On Social Marketing and Social Change

The PSI Life

Tonight was my official 'coming out' event as the Chief Technical Officer at Population Services International. The reception was held in conjunction with the Global Health Council annual conference and featured the introduction to the international health community of our new CEO Karl Hofmann, a new member of our Board of Directors Dr. Rehana Ahmed, and myself.

As CTO, a position I began last Monday, I will be be responsible for the technical groups that support PSI programs in 65 countries around the world including:

• HIV
• Malaria Control
• Reproductive Health
• Safe Water and Child Survival
• Research
  

In a preview tour to two global retreats of PSIers from the Asia and the East Africa, South Africa and Nigeria regions, I have had a whirlwind introduction to an organization that is widely known for its social marketing - especially of subsidized products including condoms, other reproductive health products, and insecticide-treated nets - to poor and vulnerable groups around the world. The staff have been great in their openness and willingness to share their experiences and hopes with me. The programs I have seen presented at the retreats were models for social marketing practice and the incorporation of evidence-based decision-making into program planning, implementation and evaluation. One of the most intriguing aspects of PSI is its commitment to creating ROI metrics for program effectiveness based on the number of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) averted by their various programs and using these as their measure of success in their strategic plan (pdf file).

At the Asia regional retreat I briefly talked about my perception of the CTO position and offered four different POVs on it:

• A type of sports car made by General Motors.
• Some kind of techno-geek who dresses and smells bad.
• The executive responsible for the scientific and/or technical direction of the organization.
• There is currently no commonly shared definition of the CTO position or that person's responsibilities.

The last definition, drawn from Wikipedia, is my favorite and is why I have chosen for my business card to simply be referred to as 'Chief Maven' [there are many mavens throughout PSI]. The definition of Chief Maven I extracted from The Tipping Point includes:

• One who accumulates knowledge.                
• Likes to initiate conversations and respond to requests.
• They are more than experts – they want to share.
• An educator and helper (a data bank).
• Mavens have the knowledge and social skills to start WOM epidemics.

This new position will affect how this blog evolves. I am looking at this new position as the opportunity to bridge the domestic, or better the developed world's, view of social marketing and the international one and bring out the best of both. I will line out those differences in an upcoming post. From there you will see more examples of international social marketing programs outside of the In the News features, my perspectives on international social marketing issues that become part of my daily concerns, and hopefully some new insights into how the global practice and thinking of social marketing has applications for anyone, anywhere who is committed to changing their small or large piece of the world. I won't be leaving the usual content behind; you might think of it as being globally engaged and locally connected.

Social Marketing in the News

MBA Toolkit For CSR: Corporate Branding

…Using marketing activities to undertake major initiatives to support social causes and to implement CSR initiatives comes in three forms: cause-related marketing, cause promotions and corporate social marketing...

Corporate Social Marketing is utilized to support the development and/or implementation of behavior change campaigns intended to improve public health, safety, the environment, or community well being. The distinguishing feature is the behavior change focus, which differentiates it from the cause promotions that focus on supporting awareness, fundraising and volunteer recruitment…

Setting their focus on acting as socially responsible businesses, companies are beginning to understand that their relationship with communities, customers, consumers and stakeholders need to be developed as being long-term and sustainable, not short term and transactional.

When it Comes to Safety on the Lake, Nobody’s Waterproof

With…the spring/summer boating season gearing up, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) and its partners are launching a fresh public education and water safety initiative. This creative, fun, interactive social marketing campaign is called “Nobody’s Waterproof.” The campaign was developed in 2006 by Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) and EnviroMedia Social Marketing, Inc. and has won state, regional and national awards. This year, through an agreement with LCRA, TPWD is working to expand the initiative outside the Colorado River watershed to other Texas metropolitan areas.

New Campaign Builds Awareness of Healthy Eating

[New Zealand] Minister of Health Pete Hodgson launched a social marketing campaign to complement the Government's Healthy Eating - Healthy Action Strategy at the Agencies for Nutrition Action biannual conference in Rotorua today.

The campaign 'Feeding our Futures' has been funded and supported by the Government and developed by the Health Sponsorship Council (HSC).

"This is the first social marketing campaign of its type to be launched since the Healthy Eating - Healthy Action Strategy came into play in 2003. 'Feeding our Futures' will begin by communicating with parents and caregivers through a mass media campaign about ways of achieving healthy diets for their children…"

Subsidizing Food Shopping Choices

Most discussions and debates about how to address the obesity problem, and indeed most nutrition behaviors in the US, usually turn to the lack of opportunities for people in inner-city neighborhoods to purchase fresh products, very little variety in the food purchase choices they have, and higher prices. The flight of grocery stores from these urban areas has been a major contributor to this problem. Today's NYT tells the story about one area in Philadelphia where grocery stores are returning for the first time in 8 years, and how The Food Trust's Supermarket Campaign is putting money into marketing in a unique, yet thoroughly commercial, way. And the research on how this 'place' or availability change may affect eating behaviors is being conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences - good for them! If you're looking for nutrition programs that focus on the "1P" of place - take notes.

Can Social Trump Commercial Marketing?

The industry coalition to develop food advertising guidelines (actually now aligned with an FTC task force), the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a report on the use of new media to promote food products and the Shrek promotion campaign collectively caught the attention of the social marketing list serve in the past week. Of course, industry marketing practices are the culprit. Corporate intentions, even when shrouded in CSR language, are evil.

Gordon Wright wrote an excellent contrasting POV to the alarmists that deserves your consideration. With his permission, unedited:

Shrek is a big green ogre.
But he sure is loveable and he connects with an audience.
That connection can help sell both goods and ideas.
It's all true. But it is not really new.
The approach is much more sophisticated today. But, this type of marketing has been going on for years and years.

So, let's talk about marketing. And we will use the word a lot so we remember what it is we are really talking about -- marketing.
I started some of this discussion for a reason.
We may be social. But we are also marketers.
Are we committed to marketing?
If we are social marketing professionals, then how can we be opposed to marketing?
It seems to me that "marketing" upsets some people in the social marketing world. I find that a bit perplexing.
What is it that upsets?
Is it the act of marketing?
Is it the success?
Is it the effect of the success?
My position is that, if we are in marketing, then we ought to accept that many of our competitors who market products are generally good at what they do. We can learn.
They are competitors. I am a competitor. Let's compete.
Yes, the food and beverage industry is targeting children and youth in a digital age. That's a challenge in product marketing.
But, what is the greatest challenge in social marketing today? Targeting children and youth in a digital age, perhaps?
One sells junk food. One promotes health. But each is trying to reach an audience.
There is a subtle difference between social marketing and advocacy for social change. The word marketing doesn't appear in the latter expression.
We, as social marketers, need to be creative and keep learning from competitors and from the marketplace of ideas.
We must adapt to survive and succeed.
If we're at odds with the concept of marketing, then I'd suggest we're in the wrong profession.
A guideline is one thing. A policy is one thing. A regulation is one thing. Censorship is one thing. History tells us what works and what doesn't work over time.
If we are discussing "marketing to children" and the need for regulation to help families protect their children from "predators" who market to children, then I'd suggest we ought to be careful.
A lot of us are in the business of marketing to children and to families.
I'd like to think we are marketing good things.
But we are marketing. Or, as marketers, we ought to be.
I may be skeptical. I may by cynical from time to time. I may even be analytical once in a while. But I still think it is important to differentiate between "marketing practices" and other things.

Here's my comment back to Gordon:

Gordon, great and thoughtful post. Straight to the heart of the matter, esp the ‘uncomfortableness’ many have with marketing. I think of what Stephen Dann has been saying periodically about ‘cheating’ and going to advocacy/policy change before really trying to compete in the marketing arena. The answer from many smers is that ‘we are outgunned, underfinanced’ etc… lacking great ideas and the will to compete may be closer to the truth you have here.

As I've said before: there are no coincidences. Now it's time for the public health, children's welfare, education and other sectors to decide whether to engage, or cheat. And who can foresee the unintended consequences?

Living in Color

Came across Living in Color which is too great an idea to let sit quietly on the Edelman website. Here it is from an employee's POV.

Living In Color Means...

...reading one or two (or three) newspapers every day.
It's developing an ever growing interest for the place you live in, the world you live in.
It's watching the news.
It's expanding into new interests, opening doors.
Living in color is not "what you do after work" - it's what you do with your life.
It never stops.
It's agreeing to work for a pro-bono client, and helping another team - or office - with a project, so you can get exposed to things outside your area of comfort.
It's understanding how what you do fits into the bigger picture.
It's becoming an active, joyful participant in whatever you think is worth your time.
If you are a contributor to making this office a better place beyond your account work, you're living in color.
If you vote, you're living in color.
If you volunteer, you're living in color.
If you spend yourself in a worthy cause, you're living in color.

Student Voices: Coalitions, Partnerships and the Wrap

Partnerships and coalitions have enormous power to amplify and focus all of the aspects of the marketing mix as well as sap the strength and resources of everyone involved in them. In our last class on social marketing, we also looked at the questions recently posed by IDEO at the Innovations in Social Marketing Conference, and took peaks at a future for social marketing.

Coalitions are poor at creating new innovations; they also create more work and use more resources.

Use the skills within the community to further the program.

New partnerships that create excitement will get people's attention – don't just go with the "usual cast of characters."

New “Relationship Management” positions for maintaining a strong relationship with coalition partners, contributors, etc.

Working as part of a coalition, or developing a coalition may not be as easy or as cost effective as it first seems.

Great question to ask ourselves as social marketers: “What if we understood our stakeholders as well as the people we serve?”

Finally, not all of what looks or feels good is actually worth seeking. Partnerships and coalitions may be burdensome and less efficient if not initiated with clear goals and strategies in mind.

The “audience” is no longer really even an audience in the traditional sense but rather now a PARTICIPANT.  Communication back and forth and the absolute necessity of this concept being embraced in social marketing.

The idea that people are no longer audience members and are now creators is a fascinating one.  It makes sense because when people can make a personal connection and there is a personal interest there is the chance for there to be more attention.

Public health marketers should be storytellers and the audience should be creators.

I can finally see a connection between my research interests of language and power and health communication.

“Positive deviants” are often an untapped resource with great ideas on how to get a campaign to create a behavior change.

Does public health ever use lead users as a way to learn how people adopt a behavior/ use a new product? I took a class in the business school and this was a major focus in that class.

Invite people with extreme opinions to talk about product/services. Really gets the conversation going and provides more insights.

What if we embraced experiments (or prototyping) instead of waiting for the perfect answer? (IDEO)

Is it possible that “upstreaming” in social marketing can sometimes cause disempowerment to the individual, group or society in need of a behavior change rather than inducing health improvements? Specifically, does imposing policies related to one’s health style strip their ability to choose better for themselves or as a group?

Do you believe framing is one of the most pivotal factors in a social marketing campaign? Meaning, if you can help your target audience to "reframe" their existing perspective on a health issue or behavior in order to see it from an angle that will alter their cognitions and thus their subsequent behavior, will that reap success?

It’s mind-blowing to think about the power and influence media will have in the future! As public health practitioners, I think we must accept and embrace this trend and look for innovative ways to progress public health goals (Nintendo’s new Wii game, Dance-Dance Revolution, etc).

One of the keynote speakers at the ISM Conference, Dr. Craig Lefebvre, spoke about social media’s powerful, momentous influence it has in the public health context. **Main lesson learned: We as social marketers need to design programs, interventions and products that will have the consumer/target telling a story that completes or augments their life’s story.

Last and final thought/question that popped into my mind during our class discussion: When talking about health behaviors and the environment’s influence in health decisions people make, why is it that in the literature environment is sometimes referred to as “the environment” and sometimes it is “our environment” (or her/his environment); how much do we perceive the environment as mine or yours? Do we “own” our environment? If so, I wonder if the degree to which someone feels ownership over whatever context they find themselves in, is proportionate to how much control they have in the health behavior decisions they make. Any suggestions on further research Craig??

New Ideas for Social Marketing:
•    Become social critics
•    Become story-tellers and creators
•    Include people at the extremes and place messages is surprising places
•    Make the audience the creators of program
•    Understand the stakeholders as well as the people served
•    Social marketers = Audience advocates

This lecture goes hand-in-hand with the classes I took in anthropology of consumption and anthropology of markets in college! Through making a variety/ infinite combination of buying choices, consumers in our postmodern capitalistic society use shopping to construct identity. Social marketing can also be available to sell identities, so to speak. Consumers are not blank slates sucking up commercial messages through osmosis; their minds already have existing templates for receiving/ processing new messages. To be successful a social marketer must get people to start to tell a story about the program. It’s only when people talk to one another other that behavior change happens.

Always be the audience advocate.

I had a dream in which social marketing would be implemented to meet the health and welfare needs of a community, even if they impinged upon political and bureaucratic needs of funders.

Ideal embodiment of the social marketer:    Change agent, Trusted advisor, “Audience Advocate” (C.L.).  Will then never be wrong. 

And here’s a final wrap from me I rediscovered while looking though some old social marketing list serve posts.

My point is that a lot of time can be spent parsing language and tactics into what or what is not social marketing. I like to keep it simple.  Do you understand and have an insight into your target audience? Are you focusing on behavior as your product (what you are encouraging a large number of people to adopt or sustain – we don’t always want teens to change certain types of behaviors for example, ie, pre-initiation of risky behaviors)? Do you have a clear understanding from the audience’s POV of the costs and benefits for maintaining current behaviors or adopting a new one?  Do you increase access and provide opportunities for the audience to try the new behavior and then sustain it?  Are communication and other promotional techniques used to assure that you reach the audience with a message that is relevant, attention-getting, taps into existing motivations and aspirations and has sufficient frequency to be remembered and acted on?  If yes, you’re doing social marketing.  HOW you do each of these four things is up to your own frame of reference, theoretical bent, review of evidence-based practices, morals, values, ego, etc…. Social marketing is about the goals of social change and then using whatever tools we have to get there. Commercial marketers aren’t debating the merits of diffusion theory, agenda-setting research or social network analysis when they plan their campaigns.  They debate the merits of what will help them achieve their objectives.  As my clinical supervisor told me early on in my psychotherapy practicum: the one with the bigger tool box wins!

And a final thank you to the students who gave their time and attention to learn about social marketing and help me understand what is really important about it to them. Hopefully, you received something from them as well.

Student Voices: Research and Evaluation

Great research and evaluation form the basis and vitality of any social marketing effort – yes, vitality rather than sucking the life out of everybody! Research, when done well, disposes the planning team to understand their audience in deep and unique ways. Well conceived audience research brings the insight from which unique benefits and positioning can nurture a strategy that leads to more effective and efficient programs. And when all is said and done, evaluations that answer the SW2C (So what? Who cares?) and not just document relative overall success or failure of the program provide the information we need to move forward fast in adjusting our programs to changing conditions. What the students took away:

Concept testing is important. Find out what is the important benefit to your audience. So what if other people don’t get it – it doesn’t matter as long as your target audience gets it.

Do research to gain understanding, insight, and reassurance.

Use the anthropological approach of interviews and observation of your audience in their social environment instead of always turning towards the sterility of controlled focus group settings. Embrace this chaos.

“If you want to know how lions hunt, go to the jungle, don’t go to the zoo.”  I love this! So many social marketers are learning about the lion in the zoo believing they are doing the right thing in terms of conducting formative research and collecting evidence for their social marketing programs.

For the first time, I think I’m starting to see where qualitative and quantitative research meet - ironically not in a sociology class but in a marketing class!

The criteria for good exploratory research should be if it changes your world. If you walk away thinking people reacted just like the way you anticipated, it’s a waste of money.

Exploratory research needs to change your world. You need to hear something you didn’t already know.

Things to consider when conducting a process evaluation—questions to ask.
a.    Is the plan implemented as intended?
b.    Is it reaching the audience(s)?
c.    Is it having the desired affects?
d.    Is the marketing mix relevant to the audience(s)?

I think that the comment regarding staged testing is brilliant. I am using it with another client that I am working with. This is one of those common sense insights that probably isn’t practiced enough. But really isn’t this just a reiteration of the social marketing commitment to continuous research?

SW2C – So What, Who Cares.  Evaluation needs to address questions that are worth knowing.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

Social Marketing in the News

Students Create New Environmental Strategy for Lake Ripley

With the help of University of Wisconsin-Madison students, communities around Lake Ripley in southeastern Wisconsin are among the first in the state to use an innovative social strategy known as community-based social marketing, or CBSM, to deal with an environmental problem…

The students adopted CBSM because research shows that traditional education campaigns aren't always effective. Informational brochures may change attitudes and beliefs, but urging people to "do the right thing" doesn't usually change their behavior. CBSM focuses on what may be preventing people from changing those behaviors — why, for instance, they keep smoking even if they know it's bad for them. It uses focus groups and other market research to identify the barriers to changing behavior and strategies to overcome them.

A Life Aquatic

We’ve done work with the Institute for Learning Innovation and other groups that are focused on understanding, from the perspective of behavioral psychology and social marketing, how people learn, and how they change their behavior. Habits are ingrained, and it’s hard to get people to change, especially when they feel powerless. In our experience, if you get somebody to make a change and then celebrate what they’re doing and make them advocates for creating change elsewhere, that seems to be something that works…

We don’t want to repeat the work of other organizations. We really want environmentalism to become mainstream and part of popular culture, because that’s when things happen. That’s why we’re a storytelling organization.

The Condom Debate

…Dr Sam Okware of Uganda’s Ministry of Health believes it actually was a combination of the three aspects of the ABC approach that helped the country bring the epidemic down to more manageable levels. Okware said he thinks that in large part, that was because ABC made no value judgments, but instead offered a range of options for everyone. 

“Even in the same individual, in the morning you are on mode A,” Okware told an interviewer last June. “In the evening you are on mode B. And maybe at night, after a small drink, you are on mode C, and vice versa.” 

But in 2003 and 2004, the delicate, often uneasy balance among the three parts of the ABC strategy began to shift. Bush administration officials began working with the Ugandan government to develop a new “emergency plan” for combating HIV/Aids, with the avowed goal of averting 165,000 new infections over a five-year period, according to PEPFAR documents.

The new effort wouldn't totally exclude condoms — the US would buy and ship 47 million of them in 2005. But their use would be promoted only to a narrow “increased risk” segment of the adult population, including roving fishermen, truck drivers, soldiers, and commercial sex workers and their clientele. (The “social marketing” promotion effort would include putting condoms and literature about HIV/Aids in bars, nightclubs, truck stops and drugstores and offering counselling through outreach organisations.)

“We have erroneously given more prominence to condoms, and this is going to change,” Uganda’s then-Minister for Information, Nsaba Buturo explained. “It is now going to be equal treatment…”

Student Voices: Positioning and Branding

The positioning and branding session were put into the class because I find these two of the most misunderstood and misused concepts among marketers in general, and social marketers specifically. Take homes: Brands are not slogans and logos. Positioning is a process of differentiation from the competition.

Trust creation is a fundamental goal of brand design.

Branding is actually a psychological concept!

“It takes a village to build a brand.”

“Brand happens while we are doing something else.”

Positioning is not about communicating, it’s about selecting information and data.

The most important thing is to select the correct information to segment the audience and separate you from the competition.

Positioning – how the person on the other end receives the information. We’re not in the communication business, but the selection business. What are we selecting to convey to our audience to position ourselves.

Social Marketing: “Selection Business!” (makes a lot of sense now).

Student Voices: The Marketing Mix

We spent four class sessions on each of the elements of the marketing mix: products, prices, places and promotion – such a great change from a presentation or workshop when I get to spend 5-10 minutes on the core ideas. There are social marketers who believe that the marketing mix needs to be expanded from these basic four to an even larger set of Ps. My advice: get comfortable and facile with the core 4 first.

The 3 Layers of the Product:

Inner layer: core product/the benefit of it;
Middle layer: actual product/specific behavior;
Outer layer: augmented product/objects, services and programs tied to product.
Question: does the success of the product (and its launch) rest on whether or not it addresses or is comprised of all three layers? Is it imperative to have all three layers? Bottom line: Must unearth the person’s personal benefit they think it has in order to yield behavior change (example: drug IV users using clean, sterile needles in order to prevent HIV spread, benefit? Keeps drug users healthy to continue in drug use).

Good quote: “If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the gaps in their own lives.”

Coca-Cola and many other corporations modify their product in order to meet cultural trends and consumer desires (such as 100 calorie Coca-Coal drinks in response to the anti-obesity initiatives)…the public health field needs to be as sensitive and flexible to consumer’s desires in order to get the consumer to buy our “product” – the intended behavior change?

When cost is low and promoted action benefit the individual, change is relevantly easy; when cost is high and promoted action benefits the society, change is difficult.

PH field needs to get better at increasing incentives rather than just focusing on barriers.

Social marketers can never forget that every new behavior has an opportunity cost which should be figured in the “price” variable of the marketing mix.

Distribution is a business of people. It depends on people to happen.

Three dissemination strategies: organizational, principles, and program. I often forget the organizational part.

Support time and energy for discovery, testing, networking, adapting, monitoring and preserving the past.

“Easy, Fun and Popular” - Bill Smith (AED)
Is there EASY access to the services I’m offering?
How much FUN is the product I’m offering?
How POPULAR is the product?

“The Tipping Point” – Three types of people needed for dissemination team: connector, maven, and salesperson.  The connector puts people together.  The maven connects people through knowledge.  The salesperson uses knowledge to engage and persuade.

Marketing strategies are essentially the answers to the questions:  “Why are we doing this and how are we going to achieve it?” centered around the Marketing Mix of Product, Placement, Pricing and Promotion.

It is challenging for many but critical to think of strategy (one big, unifying idea) before individual tactics.

I hate to admit that your comment about cyberspace being somewhere we live rings true for me. I am probably 50 times more likely to read about a piece of news on my computer screen or listen to it stream from my speakers than to read about it in a paper or on TV.

“Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

Craig Lefebvre showed the class some very creative social marketing campaigns, such as the CDC’s use of Whyville, an online community to market flu vaccines to children. Although the marketers gave up some measure of control (when children can intentionally catch the flu in order to infect as many people as possible) they were successful in producing the desired virtual behavior change in that children sought vaccination. Other fantastic places that social marketing can take place are MySpace and Second Life whereby people can interact with the messages social marketers are disseminating. Am I a young dinosaur for not knowing about Whyville and Second Life before this class?! I feel ancient.

Student Voices: Getting Started

Conducting an environmental scan and identifying, segmenting and understanding the audience were our next topics of conversation. These classes focused on how to set the stage for developing a social marketing approach to public health problems by understanding the important marketing issues.

You are a marketer not an epidemiologist.

Without understanding the micro and macro environment of a region or country in which the product or behavior is being promoted, marketers would lose valuable insight.

Define what “culture” means in social marketing.

Yankelovich and Meer advise to broaden segmentation from simply generating characters people can identify with so that the “segmentation ethos” pervades the entire marketing process. Perhaps this is like a total quality management program for marketers.

We need to broaden the use of Market Segmentation not only to advertising, but also pricing, product innovation, and distribution channels.

Segmentation is one of the most important strategies to marketing because a failure to narrow down exactly who should respond positively to the campaign means setting up one’s project for failure… As Craig Lefebvre emphasized: trying to create a message for everyone often means nobody can hear the message. Tailored messages will resonate more with specific segments of the population that a single generic message that’s so broad that nobody can identify with.

We should be able to “talk to” and visualize the target audience, not just list demographic characteristics.

Target audience segmentation and finalizing the target audience are the hardest decisions to make.

When segmenting, we MUST get into the habit of being more specific and targeted.  Until then, we aren’t being specific enough even when we think we are!

•    Define what your target audience is and what your behavior objectives are
•    Work with what is realistic
•    Do what will effect your audience
•    Seek who is open to change
•    Seek who is critical to success

If you can not imagine having a conversation with the target audience, you do not have a target audience.

It truly is apparent to me (now) even in commercial marketing when this is skipped and segmentation hasn’t been utilized.

Student Voices: The Toolbox

The very limited use of theories and models for change, when applied at all, has been one of the constraining factors for the success of social marketing programs. Conscious and deliberative use of these tools either opens our minds, or closes them, to the possibilities of helping create healthier populations and environments. Our second class in social marketing focused on a variety of theories that are commonly used in social marketing programs [pdf file], as well as ones that are not and should be – diffusion of innovations and social capital in particular. The voices:

There are multiple theories that social marketers should consider when designing programs because different theories take you to difference places and help you achieve different objectives.

We must have a “deep portfolio” of knowledge in theory because not all problems (social or behavioral) can be cured with one frame of reference or explanation.

Many social marketing and public health campaigns fail when planners become complacent after target populations embrace new behaviors. They forget that people often relapse and need reinforcement.

Models describe events while theories guide decision-making.

Diffusion of Innovation is an untapped theory in the public health field.

A purpose of social marketing is to rapidly increase a rate of adoption.  Organizations need to be concerned about this because products become outdated so quickly.

We need to focus on “boundary spanners” who bring new information into the network and enhance the attractiveness of the “out-group”.

Social Network Theory - we need to especially know who’s the alpha pup.

Social capital theory seems to be gaining momentum in the field of social marketing – perhaps because of a growing focus on attributes of social networks and communities in relation to health status.

Dr. Lefebvre made it a point to use whatever combination of behavioral change theories to stimulate the desired effect in the target population while keeping in mind that resourcefulness, consumer advocacy, technology and good communication skills are helpful tools any social marketer can benefit from.

At what point is the theory too complex? With social marketing the “marketing mix” includes the 4 P’s: product, price, place, promotion. However, you could also include: policies, politics, public perception...? These are important factors to consider, but at what point is the theory trying to do too much and no longer useful?

We need to be resourceful marketers – we need a big tool belt, a big bag of tricks to get the job done.

The Beginnings for Social Marketing

We began the first class with an overview of the public health context in which social marketing is often practiced, and a variety of definitions of social marketing that have appeared over the past 35 years. Some of the reactions and thoughts of the class: the student voices.

The first class completely changed my view of what I thought social marketing was. I thought it was just using advertising to market social or health ideas. I realize it is much more than that and really about initiating social change.

I’m impressed to learn that marketing’s actually more methodical and analytical than I’d initially imagined.

Social marketing is not just behavior change; it includes structural and policy development.

Do not put social marketing in a box. Social marketing is about finding innovative strategies and solutions to a societal or population problem.

What is the difference between social marketing and social change? Is social marketing the business of social change?

•    There is no one concrete definition of social marketing
•    This lack of clarity is not helping the discipline gain credibility among other disciplines
•    A variety of fields can benefit from understanding social marketing theories – but many are not currently open to it.

We aren’t learning the cookbook we are learning to be chefs.

Programs fail because of insufficient intervention resources, non-supportive social and political environment, because of flaws in the measurement and evaluation design, and use of the wrong theory to understand problem and development strategies.

Still confused of what exactly social marketing is….I thought I knew.

_________________

What I consider to be some of the takeaways from my presentation are captured here:

I believe that social marketing is a disciplined approach to engaging with and solving problems, not a series of recipes that are applied unconsciously or in some rote fashion to whatever is in front of you.

Social marketing is much broader and focuses on bigger issues than simply helping individuals manage their own behaviors. It is a true public health, or population-based, perspective and systematic approach for change (one of the only ones).

The core of a definition of social marketing is fairly consistent across authors. What often gets lost is its soul.

Student Voices: The Preface

Blogging, lecturing, workshopping and otherwise evangelizing about social marketing presents opportunities for me to focus and tailor ideas and practices of what constitutes great social marketing practice to the interests and needs of many different groups of health professionals. Over the last five months I took the step of teaching a semester long course on social marketing that allowed me to systematically collect the thoughts and reactions of the 26 students who were enrolled in the course. In contrast to the usual evaluation form that is quickly completed, if at all, by participants at a conference or workshop, or the comments left on a blog post, the students were required to keep a lesson log throughout the semester and turn them in for course credit (aka part of their grade). Thus, a feedback loop with a higher set of ‘prices’ than usually encountered in less formal settings.

The instructions at the beginning of the semester were simple: at the end of each weekly class, or during the week, write down the 3-5 major points you got out of the class. Not what notes you made about a lecture or discussion, but the highlights – something that was said, a point that somebody made during the discussion, a thought or question you had that really had an impact on you or stuck with you.

The point is to have them consolidate their thoughts and provide me with some indication of what we have been talking about that resonates with them, gets a reaction, or completely misses the mark. In that way, the lesson logs reflect the perspective of master’s level students in a MPH program (or related degree program) who have sat through, participated or engaged in classroom social marketing content for an extended period of time. I let them know ahead of time that some of their comments in the logs may be used on my blog without direct attribution. So what follows in the next several posts about “Student Voices” will be selections from their responses to the class material and discussion. For background, here is the class curriculum [GWU Social Marketing].

SO in a series of 7 installments, rather than my talking about what social marketing is (I do enough of that already), here come the lessons and stories as the students experience it.

Social Marketing in the News

Colombia: Agreement between Carrefour and IOM Promotes Products Made by Vulnerable Populations

Products covered under the agreement include items for home decor, office supplies, handicrafts and clothing made by displaced persons, victims of human trafficking and minors demobilized from the illegal armed groups, and Afro-Colombians and indigenous populations.

The initiative stems from IOM's Social Marketing Strategy, which seeks to improve the levels of economic sustainability that are part of the Organization's income generating projects. These initiatives have received financial support from the governments of the United States, Canada, Holland and Italy.

23-Year-Old Hopes to Revolutionize the Marketing of Clean Living to Teens

...Jordan has developed a concept he calls “social branding,” which uses CIA-like methods to infiltrate teen social circles and work to steer kids away from drinking, smoking and other destructive behaviors…

Commercials, billboards and magazine ads with slogans such as the classic “this is your brain on drugs . . . ” may be catchy, said Jordan and other social marketing experts, but, by themselves, have little effect at the house party where a teen is likely to be offered a smoke or a beer.

Preventing Underage Drinking, Drug Use is Coalition Goal

So how do we prevent drug and alcohol abuse, specifically among young people? We start by trying to address the environment in which they live — by changing the so-called social norms (those beliefs which are held by community members about the frequency and amount of drug and alcohol use that takes place), addressing policy issues (the laws that govern underage drinking and drug use and its repercussions) and the accessibility of drugs and alcohol (where and how young people either buy or get drugs and alcohol).

...our Social Marketing Committee is developing marketing campaigns and media materials that will raise awareness among parents and youth in order to influence them to make healthy decisions. Our current campaign has the goal of reducing youth access to alcohol and is targeted to middle school parents.

Canadian Health Initiatives: Global Companies Dishing Out Support

New initiatives launched in Canada to highlight the importance of healthy eating are being backed by leading consumer goods companies, including Coca-Cola. The initiatives will alter the landscape of advertising directed at children, and demonstrate that global players are taking the issue of rising childhood obesity seriously…

The strength of the program lies in its integrated approach, with government and industry players uniting to tackle the issue. Whether other countries will follow Canada's example, combining changes to advertising practices with enhanced social marketing and education initiatives, remains to be seen. Canada already has some of the toughest rules when it comes to advertising aimed at children, and, against this backdrop, the new initiatives represent a clear stance that the country is taking the rising rates of overweight and obese children seriously.

Women as Brood Mares

... India was the first country to launch a Government family planning programme in 1952. Due to mismanagement, forced sterilisations and chasing fictitious targets, the programme received an unsavoury reputation it just cannot discard although decades have gone by.

Post-1994, Cairo and ICPD, Governments the world over supported by international organisations and NGOs ushered in a new reproductive child health approach. Today, people who talk of population control and explosion are considered barbaric. In the name of giving "reproductive choices" to women and offering "a cafeteria approach", the old targets, incentives and disincentives have been struck off the strategy list. Rightly so, if one goes back to the horrors of family planning excesses, but wrongly so if there is no cafeteria, no coffee (read condoms), IUDs or oral pills to make that choice.

The emergency contraception pill, the most needed of all, is unheard of in most of the country. The social marketing approach can deliver up to a point - no more…

It is time that spacing and male sterilisation were resolutely brought back on the front line. Lest the next generations require more hospitals than schools to attend to the abysmal levels of anaemia among women, and the resultant wasting and stunting of children, accompanied by high levels of under-five mortality. This beckons a deliberate restoration of family planning services to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Keeping It Clean: The Chemical Industry is Finding Ways to Secure and Expand Global Water Supplies

…Seeing both human need and, someday at least, profits, companies in the chemical industry have begun developing a wide range of technologies that can help secure safe drinking water for the world's poor. Usually the projects are offshoots of technology that companies are developing for profit-generating business…

Arch Chemicals' involvement in a safe drinking water program reflects the company's relationship with P&G, to which it supplies the calcium hypochlorite in P&G's PUR sanitization sachets. The partnership focuses on provision of two household-level technologies to disinfect drinking water: PUR sachets and WaterGuard, a dilute chlorine solution developed by the Washington, D.C.-based Population Services International (PSI), the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and the Pan American Health Organization.

"We have provided more than 600 million L of safe drinking water over the past three years," says Charlotte Otto, global external relations officer at P&G...

The project works, in great part, because it has turned to social marketing partners. For P&G and USAID, the main partner for social marketing is PSI, which has outreach programs for PUR in eight countries and WaterGuard in 18 countries.

Among the lessons learned in the project, according to Arch's Campbell, is that "we have to provide people in undeveloped regions with simple, easy-to-maintain, water treatment systems that villages or even individual households can continue to operate when relief workers have moved on to other communities or other crisis-stricken regions."

CDC Health Marketing and Communication Conference

I just received the call for abstracts for the CDC National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media. From the announcement -

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pleased to announce the first National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media. This conference is intended for knowledgeable practitioners and academics working in health communication, marketing and media and will feature plenary and keynote speakers. This conference will provide a forum for collegial dialogue about research and practice within and across these disciplines. The conference is an excellent opportunity to meet with colleagues and shape the future of health communication and marketing practice.

Conference Objectives:

• Provide an environment to present findings and recommendations from health marketing, communication, and media research.
• Offer participants an opportunity to network as well as promote information sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration within the health communication, marketing and media community
• Advance the fields of health marketing and health communication.

The conference planning committee invites abstract submissions that address specific issues, approaches, or strategies that contribute to the fields of health communication, marketing and media.

The deadline for abstract submissions is May 25, 2007.  More information about the conference that will be held August 29-30, 2007 In Atlanta.

Some Public Perceptions of Social Marketing

Stephan Dahl notes the local media coverage of a new program in Health & Social Marketing at Middlesex University. Within a few hours, there were some rather interesting comments on their website about the degree - calling it “a degree in Political Correctness” or “Masters of Dictatorship”.

The headline for the article 'Become a Master at Influencing Others' is provocative to start with. Included among the negative comments about the program that were submitted to the paper's website was this one:

Social marketing eh? Ah, so now we can have people who are "qualified" to interfere in our lives.

I don't often see unvarnished public reactions to social marketing and what we mean by it - let alone all of the other variations in definitions and applications that abound these days. These types of responses - notable here for being members of the public, but I am sure also lurk in the minds and hearts of some partners and donors - should be a wake up call for us to blow the dust off of our white hats and get engaged with our brand.

For most of us, brand happens while we're doing something else. - Marty Neumeier.

Transparency: Tyranny or Triumph?

Things have been too busy and I just had the longest (unplanned) hiatus from the blog ever. For those who want to catch up on some of the action. I'll get back to it later.

Today is a set of facts and figures from Trendwatching's new report on transparency. While it focuses on the consumer products sector, I assume that similar ideas and sites are already percolating in different nonprofit and government offices - if for no other reason than worrying about the tyranny empowered people might wield over cherished ways of operating these enterprises. When do the large advocacy organizations start setting up similar consumer review and report sites? If you haven't read this yet, the revolution will not be televised.

• 80% of online shopping time is spent researching products rather than buying them. (TechCrunch)
• 71% of online shoppers read reviews, making it the most widely read consumer-generated content. (Forrester)
• In a test of product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating. (Marketing Experiments Journal)
• 60 percent of online shoppers provide feedback about a shopping experience, and are more likely to give feedback about a positive experience than a negative one. (JupiterResearch)
• User-generated ratings and reviews are the second most important site feature behind search. Retailers who adopt ratings and reviews as a differentiator and retention strategy will gain market share. (JupiterResearch)
• In a study of 2,000 shoppers – 92% deemed customer reviews as “extremely” or “very” helpful and ~ 71% used keyword searches to find products. (eTailing Group)
• 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews. (Bizrate)
• Only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion. (Forrester)
• 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
• Conversion rates are higher on products with less than perfect reviews (less than 5 stars) than those without reviews at all, indicating that the customer feels that the product has been properly reviewed by other customers. (Burpee)
• 39 percent of those who bought from sites with reviews cite the reviews as the primary factor influencing the purchase decision. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)

Imagine when your agency and sector is included in these facts and figures. Will you be ready? For more from the transparency report.