On Social Marketing and Social Change

Social Models for Marketing: Building Communities

For many years communities were inextricably linked with social marketing. Lefebvre & Flora (1988) laid out the defining features of the social marketing approach based on experiences they shared directing community interventions for cardiovascular disease reduction. Yet, even by the early 1990s, we can recall where social marketing and community development components of Health Canada could not find common ground for collaboration. As more practitioners appropriated social marketing as the basis for the development of ‘new’ health communication campaigns, the term became associated (and in some quarters still is) with mass media campaigns that segmented their audience, pretested materials and considered the 4Ps only in the context of communication planning, not marketing.

The differences in the social marketing approach became even more pronounced in the international community where social marketing became synonymous with the marketing of products for family planning, HIV prevention and malaria control while various other groups organized themselves around concepts such as behavior change communication, health communication, development communication and community mobilization to name a few. Responding to this fracturing of resources and talent, McKee (1991) wrote a book that he hoped would enhance the understanding of social mobilization, social marketing and community participation amongst communicators who sometimes set up unnecessary barriers between their various fields. Few seem to have heeded his call.

A hybrid approach developed independently in North America to reunite community with social marketing was coined as community-based social marketing (CBSM; McKenzie-Mohr, 2000). McKenzie-Mohr & Smith (1999) described CBSM as a process of identifying the barriers and benefits to engaging in behaviors and then organizing the public into groups with shared characteristic in order to more efficiently deliver program (p.3).  Carol Bryant and colleagues at the Florida Prevention Research Center (2000) use the term ‘community-based prevention marketing’ to refer to programs with similar strategies that combine community participation with social marketing approaches.

The community-based approach as a context for implementing social marketing programs has much to commend it.  Drawing from my experience and those of McKee (1992) these advantages include:

•    Gaining community insight into problems and their support for proposed solution.

•    Ensuring the use of indigenous knowledge and expertise.

•    Mobilizing and employing local communication channels including local mass media and local social and interpersonal communication networks.

•    Localizing distribution of products and services and improving access and opportunities to engage in new behaviors. 

•    Helping build sustainable solutions.

Engaging the community is not without its drawbacks too. McKee (1992) notes that community participation can also mean cursory consultation with the community rather than full engagement in a dialogue about problems AND solutions. Participation from the community may develop into a ‘participating elite’ who may, or may not, represent broader community viewpoints. Program planners can fail to recognize the opportunity costs for people who are approached to participate in the development and oversight of the program. Open participation also can lead to manipulation and conflict by and among different parties or stakeholders. And local agendas may not match those of the donor or lead agency. Finally, he also notes that to truly move from a social marketing ‘shell’ of a program to a community-driven one, there is a need for partnership development and to gain strong public advocacy and political commitment to create a culture in which to embed and support social goals. These are skills many social marketers are in need of learning.

The characteristics of effective community networks for social action have been found to include the following: common attributes, goals or governance; a diversity of connections; several paths exist between people and/or organizations within the network to work around possible disruptions or removal of them (e.g., being absent from meetings, moving away from the area); some nodes of the network are more prominent than others by being brokers, hubs or boundary spanners; and the majority of the linkages within the network tend to be short (or go through few other people and organizations) to minimize delays and distortions in communication or information flow (Krebs & Holley, 2006 pdf).

These authors highlight that to achieve this high level of functioning, networks must be actively managed, otherwise they tend to drift towards high levels of homogeneity (less diversity) and form closer and denser ties that are resistant to newcomers and new information. Network weaving is an essential step in identifying small fragments of networks that may be organized around similar issues or interests, but that do not relate with each other, and bringing them together into a larger network by facilitating their interactions with each other.  These weavers often become the ‘hub’ for these disparate networks to move information from and to them in a more organized manner. In their experience, these ‘hub and spoke’ networks are quickly transitory with the aim of weaving the existing networks together so that they begin to directly interact with each other through boundary spanners and shared information and communication vehicles. As this occurs, the original network weaver moves on to bringing more networks into the new system and coordinating with and mentoring other network weavers or boundary spanners that emerge to encourage and support their ability to collaborate on meeting shared goals and objectives. As the network continues to mature and expand, the network weaver becomes more of a facilitator for network interactions and expansion and to focus on larger policy goals. Marketers who think of themselves as 'social' need to work on and hone their weaving skills.

I also believe that future social marketing efforts need to work from asset-based models of community development rather than ones solely based on mapping and addressing deficits or needs. Kretzmann & McKnight (1993) list several arguments against relying on needs assessments and mapping in community projects including:

•    It provides a nearly endless list of problems and needs that leads to a fragmentation of efforts to provide solutions.
•    Targeting resources based on a needs assessment directs funding not to residents but to service providers, a consequence not always either planned for or effective.
•    Making resources available on the basis of the needs map can have negative effects on the nature of local community leadership by forcing them to highlight their problems and deficiencies, and ignoring their capacities and strengths.
•    Providing resources on the basis of the needs map underlines the perception that only outside experts can provide real help.

These authors argue that a needs based strategy will inevitably focus on community survival rather than shift to serious change or community development. As an alternative approach, they propose an ‘asset-based community development’ approach that involves three interrelated characteristics:

•    The strategy starts with what is present in the community, the capacities of its residents and workers, the associational and institutional base of the area - not with what is absent, or with what is problematic, or with what the community needs.
•    The development strategy concentrates on the agenda building and problem-solving capacities of local residents, local associations and local institutions to stress the primacy of local definition, investment, creativity, hope and control.
•    Implementation of the resulting strategy will be relationship driven. Thus, one of the central challenges for asset-based community developers is to constantly build and rebuild the relationships between and among local residents, local associations and local institutions.

This look at the asset-based model is intended to reinforce for social marketers, particularly those who work in resource constrained contexts and with disadvantaged populations, the need to view their work in communities as needing to expand to working with communities. Through these programs, community strengths and competencies should receive at least equal attention in marketing plans as do needs and barriers. Indeed, one of the potential unintended effects of well-done community-based programs could be that they result in lowered social capital, self- and collective efficacy and increasing dependency among citizens. An asset-based approach also reinforces two core values of the social marketing approach: the audience orientation and the engagement of people in the process rather than only treating them as passive consumers of messages and programs.

Social marketers who venture into the real-life world of community-building should also be attentive to what is being learned by people involved with online community-building (and vice versa). How to encourage and guide people into moving from spectators to actors to leaders (see Preece and Shneiderman, 2009 for examples), and increasing their level of engagement with problems and solutions, is common ground on which to build conversations with our social media marketing colleagues.

References

Bryant, C.A., Forthofer, M.S., McCormack Brown, K.R., Landis, D.C. and McDermott, R.J. (2000) Community-based prevention marketing: The next steps In disseminating behavior change. American Journal of Health Behavior, 24: 61-68.

Kretzmann, J.P. and McKnight, J.L. (1993) Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets. Evanston, IL: Institute for Policy Research.

Lefebvre, R.C. and Flora, J.A. (1988) Social marketing and public health intervention. Health Education Quarterly, 15: 299–315

McKee, N. (1992) Social Mobilization & Social Marketing in Developing Communities: Lessons for Communicators. Panang, Malaysia: Southbound.

McKenzie-Mohr, D. (2000) Fostering sustainable behavior through community-based social marketing. American Psychologist, 55: 531-537.

McKenzie-Mohr, D. and Smith, W. (1999) Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing. Washington, DC: Academy for Educational Development & Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers.

Preece J. and Shneiderman B. (2009). The reader-to-leader framework: Motivating technology-mediated social participation. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction;1:13-32

Social Models for Marketing: Social Networks

Over the past decade there has been a dramatic shift in the emphasis of determinants of health and social behaviors from individuals to networks and communities. For example, in three major areas of interest for public health officials and social marketers – the prevention of HIV infection, obesity and tobacco use  – the role of social networks in disease transmission and the prevalence of risk behaviors is creating new opportunities for both concepts and practices that focus on social units of analysis, change and outcome.

Concurrent sexual partnerships, that is, having two or more stable sexual partners over time is being seen as one of the previously hidden drivers of the HIV epidemic. Concurrency, especially when the partners are sexually active with others in a small world network (see below), heightens the risk of HIV transmission because these relationships are not casual or one-off sexual encounters, but are maintained over time where a level of trust develops that diminishes their perceived riskiness. Thus, when one partner becomes infected, they are highly likely to have sex with one or more other partners during the window of greatest HIV infectivity. Developing interventions to address the network effects of sexual activity are only just beginning.

Similarly, the work of Christakis & Fowler (2007, 2008) provides descriptive evidence that the likelihood of becoming obese rises as close members of one’s social network become overweight and obese and that stopping smoking is also highly susceptible to the smoking status of others.  Again, the implications for interventions are only now being explored. However, it is clear that simply focusing on individual and/or environmental determinants of these conditions can no longer be a singular pursuit for social marketing or any other type of risk reduction programs.

The world of social network theory introduces us to an entirely new set of concepts and ways of thinking about human behavior and the social forces that directly influence it. Goyal, for example, posits that individual choices related to the gathering of information for making behavioral choices are shaped by the pattern of connections between people in a society. Three core network properties he discusses are (1) degrees or how many links each member in a network has with others; (2) clustering – how dense the connections between members of a network are; and (3) average distances or how far away from one another each person in a network is from another in terms of the number of links necessary to reach them (popularized as “6 degrees of separation” or “the Kevin Bacon game”). A network that is characterized with small average degrees (everyone has at least a few connections with others), high clustering (they mostly connect with others in the network), and small average distances (there are few degrees of separation between them so that most people know or are at least acquainted with most of the others) are referred to as small world networks (Watts and Strogatz, 1998). Recall that these closed networks are less likely to adopt innovations or new evidence-based recommendations (a new take on ‘the old boys network’).

One of the implications of this work with social networks is that people learn about and choose among behavioral options not only based on directly observing others in their social circle engage in behaviors and the consequences they experience, but also by whom their friends and associates connect with outside that proximal network and then bring that information or those practices back to the immediate network. Goyal (20070 concludes from his review of empirical work in economics and social networks that variations in behaviors among individuals are related to not only the connections people have within the same social group, but also from their being members of different groups as well. The implications for social marketers seem clear; who people associate with, or are connected to, must be considered and addressed by intervention efforts. These network variables, in turn, might also serve as intervention points by, for instance:

1. focusing on people with large numbers of connections within a network (connectors, influentials, or opinion leaders);

2. reducing the density of a network in which risk behaviors are concentrated by introducing more boundary spanners or increasing social connections of members of the group outside of their immediate network;

3. understanding the members of a network who are most attentive and responsive to the behaviors of others (or more easily influenced or persuadable) and providing them with protective or alternative behaviors to prevent adoption;

4. and enhancing the salience and attractiveness of the ‘out group’ [positive deviants] by positioning these practitioners of desired behaviors in a way that attracts imitation or modeling.

Social network analysis must also be sensitive to information asymmetries that will exist among individuals within a group as well as between groups. Viswanath and Kreuter point to the existence of communication inequalities as possibly underlying many of the social inequalities we see in health risks and conditions. These communication inequalities are manifested as differences among social classes in the generation, manipulation, and distribution of information at the group level and differences in access to and ability to take advantage of information at the individual level. As a consequence, communication inequalities may act as a significant deterrent to obtaining and processing information; in using the information to make prevention, treatment and survivorship-related decisions; and in establishing relationships with providers.

Social networks have also played a major role in the development of the so-called Web 2.0 in which collaborative and dynamic models of communication underlie the philosophy, software development and user behaviors.  The ubiquity and popularity of blogs and microblogs, social network sites, social sharing sites, wikis and virtual worlds have made the network connections among people more obvious.  And, more importantly, these social media have unleashed a set of tools and resources that allow the people formerly known as the audience to create content for themselves and to tap into pools of collective wisdom. Social marketing programs must adapt to be both relevant to people’s (new) lives and to harness this collective wisdom and power for social change.

Similarly, the explosion in the adoption of wireless communication technologies, notably mobile telephones and smart phones, are enabling communications that transcend place-based methods (‘we call to individuals, not places’; Ling, 2008) and are further driving home the idea that people are communities, not individuals (Ahonen & Moore, 2005). As I have said elsewhere, while we have always been aware that there are social influences for many of the individual behaviors we seek to influence for environmental protection and the improvement of public health and social conditions, social technologies are changing the weights we use in our models of determinants of behavior and the ways in which we approach changing them. Given all of this, in the future let’s consider the consequences and implications of adopting a social networking perspective into our work as social marketers:

•    How can we enhance linkages that already exist among people, organizations, and communities to allow them to access, exchange, utilize, and leverage the knowledge and resources of the others?

•    How do we help develop, nurture, and sustain new types of linkages that bring together like-minded people, mission-focused organizations, and communities that share interests to address common problems and achieve positive health and social change?

•    How do we identify, encourage and enable the many different types of indigenous helpers that are found in social networks so that they can be more effective in promoting positive health, environmental and social behaviors and policies?

•    What do we do to better engage communities in monitoring, problem analysis, and problem solving; striving to health and social equity; and increasing social capital?

•    How do we go about weaving together existing social networks of individuals, organizations and communities to create new sources of power and inspiration to address health and social issues?

•    How does a networked view of the world disrupt our usual ways of thinking about and engaging the people, organizations, and communities with which we usually work? What are the insights we can gain from this perspective?

Clearly we need to dig much deeper into social netwrok theory to understand the dynamics of diffusion and change of various types of health behaviors. More importantly, we need to develop and test programs for which change among  social networks and connections are a primary focus of our efforts. Where information and communication technologies may evolve to in the next few years is an open question. But blending social media tools and mobile technologies with social marketing to capitalize on and impact social networks is also an area for further exploration in achieving scalable results for networks of healthy people.

References

Adimora, A.A., Schoenbach, V.J. and Doherty I.A. (2007). Concurrent sexual partnerships among men in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 97: 2230-2237.

Ahonen, T.T. and Moore, A. (2005). Communities Dominate Brands. London, UK: futuretext.

Christakis, N.A. and Fowler, J.H. (2007). The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. The New England Journal of Medicine, 357: 370-379.

Christakis, N.A. and Fowler, J.H. (2008). The collective dynamics of smoking in a large social network. The New England Journal of Medicine, 358: 2249-2258.

Goyal, S. (2007) Connections: An Introduction to the Economics of Networks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Helleringer, S., Kohler, H-P. (2007). Sexual network structure and the spread of HIV in
Africa: evidence from Likoma Island, Malawi,. AIDS, 21: 2323–2332.

Lefebvre, R.C. (2007). The new technology: The consumer as participant rather than target audience. Social Marketing Quarterly, 13: 31-42.

Ling, R. (2008). New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Mah, T.L. and Halperin, D.T. (2008). Concurrent sexual partnerships and the HIV epidemics in Africa: evidence to move forward. AIDS and Behavior. Published online: 22 July 2008. [Cited 5 March 2009]. 

Viswanath, K. and Kreuter, M.W. (2007). Health disparities, communication inequalities, and e-Health: A commentary.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 32(5 Suppl):  S131–S133. 

Watts, D.J. and Strogatz, S.H. (1998). Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks,. Nature, 393 (June): 440-442.
 
Watts, D.J. (2003). Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Social Models for Marketing: Diffusion

Among the most data-driven models for behavior change, particularly at scale or on a population-basis, is Rogers' diffusion of innovations. When I reviewed the most popular theories and models then being used in social marketing programs, I added that Diffusion of innovations research and concepts offer a tremendous amount of insight for social marketers to use in designing their programs, yet we see very little active discussion of it in social marketing circles.  Social diffusion offers one of the most robust theories for taking innovations in ideas, behaviors and practice to scale. Yet, though the calls for scaling up successful behavioral interventions for such things as HIV prevention are reverberating around the globe, we see little discussion or application of the model by social marketers or, for that matter, few others in public health.

Social marketing needs to focus on ‘pushing the curve’ of adoption of health practices among individuals, the adoption of effective interventions among practitioners, and the adoption of health-promoting and supportive policies among policy-makers. Adopting diffusion of innovations means that we understand how and why people adopt (or fail to adopt) healthier, environmentally conscious or socially beneficial behaviors. These characteristics include (a) the contextual factors that surround the adoption of new practices and policies, (b) people’s perceptions of the innovation as a normative behavior among their reference group or peers (which studies suggest account for anywhere from 50-86% of the variance in the rate of diffusion of new behaviors), and (c) a risk-benefit analysis that substitutes certainty of outcomes and familiarity with the new behavior over costs and benefits of changing current ones.

Social marketers need to design their behavior, product and service offerings to answer the questions people have that are associated with adoption or termination:  

How is this better than what I currently do? ·     

How is it relevant to the way I go about my everyday life? ·     

Is it simple enough for me to do?·     

Can I try it first?   

Can I watch others and see what happens to them when they do it?

Social marketing for behavior change at scale also needs to explore more extensively the use of audience segments such as:

Innovators:  who have a high tolerance of risk; are fascinated with novelty; usually viewed by others in their community as mavericks, not opinion leaders; and whose social networks transcend geographic boundaries.

Early Adopters: who are the community opinion leaders and well-connected socially and locally; have the resources and risk tolerance to try new things; and are the people who are watched by others – and they know it.

Early Majority: the people who are very engaged in local peer networks; rely on personal familiarity before adoption and continually ask the question ‘How does this new behavior, product or service help me?’

Late Majority: the group of people who are most sensitive to peer pressure and norms, yet very cautious about change of any kind; they seek to minimize uncertainty of outcomes and want to see the proof of relative advantage locally – not read about it on web sites or see it on television.

Laggards: these are the traditionalists who believe in the tried and true; they are near isolates in their social networks which explains why they can be so difficult to reach and influence (versus having individual deficits); they are often suspicious of innovation and change agents; and they are seeking assurances that adoption of new behaviors (such as stopping smoking, driving a low carbon emission vehicle) will not fail.

The diffusion of innovations literature should also wake-up policy-makers and social marketers that there are immediate needs to apply marketing principles to such social goals such as improving evidence-based practices in public health and medicine. Maibach, Van Duyn & Bloodgood (2006) suggest three marketing-based solutions: (1) conduct consumer research with prospective adopters to identify their perspectives on how evidence-based prevention programs can advance their organization’s mission, (2) build sustainable distribution channels to promote and deliver evidence-based programs to prospective adopters, and (3) improve access to easily implemented programs that are consistent with evidence-based guidelines.

There are lessons we have learned over the years that can be used to re-conceptualize social marketing strategy to promote diffusion of product and service use as well as adoption of new behaviors.

1. Find sound innovations/solutions. Ones that meet the criteria noted earlier and are relevant to people’s everyday lives.

2. Provide opportunities for Innovators to discover them.

3. Engage the curiosity of the Early Adopters.

4. Target the weak ties between Innovators and Early Adopters through identifying the ‘boundary spanners’ who interact with multiple networks.

5. Promote the work of Early Adopters.

6. Create spanable social distances between groups through various means including using social media such as social network sites and blogs and convening meetings of the ‘unlike’ rather than the usual host of agents.

7. Enhance the salience and attractiveness of the ‘positive deviants’ – the people who are already practicing the target behavior or using the product and service; put the practitioners of ‘new’ behaviors in contexts and situations that attracts imitation or modeling.

8. ‘If you can’t imitate them, don’t copy them.’ Expect and encourage reinvention.

9. Support time and energy for discovery, testing, networking, adapting, monitoring and preserving the past. Do not write off the traditionalists, especially when encouraging organizational change.

10. It starts with yourselves and your partners.

With respect to this last point, remember that highly linked and centralized coalitions are less likely to adopt new evidence-based public health programs than ones that are less dense and have more decentralized structures. What is important for adopting new practices and programs are 'boundary spanners' or individuals from organizations who are not tightly bound exclusively to the clique (or usual cast of characters). These are the people more likely to be open to innovation; the traditionalists have their own, seemingly immutable, point-of-view.

Our challenge in the years ahead, whether it is in HIV prevention or the prevention of childhood obesity, is to apply in a deliberate and systematic way what we have learned from the evidence-base of diffusion research to achieve broad and sustainable change. It seems that very few policy-makers, behavioral change experts and public health officials know how to transform programs focused on individual behavior change to ones scaled for population impact. And few program directors and donors seem willing to take the risk that is inherent in moving from ‘the zoo’ of controlled experiments to ‘the jungle’ of people’s real lives. Social marketing provides us with a framework to fill this gap between knowledge and practice.

References

Global HIV Prevention Working Group. (2007) Bringing HIV prevention to Scale: An urgent global priority.

Lefebvre, R.C. (2001). Theories and models in social marketing. In P.N. Bloom and G.T. Gundlach (eds),  Handbook of Marketing and Society. Newbury Park, CA:  Sage Publications, pp. 506-518.

Maibach, E.W., Van Duyn, M.A. and Bloodgood, B. (2006). A marketing perspective on disseminating evidence-based approaches to disease prevention and health promotion.  Preventing Chronic Disease [serial online] July.

Rogers, E. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations (4^th Ed). New York: The Free Press.

Valente, T.W., Chou, C.P. and Pentz, M.A. (2007). Community coalition networks as systems: Effects of network change on adoption of evidence-based prevention. American Journal of Public Health, 97: 880-886.

Phillip Kotler on Marketing 3.0

Late last week, Guy Kawasaki was all-atwitter (and otherwise) with Phil Kotler's description of Marketing 3.0. He even included a picture of the slide Phil used. If you are like me and found Guy's shot a little hard to read, here's the original and a brief comment about it from the marketing guru himself.

My colleagues and I believe that Mktg 1.0 represented an effort to establish the superior performance of a product ("Tide cleans better," "Volvo is safety,")  In Mktg 2.0, marketing added an emotional dimension to strengthen its appeal to prospective customers.  We are entering Mktg 3.0 where marketers are adding a human spirit dimension.  Mktg 1.0 and 2.0 is how about a product or offering will serve you.  Mktg 3.0 is how a product and its company are sensitive to social and economic issues that are a concern to everyone.  Companies that conduct themselves ecologically and create real value that aligns with the social good will be competitively favored.  The new media will increasingly carry more favorable statements about "caring" companies" and this will influence the buying choices of more consumers.

My thanks to Phil for the slide and the comment. There will be more to come in Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawan, Mktg 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit to be published by John Wiley in April 2010.

 

Social Models for Marketing: An Overview

 At a Social Marketing in Public Health conference 10 years ago, I did a session on Putting the ‘Social’ Back Into Social Marketing. I was concerned that social marketing theory and practice were being turned into another approach to individual behavior change. Indeed, despite early calls for social marketing to be concerned with social and population-based change by Kotler & Zaltman (1971-pdf), Lefebvre & Flora (1988-pdf) and Walsh, Rudd, Moeykens & Moloney (1993-pdf), many definitions of social marketing that emerged over the next two decades promoted a variation of the theme ‘individual behavior change for the common good’ (cf, Andreasen, 1995; Kotler & Lee, 2008; Siegel & Lotenberg, 2007). My session looked at how models of community asset development, political economics and social and anthropological theories provided us with a richer understanding of the social dynamics underlying health and how these approaches could improve the development of social marketing programs. That many so-called social marketing programs then (and now) were little more than persuasive messages delivered as ‘health communication’ is a testimony to the power of theory, and the lack of it, to constrain and limit our effectiveness.

More recently, Gerard Hastings (2007) has embraced the notion of social marketing as a way to enhance social goals and also to analyze the social consequences of marketing policies, decisions and activities. Similarly, Donovan & Henley (2003) take issue with the prevailing individually-focused definitions and call for a focus on social determinants seeing ‘the primary future goal of social marketing as achieving changes in these social determinants of health and well-being’ (p. 6). For the next few days, I am going to explore how to incorporate more social perspectives into social marketing. The social models I believe are important to the vibrancy and success of social marketing include social diffusion, social networks, social determinants, social capital, building communities and social franchising. In the end will look  to how social marketing can become an important lever in the arena of social policy development and implementation – although if you can’t wait, you can always go to this earlier post I did on the subject.

Feel free to jump in at any time.

References

Andreasen, A.R. (1995) Marketing Social Change: Changing Behavior to Promote Health, Social Development, and the Environment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Donovan, R. and Henley, N. (2003) Social Marketing: Principles & Practice. Melbourne, Australia: IP Communications.

Hastings, G. (2007) Social Marketing: Why Should the Devil Have All the Best Tunes? Oxford, England: Elsevier.

Kotler, P. and Lee, N.R. (2008) Social Marketing: Influencing Behaviors for Good (3rd Ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kotler, P. and Zaltman, G. (1971) Social marketing: An approach to planned social change. Journal of Marketing, 35:3-12.

Lefebvre,R.C. and Flora, J.A. (1988) Social marketing and public health intervention. Health Education Quarterly, 15:299–315.

Siegel, M. and Lotenberg, L.D. (2007) Marketing Public Health: Strategies to Promote Social Change (2nd Ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.

Walsh, D.C., Rudd, R.E., Moeykens, B.A. and Moloney, T.W. (1993). Social marketing for public health. Health Affairs, 12:104-119.

The Seven Rules of Projects

Most social markers and change agents work on projects – perhaps the least useful way to generate passion, commitment and results. Matthew May writes about The Seven Laws of Projects, and How to Break Them. Worth a close look.

1. A major project is never completed on time, within budget, or with the original team, and it never does exactly what it was supposed to.

2. Projects progress quickly until they become 85% complete. Then they remain 85% complete forever. Think of this as the Home Improvement Law.

3. When things appear to be going well, you’ve overlooked something. When things can’t get worse, they will. (Murphy’s Law says, “If something can go wrong, it will”—this is a corollary).

4. Project teams hate weekly progress reports because they so vividly manifest the lack of progress.

5. A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected. A carefully planned project will only take twice as long as expected. Also, ten estimators will estimate the same work in ten different ways. And one estimator will estimate ten different ways at ten different times.

6. The greater the project’s technical complexity, the less you need a technician to manage it.

7. If you have too few people on a project, they can’t solve the problems. If you have too many, they create more problems than they can solve.  

OK, now that you know them – breaking them is the courageous next step. When has this worked for you?