Addressing “social hesitancy” with visual marketing

Purpose “Social hesitancy” is a reluctance by people to purchase products, or engage in activities, that may benefit themselves and society. This paper aims to review and assess a visual marketing approach to this significant social marketing problem. Design/methodology/approach The authors use data visualization technology as an informational tool, visual sentiment analysis as a social text mining tool and Latent Dirichlet Allocation visual (LDAvis) modelling as a topic modelling tool to measure, assess and address social attitudes inherent in hesitancy. The paper’s hypothesis is that these technologies can help society understand the reasons for, and barriers to, hesitancy, and that visual marketing is an extremely effective approach to the hesitancy problem. Findings Using extensive vaccination data and results from the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors found that the visual marketing technologies were successful informational and motivational tools for social hesitancy. Social implications Hesitancy is a social marketing concern that can have an impact on product or service promotional and motivational campaigns during a crisis. The LDA visual model, for example, can quantitatively extract and measure the social attitudes of people and identify and segment these people based on their feelings. These tools can be valuable to social marketers by helping to establish strategies for any product or service exhibiting hesitant consumer behaviour. Originality/value Using advanced visual technology, the paper contributes to social hesitancy by addressing the following question: does a visual marketing approach help social marketers understand the underlying reasons for, and help to mitigate, social hesitancy?