Benchmarking Social Marketing Programs

A new survey from the Association of National Advertisers reveals that many commercial marketers face the same problems as social marketers when trying to construct and deliver integrated marketing programs.

• Sixty-three percent of marketers rank organizational issues as the greatest challenge to successfully integrating their marketing efforts. More specifically, they identified the existence of "functional silos" inside their companies as a key challenge.
• Most marketers (72 percent) feel the development of the “Big” creative idea that can be leveraged across all marketing channels is the most important contribution an agency can make toward an integrated marketing campaign.
• Almost 50 percent of marketers want their agencies to be media neutral when developing an integrated marketing program.
• Sales data and ROI analysis are viewed as the most important measures of the effectiveness of an IMC campaign.

So for the social change agents who look to the commercial sector for some inputs and points of comparison for benchmarking marketing practices:

Intraorganizational and other management concerns are among the greatest impediments to successful marketing efforts: a fact that is rarely recognized in discussions of 'what goes wrong' with social change efforts - not that it hasn't been been raised before.

The work to gain the audience insight that leads to the 'big' idea is one of the more unappreciated elements of the 'great' or most successful social marketing programs. Truly inspired and effective campaigns do not come out of workbooks or by following 'recipes.'

Programs designed from a tactical communications (promotion or media) perspective rather than a strategic and comprehensive marketing one have less value in the short and long-term.

The focus of marketing and change efforts needs to be on objective measures of change - not the feelings and perceptions of program and agency managers, stakeholders, informants or focus group participants.

Technorati Tags: Benchmarking, Integrated Marketing Programs, Marketing Practices, Social Marketing