Marketing Lessons from the Commercial Sector

The Devil Came Down to Tampa was the opening plenary session by Gerard Hastings at the Social Marketing and Public Health conference. Gerard drew on two reviews of marketing practices of the pharmaceutical and financial services industries to distill 7 key ideas that should inform social marketing practice.

1. Rethink our use of research to be more what he termed 'navigational' - providing guidance for program decision-making - rather than solely focused on monitoring and outcomes.
2. A consumer-orientation is crucial for effective programs.
3. Emotion matters when it comes to individual decision-making and brands (in which he also rejected the tag line and logo oversimplification of the process).
4. Need for segmentation and targeting.
5. Have a long term vision for impact.
6. Context matters when seeking behavior change.
7. Tackle the competition rather than avoiding or ignoring it.

He has a new book on social marketing coming out next month. A review of the book is in the latest issue of Social Marketing Quarterly.