Many people who design social marketing programs ponder how to best develop their communications mix (unfortunately they often don't spend as much time on the other 3 Ps). Stuart Elliott reports from the meeting of the Association of National Advertisers that experimentation is the name of the game.
Speaker after speaker at the meeting, which ended here yesterday, exhorted the more than 900 attendees to acknowledge and act on a new marketing reality: that major changes in consumer attitudes, habits and behavior will require completely making over how products are advertised...For example, to introduce a variant of Secret deodorant, Secret Sparkle, aimed at teenage girls, Procter decided to "forgo television entirely," Mr. Stengel said, which would have been considered heretical not too long ago, in favor of a print and online campaign that "far exceeded our expectations."
The openess of Madison Avenue to new ways of looking at the use of media for reaching audiences is one for social marketers to contemplate. That a Proctor & Gamble will forego the television route (usually the Holy Grail for many national social marketing programs) not because of the expense, but because of better reach and effectiveness in other media, underscores the point that it is reaching the audience where and when they are open to the message - not HOW they receive it - that leads to success in product and, I submit, social marketing.
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