New Media Marketing Dilemmas and Innovation Pathways for Publishing Houses under Multiple Institutional Logics: A Case Study of Zhejiang Publishing United Group

DOI: https://doi.org/10.62517/jnme.202610409

Author(s)

Chuqing Zhou, Xiao Qian*, Yiyi Cao

Affiliation(s)

School of Cultural Creativity and Management, Communication University of Zhejiang, Jiaxing, Zhejiang, China * Corresponding Author

Abstract

In the present period of extensive media integration, publishing houses face certain practical problems in their new media marketing, like unclear brand positioning, lack of emotional connection with readers and poor matrix management. Previously, most studies focused on the technical fields or marketing methods, but they did not pay much attention to the basic structural causes of these problems. Our research is based on institutional logic theory and takes three publishing houses under the Zhejiang Publishing United Group as examples. Through multi-case analysis and in-depth interviews, we examine the various institutional logics and their conflicts in the new media marketing field. The investigation shows that publishing houses operate in a complicated situation affected by four institutional logics: government logic, market logic, professional logic and corporate logic. There are internal conflicts among these four logics in decision-making, content production and organizational structure. The algorithms and traffic rules of new media platforms aggravate these conflicts. A great many difficulties that publishing houses meet are the external manifestations of the internal contradictions and inconsistencies among these logics. From the viewpoints of the three publishing houses, it has been discovered that the innovation in new media marketing is not achieved by strictly following a single logic, but is a flexible selection process of combining multiple logics.

Keywords

Institutional Logic Theory; Publishing Houses; New Media Marketing; Selective Coupling; Digital Publishing

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