to recognise similarity to others according to motivation.

This is an interesting finding which is likely to prompt more research questions and perhaps further studies.  In practical terms, it suggests that social marketers ought to focus on presenting case studies that are similar in more obvious ways to the intended audience (e.g. demographically similar).  This is a small part of a longer-term challenge though, as researchers continue to search for techniques that encourage internally-driven behaviour to benefit wider society through social marketing.

Dr. Tom Bowden-Green is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing and behavioural science researcher at Bristol Business School, UWE Bristol. With over a decade of experience in higher education he is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Prior to academia, he spent 11 years in consultancy, ultimately as an Associate Director at Grayling in Bristol. Tom teaches digital marketing at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and previously launched and led the MSc Digital Marketing program for five years until 2023. His research focuses on consumer behaviour in online environments, with a particular interest in the influence of personality on social media behaviour. His expertise lies in digital marketing, social media, psychology, and behavioural science.

B2B Relationship Formation Online in Social Media Communities

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

By Peter Wise

Businesses form online partnerships with other businesses every day. Those businesses may never physically meet and are spatially and temporally displaced. The objectives of the business, in participating in online forum social media communities (OFSMCs) and other social platforms, may be to source suppliers, distributors, expertise, personnel, etc. Much has been published concerning B2B relationships in the offline physical world, but much less about the online virtual world.

For the business practitioner, online presents an opportunity to research seller prospective relationship partners (PRPs) without the other party being aware and without interacting. The practitioner can complete preliminary evaluation, shortlist candidates, and then resolve to interact. The candidate, once aware via contact of their buyer PRP’s interest, is afforded the opportunity to reciprocate in their own due diligence of their suitor, to identify potential synergy, homophily, potential, etc.

Where a mutual spark is detected, the businesses come together, typically virtually and asynchronously, at moments that suit each PRP, to interact and rapidly determine whether ‘marriage’ prospects are recognised. The interaction may be brutal in the absence of F2F social etiquette; time is money, and where there are multiple seller PRP candidates, the faster the evaluation decision, the faster a buyer PRP can move on to the next seller PRP candidate evaluation.

The Study

Analysis was conducted of multiple active UK focussed B2B OFSMCs throughout a 12 month period. The study used netnography, a blended ethnography approach adapted for online research; observations were subsequently discussed with the most active OFSMC practitioners using depth-interviews.

The approach permitted naturalistic observation of B2B relationship development interactions, without disturbance from the researcher. Dialogue was observed and insight gained; this qualitative, inductive, exploratory, research was conducted without preconceived hypotheses.

OFSMCs are populated by a diverse spectrum of practitioners; start-ups to mature businesses, construction to legal, CEOs to product managers. Time resources are invested longitudinally in the development of an archive of contributions typically containing knowledge, advice, commercial war stories, etc.

The contributing practitioner typically acts on behalf of their own business with autonomy or with the ear of decision makers. Practitioners are typically experienced and knowledgeable of the business they represent, recognising commercial opportunities arising, and understanding how to get things done within their organisation. Opportunities are real in OFSMCs; in the rare instance where the practitioner is bullshit-inclined, this is publicly identified and the practitioner duly exposed.

The process of forming a relationship is longitudinal witnessing an archive of contributions and interactions, consciousness from other OFSMC practitioners, successful due diligence, satisfactory interaction, and thereafter formal or informal convention of a roadmap. Where projects are fulfilled successfully and profitably, the relationship matures, with a greater quantity of projects allocated to the relationship. Relationship partners (RPs) increasingly worked together to resolve challenges and share resources, without equivocation.

Status was influential at early stages where multiple suitable seller PRPs were present in the OFSMC. At later stages, the relevance of asymmetry in status became contracted. RPs respected one another having developed relations with personnel at different strata, observed the seller RP in action, understood the internal working of the respective RP, etc. RPs mutually valued one another based upon a history of successful transactions.

The relationship could continue indefinitely, successfully and collectively navigating operational challenges with the product offering cocreated to maintain and grow the relationship. Alternatively, the relationship could conclude harmoniously where business circumstances changed (e.g., retirement or end client ceased trading) or acrimoniously where a RP determined that the respective RP was no longer a worthy RP (e.g., opportunism, unethical activity, illegal activity).

The Reality

Businesses met other business, formed relationships and flourished online, in much the same way as they always have in F2F relationships offline. In the absence of visual and audio cues, RPs honed their asynchronous written skills, carefully crafting text to convey meanings (e.g., knowledge, confidence, clarity, and latency) developing textual analysis of communications received. Spatial and temporal displacement were overcome by communications, addressing operational issues, but with an informal personalised social content – interactions between proven friends.

An indicative timescale for a business entering an OFSMC to achieve consciousness by other practitioners was a maximum of 47 months, which required a significant labour investment in crafting an archive of OFSMC value-added content. From initial contact, the relationship was formalised typically in 1.75 months. Following a further indicative period of 36.75 months of multiple successful and profitable project completions, the RPs had become intertwined, understanding respective businesses intimately. The RPs, regarding each other as valued and trusted colleagues, had developed friendships. It was not inevitable where demand and harmony remained, that the relationship would advance to conclusion / cessation, therefore the timescale was not measured beyond business contentment.

To Summarise

Real B2B partnerships are formed online via OFSMCs, without requirement for traditional F2F etiquette formality. OFSMCs afford access to diverse businesses. The practitioner may engage with other practitioners and experience spontaneous camaraderie and commitment through a common forum membership. The business can be validated in the forum through peer review, interrogated, and approached to form a relationship. B2B partnerships evolve with synergy, homophily, trust, shared knowledge, shared ecosystems, and cocreated products.

Key Points to Takeaway

  • Online communication is textual and asynchronous; offline communication is typically verbal and synchronous
  • Reliance on text and textual interpretation, versus voice and behavioural communication
  • Six distinctive relationship development stages
  • Consciousness is gained via the creation of an archive of quality content
  • Up to 47 months to become established in the OFSMC
  • OFSMCs provide access to naturalistic text for due diligence without interaction
  • The online process of qualifying PRPs is abrupt versus offline
  • Trust and respect between RPs can be realised, whilst spatially and temporally displaced
  • Knowledge sharing, self-disclosure and intimacy online is rapid and candid, in the absence of restrictive social cues
  • 36.75 months from formation for the relationship to achieve contentment
  • Asymmetric status becomes irrelevant where the end client is fulfilled satisfactorily and profitably on multiple occasions
  • The results obtained in the research can be applied to other social media platforms wherein B2B interaction is possible

Is Marketing The Devil’s Art?

Author jyotishaw | Posted on

The latest blog post is written by Martin Williams, a member of UWE’s Applied Marketing Research Group.

In 2012, I was the Sales & Marketing Director at the ecological attraction and charity the Eden Project. I wrote an email to my colleagues on the Leadership Team proposing we do some market research. My boss, co-founder Sir Tim Smit, emailed me a reply in which he said “Marketing is the Devil’s art”; I wrote back “I thought that was rock ‘n’ roll” but it got me thinking. I left Eden the following year, but working there had made me interested in sustainable and ethical marketing and I wanted to keep exploring this area. Is marketing really the work of the Devil?

I gained my Masters in Marketing at UWE in the early Nineties and, to me, the discipline was fundamentally about meeting customers’ needs. After leaving UWE, I worked in bookselling for Bertelsmann before moving on to LEGO, where I held lots of different roles. Nothing in my experience suggested marketing was ruining the planet, but over time, I became aware that not everyone shared that view. I wondered how the principles of marketing could improve the world and set out to find some answers, interviewing people smarter than I am to unpick this issue.

I started with Tim, the first interviewee on my blog at thedevilsart.com and the man who unwittingly launched me on my journey. I asked him why he thought marketing was the Devil’s art and he told me it was because “it’s about temptation without necessarily concerning itself with the substance.” I wanted to explore this idea of temptation further, and although I’m not particularly religious, I managed to speak with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, who felt that an issue with marketing was that, beyond pure temptation, it often created a feeling of anxiety, “a spiral of competitive, anxious self-doubting and rivalrous mentality”.

Conversations often turned to marketing’s role in driving consumption. Tim said that another reason he felt marketing was the Devil’s art was because “I think it has been used to create market forces that are currently out of control, which means we have a global economy that is dependent on consumption, that we know we can’t sustain.” When I interviewed Richard Hall, author of Brilliant Marketing, he argued that marketing is less effective at doing that than marketers like to admit!

Nevertheless, a key theme throughout the conversations was one of growth, and the role of marketing in driving it, on a planet of finite resources. Rowan Williams said “we just have to keep asking the question ‘Growth for what?’ or ‘Growth in what?’”. For John Grant, Anita Roddick’s former agency head and the acknowledged expert in sustainable marketing, the answer is rather like managing a forest where “as new things grow, other things have to be chopped down and that’s government and society’s job”. For Chris Hines MBE, co-founder of Surfers Against Sewage, growth isn’t bad per se, the problem is “consumption-based growth” and pointed to the Circular Economy as a possible solution, often using different business models, such as renting goods instead of selling them.

The answer to Rowan Williams’ question ‘Growth for what?’ might be business purpose. John Grant told me that if your work has “been in the service of something, you will end up feeling that you’ve left something worth doing behind, as opposed to just a series of humorous lucky escapes and get rich quick schemes”. The social entrepreneur, Liam Black, co-founder of Fifteen with Jamie Oliver, cautioned that “purpose might get you into the conversation, but what will keep you there is the quality of the product.”

For several of my interviewees, however, one issue is that, in the words of Smit, “often people casually start to use the word ‘consumer’ as opposed to ‘people’”. TED speaker Jon Alexander, founder of the New Citizenship Project, told me that seeing others as people first can be transformative: “Rather than just ‘What can people buy from us?’ you ask ‘How can people be part of it?’”. Jon feels digital marketing is part of the solution as it promotes interaction: “In a society dominated by the internet, you have that kind of network diagram, many producers, many consumers, many different interactions, and fundamentally you have a many-to-many society.”

So is marketing really the Devil’s art? Whilst a champion of the discipline, Hall said that “it isn’t necessarily and always a force for good, of course not, because it can be used as Goebbels used it for his own purposes to great effect”. Rather, it’s a neutral thing – Liam Black told me “Take this glass. I could drink water out of it, I could give a glass of water to the homeless guy outside, or I could smash you in the face with it. It’s not the glass, it’s what use that’s put to. I feel the same way about marketing.”

What gives marketing its power is the ability to tell stories. Chris Hines said “So is marketing the Devil’s art? No it’s not! It’s an art. If the Devil uses it, then stuff the Devil – we can do better. And if you’ve got a good story and you’re using the art of marketing, you’ll win.” Last word on the subject must go to Tim Smit again, who told me “I think that marketing is the only thing that can save the human race right now, by giving us a different vision of ourselves to live up to.”

I’ve already learned a lot from running my blog, and it’s made me think about what I do and its impact on the world. This post is just an amuse bouche, but I get into a lot more depth with my interviewees at thedevilsart.com and there are more interviews coming in 2022.

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