IDEO's Questions for Social Marketers

The 2007 Innovations in Social Marketing Conference has just wrapped up. The theme was It's All About the Customer and among the presentations was How Design Thinking and Innovation Can Influence Customer-Oriented Behavior Change Strategies by Chris Waugh and Holly Kretschmar of IDEO. The best part of their presentation and the group exercise they conducted to demonstrate the IDEO approach was, for me, their Nine Questions We've Been Asking About Social Marketing [from my notes]:

1. What if we called ourselves story-tellers - what if we called them creators instead of consumers?
2. What if out brand was about helping people reach their goals?
3. What if a social change movement could be successful with little to no promotion?
4. What if we embraced experiments (or prototyping) instead of waiting for the perfect answer?
5. What if the people we served created the messages?
6. What if we invited people at the extremes to put our messages in surprising places?
7. What if people were clamoring to play with us?
8. What if we understood our stakeholders as well as we understand the people we serve?
9. What if social marketers were synonymous with trusted advisors?

Food for thought and a way to start thinking about how to improve your own social marketing programs.

Update: Nedra is doing a tick tock of the conference at Spare Change.