The article about social marketing in last week's Boston Globe and my post in response to it have generated an unprecedented conversation among social marketers and others including a note at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The social marketing list serve had a number of contributions on the subject as well. So to get these voices 'on the record,' I asked several of them if they would agree to my posting excerpts from their comments. The response was immediate - literally overnight - and positive. So here they come. Hopefully, they will give you more to think about when it comes to your own work.
The Boston Globe article still is quite interesting beyond the idealism presented, because it questions the presuppositions of social marketing and its opponents (that have to be tested to then develop feasible strategies). I always wondered whether they are right but cannot judge that myself (except that if you want market structures to develop e.g. distribution of condoms, then you have to start it at one point, and better early to minimize the inhibition of entrepreneurship. That seems at least on that general level clear beyond reasonable doubt). - Mathis Danelzik
[In response to a question of when was social marketing ever defined as selling products] ...it illustrates how isolated our international and domestic social marketing programs have become. The first large-scale social marketing programs were international - the early diarrheal disease work in El Salvador by Manoff - AED's work in Honduras and The Gambia and then Egypt and very soon after the social marketing of contraceptives by PSI, the Futures Group, AED and others. Tens of millions of dollars have been invested in designing, conducting, and evaluating these social marketing efforts.
From the very beginning they were product oriented and not message oriented. That is the solution to a problem was found in social marketing of new products and services. Give-a-ways were never part of these early social marketing efforts. Products - condoms and contraceptives, ORS packets, etc, were physical products - with real costs, distribution channels, and promotion efforts. Price was discovered early on to ADD VALUE to products and some of the most interesting pricing studies among the poor have been done by these programs going back 30 years. But they are all but unknown by most "public health" social marketers in the US. - Bill Smith
The issue I would have with these studies is that the relevant behavior should not be how many people GET drugs or condoms or bed nets. It is: how many were used! The argument for charging (usually very low) prices and not giving things away is that they will be used because the target market has invested in them.
Public programs and Bill Gates can give away a lot of products but if they just sit there and not get used, it is not good social marketing. (An MBA student told me of visiting a household in Africa and finding 50 bed nets in a second floor room. When she asked about them, the person said: "Oh those are no good. They were free from the government.)
Finally, charging a price is not a requirement of social marketing. It may be the best tactic but the challenge is always: did we get the behavior we wanted. - Alan Andreasen
In my own experience price is just like the other three Ps - it is driven by consumer perception. Price can add value to consumers who distrust government hand-outs - it can be a burden to people who value the product less than the price, or a free hand-out from a trusted source can be perceived as a wonderful gift...
Marketing does not need to replace charity - but where people can pay; where people are willing to pay; and where people value products and services they pay for over free ones, then marketing has help reduce the burden on charity and increase efficiencies in the social system.
The important thing about marketing is that it is a process for answering these questions for specific segments of the population, under specific conditions at specific time periods. That, in my mind, is its real contribution to social change. The quality of pricing studies in many of the international social marketing programs have been very high. I do think it is disappointing that many of our domestic social marketing programs here in the US have not given as much attention to pricing.
As someone has said everything has a price - it may be self-respect for someone, time for someone else, or 200 dollars for someone else. The question is figuring it out. I think broad generalizations about price being good or bad are not all that helpful. - Bill Smith
What frustrates me about this argument [in the Globe article] is the lack of focus on segmentation. If we're the marketers we claim to be we know that just because some women in the US will pay $15 for shampoo doesn't mean others will - never mind whether men in India will. So because one deworming study - which didn't talk about which segment they studied - showed people used more if it was free, that means everything should be free? In social marketing if price (monetary or other) is the barrier - we aim to get rid of it (make it free, lower the price, etc). But if for some segments price isn't the barrier, then we have a reason to consider charging. Here we see people avoiding the free government condoms when possible as they are thought to be bad quality (same exact condoms as the subsidized ones) - but if they don't have access or money for the other brands they will occasionally use the free ones. It's about making sure the appropriate options are available to them, sometimes they need the whole range of options. (and then we move on to the rest of the marketing mix). - Risha Hess
Thanks to all of the contributors on the list serve and especially those who gave me permission to reprint their comments here. If you'd like to subscribe to the social marketing list serve, send an e-mail to: [email protected]
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