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13 July 2006

Sometimes Communication May be Enough

Disabled_parking_ticket_1 One of the sensitivities some of us social marketers have (in case you haven't noticed) is seeing communications campaigns passed off as 'marketing' ones. Speaking for myself, it's not that there aren't plenty of creative and effective health and social communications campaigns going on around the world (and some of my best friends are ...). Houtlust does a great job presenting many examples of social advertising campaigns and while many of them I don't get from a behavior change POV (yes, attention-getting they can be), I like this one for the possibilities that any 'Big' idea has for expanding across the marketing platform.

Too many people still park in parking spaces reserved for disabled drivers. The Brussels Equal Rights Organisation wanted to give handicapped people a voice and send a clear message to stop this antisocial behaviour.

The action created a shock effect: people who parked in a space reserved for disabled drivers felt 'caught' in the act and became more conscious of the problem. .. This action received big exposure in media like TV and press. It helped draw the attention of a large audience. People talked about what they saw in the streets or in the press (word of mouth), which positively influenced the public's opinion and attitude.

There was a time when I was temporarily on crutches that I would have loved to have had a few of these, but frankly, there are more times now that I wish I did. Add some enforcement and broader, more visible public disapproval or censure (price) and the next thing you know...behavior change.

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Posted at 01:24 PM in Campaigns and Programs |

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A Few of My Publications

  • Health communication campaigns to drive demand for evidence-based practices and reduce stigma in the HEALing communities study
    Describes the development of five communication campaigns that focused on naloxone, MOUD, and stigma reduction as part of a community intervention study (n=65) to reduce opioid deaths.
  • Social Marketing and Social Change: Strategies and Tools For Improving Health, Well-Being, and the Environment
    This book weaves together multi-level theories of change, research and case studies to explain and illustrate the development of social marketing to address some of society’s most vexing problems. The result is a people-centered approach that relies on insight and empathy as much as on data for the inspiration, design and management of programs that strive for changes for good. “This is it -- the comprehensive, brainy road map for tackling wicked social problems. It’s all right here: how to create and innovate, build and implement, manage and measure, scale up and sustain programs that go well beyond influencing individual behaviors, all the way to broad social change in a world that needs the help."
  • SAGE: Social Marketing: Six-Volume Series
    Bringing together seminal texts from diverse sources, this six-volume set organizes the field of social marketing, highlights its global scope and empirical contributions, and present its current growth and dynamism. Each volume addresses specific themes: conceptual frameworks and common ground, social marketing in the developed world, social marketing in developing countries, applications for sustainable behavior and environmental protection, and deepening and expanding its impact.
  • An integrative model for social marketing
    The model pulls together social marketing ideas and practices from the diversity of settings in which they have been developed and allows practitioners and academics to use a common set of concepts to think about and design social marketing programs. The model gives social marketers more latitude in how to use price and place in the design of programs and how to approach social change and public health in the years ahead through market‐based reform.
  • Transformative social marketing: Co-creating the social marketing discipline and brand
    The paper reviews new insights and understandings from modern social marketing practice, social innovation, design thinking and service design, social media, transformative consumer research, marketing theory and advertising practice to develop a model for transforming social marketing thought, research and practice.
  • The new technology: The consumer as participant rather than target audience
    The original argument against social marketers having "target audiences."
  • Consumer-based health communication
    The foundational work behind the creative brief as used today.
  • Social marketing and public health intervention
    The first widely cited article on using marketing for public health programs that focused on its application in community approaches to preventing heart disease. The essential principles still hold.
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