On Social Marketing and Social Change

Educate to Innovate: Another Top Down Approach to STEM Education

The Educate to Innovate campaign launched today is the latest attempt to engineer a solution to the poor academic standing of US students when compared to the rest of the world in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). From the Alliance for Excellent Education Fact Sheet (pdf; March 2008):

• The United States ranks 21st of 30 OECD countries in scientific literacy, and the U.S. score of 489 fell below the OECD average of 500.
• The United States ranks 25th of 30 OECD countries in mathematics literacy, and the average score of 474 fell well below the OECD average of 498.

• The United States has an average number of students who perform at the highest proficiency levels, but a much larger proportion who perform at the lowest levels. The United States is the only member country to have relatively high proportions of both top and bottom performers.
• Although American white students’ average science score of 523 ranked above the OECD average, Hispanic American (439), American Indian and Native Alaskan (436), and African American (409) students all fell far below. These groups scored similarly to the national averages of Turkey and Mexico, the two lowest-performing OECD member countries.
• The difference between the science scores of two students of different socioeconomic backgrounds is higher in the United States than in almost any other country.
  

The White House announcement today noted that the Educate to Innovate campaign will involve a series a 'high-powered partnerships'...[that] will apply new and creative methods of generating and maintaining student interest and enthusiasm in science and math, reinvigorating the pipeline of ingenuity and innovation essential to America’s success that has long been at the core of American economic leadership. It continues:

President Obama has identified three overarching priorities for STEM education: increasing STEM literacy so all students can think critically in science, math, engineering and technology; improving the quality of math and science teaching so American students are no longer outperformed by those in other nations; and expanding STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and minorities.

This not the first foray into improving the education of American children, especially in STEM subjects. The recent Wall Street Journal CEO Council cited 'an educated workforce' as its top priority. Says John Chambers, one of the Co-Chairs of An Educated Workforce: Each of us during our tenure as CEOs has sat in an "education-is-your-top-priority" type of discussion every year. And each year, you walk out a little bit frustrated. You say the timing's not right, we're not really serious about it, etc. But as we went through the discussion today, it was a unanimous vote that it needs to be the top national priority—way above the economy, health care, energy or the environment.

So what will some celebrities (Astronaut Sally Ride for example), 100,000 volunteers, interactive games and hands-on learning, and an annual White House Science Fair get us? As was said by a marketer in another STEM planning meeting I participated in: You can do what you want, but if you go down this road the effort is DOOMED!

Then, as now, what seems to be a crucial piece of the puzzle of missing: the students.

You can fix the curriculum, make the teachers smarter, create smaller classrooms, get the parents engaged, BUT if the students don’t see the benefit in it for themselves, it will make no difference whatsoever. If a marketer were doing this, we’d focus on the kids as the audience – not the parents, teachers, administrators or school board.

It certainly isn't clear from the announcement and rhetoric exactly what the strategies will be for the Educate to Innovate campaign. But it sadly sounds as if it will be more about posturing and hypothesizing about what's wrong with kids, school, teachers, parents, businesses, communities and ways to 'fix them' than actually getting down to designing solutions that will work for the students from their point of view. Another situation where perhaps a new way of thinking about things would bring some insight and feasible, viable solutions. Some market-based ideas we came up with at the meeting for those thinking STEM education.

Financial Literacy & Education Meets Social Marketing

The global financial crisis has focused many governments and international financial institutions on financial literacy and capabilities (FLC) among people in low, middle and high-income countries (L/M/HICs). The crisis accelerated concerns about FLC that were already a priority among some economists and retirement experts who saw the need for more FLC programs to address the increase in the supply and complexity of financial products and institutions, the drift of governments towards having individuals assume more risk and responsibility for life-cycle planning (for example, retirement), high levels of household debt in HICs, and the need to improve access to these products and institutions in LICs as well as to provide basic business education and programs that help people to understand the costs and avoid indebtedness.

Last week I joined 40 experts from around the world in a workshop on measuring financial capability and the effectiveness of financial education programs sponsored by the World Bank and OECD. The emphasis was not on what we know, but to prepare for new research projects. The organizers of the workshop believed that social marketing might be an important component of some of these research projects, though what most participants seemed to believe social marketing consisted of when we began was mass media campaigns, entertainment education (particularly via soap operas) and, in a few cases, using social media.

Though my ‘Evaluating social marketing, including media campaigns and soaps' panel was not until the second day, social marketing came up early and often in the prepared comments and discussion. What was interesting to me was how the majority of the participants were focused on behavioral outcomes and not just cognitive ones and how segmentation of audiences was also a critical part of many of their strategies. We heard from Daryl Collins about her work using financial diaries to understand the financial behaviors among the poorest of the poor in LICs [see Portfolios of the Poor].  She noted that most of these people do know how to save and budget as well as plan for life-cycle events, such as weddings and funerals, fairly well. What they don’t know, she added, was how the financial systems and products work and the existence of, and how to access, consumer protection structures that are in place – such as credit bureaus. Among people in LICs she asked, what should be the impacts of FLC programs? Changes in assets…savings…use of financial services? And what do we measure – abilities and competencies or more pervasive concepts such as a future orientation that is believed to underlie or motivate financial planning behaviors?

Santosh Anagol also put on the table the question: Why isn’t financial education provided by the market if people need it?' His hypotheses included (1) low demand and low perceived value of FLC programs by consumers; (2) behavioral biases on the part of consumers including myopia, discounting and overconfidence in their abilities to manage their finances; and (3) market failures, particularly the lack of consumer trust and the low credibility of the private sector (banks and other private financial institutions), that lead consumers to mistrust the information and be fearful of being swindled or deliberately misinformed by them. These market failures are one reason why governments are now looked to as a chief proponent and provider of FLC programs at this time. And why, he also asked as an example, can people in India be so cell phone literate that 500 million have one and yet only 200 million have a bank account? Clearly, we all agreed, more consumer research and some insight are needed.

While measurement and evaluation strategies were center stage, the discussions ranged far and wide about how to frame and understand the issues around financial literacy and education (FL&E). Some of the notes I made included:

• Can there be a universal evaluation framework for FL&E that is applicable across H/M/LICs?
• How do people in H/M/LICs think about and describe people they consider to be financially literate and illiterate?
• What are the objective indicators of financial capability and can they be arrayed on a continuum?
• What are the influences of peoples’ social networks on their own financial behaviors and capabilities?
• What are the policy enablers and inhibitors of more or fewer financial competencies across countries?
• What are the consequences of low financial literacy – how do they vary for different segments of the population and across countries?
• Are social financial competencies, for instance knowing how to cope effectively with financial difficulties, as important as ‘individual’ capabilities such as opening a bank account and using credit responsibly?
• What are the potential inadvertent or negative consequences of financial education programs?
• Should FE programs focus on specific decision-making or event planning skills rather than more general or global financial capabilities?
• How are political election cycles and grant time limits constraining the use of innovative evaluation designs such as delayed treatment and time series analyses?

These and many other questions, issues and concerns – and possible solutions and approaches - were captured by the workshop organizers and will be used to inform a series of studies that will be launched later this year or early in 2010.  They will also be shared with global networks of FL&E researchers and program designers including the US Treasury and the Social Security Administration that have become quite active in this area. Michelle Greene, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Education and Financial Access at Treasury, summed up the view that the financial crisis focuses us on financial education as part of financial security.  And I can report that after 2 days of listening and being very patient with me at times, many of the participants have a new appreciation of how to use some social marketing concepts and strategies to think about and evaluate financial education programs around the world. The slides from my presentation.

Getting Social Marketing Wrong in Health Behavior and Health Education

I often find myself asking “Where do people get these odd ideas about social marketing from?” You probably know some of them, such as  –

• Social marketing programs take a lot of time to plan.
• Social marketing is expensive to do.
• You have to do focus groups to do social marketing.
• Social marketing segments audiences to deliver tailored messages to them.
• Social marketing is consumer-driven.
• Social marketing is about reducing the barriers and costs to engaging in healthier behaviors.
• Social marketing is the application of commercial marketing principles and techniques for social change.
• Social marketing is all about delivering benefits to a target audience.
• Social marketing is a framework to identify what factors might drive and maintain behavior change.
• Social marketing is a way to develop strategic communication campaigns.

And I imagine after reading some of these you might wonder “What’s so odd about this one?”

Well, to the first question first…

The key reason that people misunderstand social marketing is that most public health academicians do not understand it – though they write books and articles about it, teach it in classrooms and other settings, develop research proposals that are funded to evaluate it and consult to unsuspecting agencies about how to do it. As the acknowledged achievers of the summit of educational and intellectual prowess (they are, after all, ‘professors’ at universities and colleges), they have the credibility, recognition and prestige to be listened to, read and believed by many people. Unfortunately, as I saw again this week, when it comes to the topic of social marketing it is ‘consumer beware!’

I just finished reading the chapter on social marketing in the 4th edition of Health Behavior and Health Education edited by Karen Glanz, Barbara Rimer and K. Viswanath. This book is said to be, by C. Tracey Orleans of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, …the preeminent text and indispensable reference for our field…the first book we reach for to help us think about the foundations on which to design an intervention or research plan, inform a systematic evidence review, write or review an article or grant application, plan a course or presentation, and consult with other practitioners or researchers… (Foreword, p. XV). Quite an endorsement and I have no reason to suspect its validity. Indeed, all the more so to expect high quality and accurate work – something on the order of Wikipedia perhaps?

The chapter on social marketing is written by people I know. They are acknowledged health communication experts at the Center for Communication Programs at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. And they approach the subject as health communication people, not as social marketers, to the point of labeling a key section as The Role of Social Marketing Within A Strategic Communication Framework. I have said before how editors and peer reviewers need to gently, or not so gently, correct authors of papers who use the term ‘social marketing’ to refer to an intervention that is clearly focused on only 1P – promotion or communication. In a textbook for the field, I wish the editors of this book had thought about that responsibility a little longer rather than summarize the chapter as ‘a fresh look at social marketing…[that] emphasize[s] how social marketing can be applied within a strategic communication framework' (p.513). Maybe then other editors and peer reviewers would have a clue as to what social marketing is when they reached for this ‘indispensable reference book.’

The shirking of responsibility is what irks me. The authors are certainly entitled to their view of social marketing as a tool that improves their strategic communication programs, but including it in a book as described by Tracey Orleans makes it obvious how and why social marketing becomes misunderstood among students, researchers and practitioners. It is the diffusion of a slanted perspective (OK, a different one) to an unsuspecting reader in the absence of anything resembling a true north – an approach similar to asking (and accepting) a Jungian to author a chapter on Freud’s theory for a book on personality theories for psychiatrists, an AIDS denialist to write a chapter about HIV prevention in southern Africa for health care professionals or an advertising person to write a marketing chapter for a graduate business text (or how about if Julia Child had written an Italian cookbook then?).

Let’s go to the quotes (and compare them to the list I started off with):

Not only is commercial marketing…a highly sophisticated and complex undertaking…it is also highly expensive (albeit not always successful; p.435). I call that classical conditioning – or guilt by association. Every time we link social marketing to commercial marketing principles and techniques – INSTEAD OF marketing principles – we do the same thing and undermine our credibility, perpetuate myths about planning and expense (despite what Reynolds Wrap is able to achieve on relatively small marketing budgets) and end-up in a conversation about lousy and deceptive marketing practices rather than creating more effective and efficient social change programs that deliver relevant and useful value to people’s lives. And do not think that ‘commercial’ marketers are not watching and learning from their nonprofit and public sector colleagues.

Careful reading of that last sentence shows the frame I prefer to use to talk about marketing practice: in the context of commercial (or private), public and nonprofit sectors [Note to the 5th P (politics) believers – it is the public sector context of many social marketing programs that drives the political aspects of them, not the people the programs are intended for]. This perspective then naturally leads to a larger discussion of whether the private sector can ‘do social marketing.’ My position is ‘of course’ – why not have a triple-win of social, personal and corporate (though I believe that the public sector and nonprofit/NGO sector agencies get some wins from success too)? See my post on Creative Capitalism to get a more in-depth look at some of the new thinking in this area.

After noting that debate over the definitions of social marketing will continue (p.437), the authors describe the five principles of social marketing as including (1) focusing on behavioral outcomes, (2) putting consumer’s benefits ahead of the ones of marketers, (3) maintaining an ecological perspective, (4) developing a strategic ‘marketing mix’ of communication elements according to the 4Ps and (5) using segmentation to identify how differences among consumers may affect their responses to the product or service being offered. While each of these deserve longer commentary, for here I will note:

1.    Behavioral outcomes are important steps to achieving the population or social objectives, but social marketers do have larger and longer lasting goals in mind as well for which a social marketing framework is very useful.

2.    Marketers’ benefits are no different than any other group of employees or professional service consultants who are hired to perform tasks and services for an organization; what they may have meant is that organizational goals are subservient to the ones of the audience – though I tend to disagree with this. I have not run across many funded projects where the donor has said “Whoops, we picked the wrong outcomes to focus on, clearly ones that are not priorities of the community. We need to go back and change them.” And fewer yet that fund an organization to do social marketing, or any type of intervention, with the mandate ‘discover what people are really passionate about changing and then work with them to do it!’ [If you have examples of these, I would really like to learn about them. Positive deviants are usually quite helpful in shifting the conversation.]

3.    An ecological perspective is a theory-driven one. One principle that distinguishes the best social marketers, I believe, is an unrelenting understanding, empathy and advocacy of the perspective of our priority population or community that is not slanted by what the theory or research evidence does or does not tell us. Social marketers should get into debates with theorists and researchers – it is the latters’ reality versus the ones of people that will drive program design, delivery and evaluation (how do ‘we’ know it worked?).

4.    A marketing mix has FOUR elements to create value for people. Not THREE (for the Easy, Fun and Popular crowd, which is also a theory) and certainly not ONE communication element. Period.

5.    Segmentation is a bigger idea than determining a response to a product, service or behavioral offering. Market segmentation has become narrowly focused on the needs of advertising, which it serves mainly by populating commercials with characters that viewers can identify with – the marketing equivalent of central casting…The idea was to broaden the use of segmentation so that it could inform not just advertising but also product innovation, pricing, choice of distribution channels, and the like.

Again, I think the 4th point in particular continues to perpetuate the misunderstanding of the differences between marketing and communication. I understand that communication academicians want the whole world to see life as one long communication process and understandably then want to subsume marketing and everything else under its benign umbrella. However, that is only a POV. Others might suggest that life is just a series of exchanges, some of which are communications and others that involve products and services under different sets of circumstances (see the other 3Ps). And of course, biologists, mathematicians, economists and political theorists (to just name a few) have their own POV – as do Jungians, denialists, advertising executives and chefs.

As you can imagine, I have notes on every page of the chapter where I agree to disagree. But the final straw was when they introduced their cases for international and domestic (US) social marketing experiences by saying: In this section, we profile two health communication programs from a social marketing perspective. They might as well as used Freud.

And as for the second question, you could have seen it coming. Try going through the list of oddities now.

Reference

Storey JD, Saffitz GB and Rimon JG. Social marketing. In K Glanz, BK Rimer & K Viswanath (Eds). Health behavior and health education: Theory, practice and research. San Francisco:Jossey-Bass, 2008.