Social Marketing

Theoretical and Practical Perspectives

Marvin E. Goldberg, Martin Fishbein, Susan E. Middlestadt

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317778608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

Social Marketing: marketing in the service of societal problems. Does this approach represent dangerous social engineering, or is it the best hope we have to treat what are often regarded as intransigent problems? For both academics and practitioners involved with social marketing, the domain remains in its infancy. Programs and approaches are being developed and implemented by practitioners; academics are defining "what it is, " "where it comes from, " and "where it is going." This book incorporates many of the presentations made at the "Role of Advertising in Social Marketing" Conference sponsored by the Society for Consumer Psychology. Professionals from academia, government, and non-government organizations address a highly diverse and interesting set of societal concerns ranging from organ donation to violence in sports, from efforts to promote safe sex and family planning to better understand cigarette smokers and their perceptions. Are marketing's "four Ps"--product, price, place, and promotion--enough to help solve these problems, or does social marketing at the end of the 1990s need to call on other Ps, such as political persuasion? This volume thoughtfully addresses theoretical and empirical issues challenging academics and practitioners alike to find out how to borrow the best of marketing for application in social marketing.

Part I
Paradigms/Perspectives

Chapter 1
Challenges for the Science and Practice of Social Marketing

Alan R. Andreasen
Georgetown University

Twenty-five years ago, marketing scholars, led by the "Northwestern School" (Elliott, 1991) began to look at possible applications of commercial sector marketing beyond its traditional confines (Koder & Levy, 1969; Kotler & Zaltman, 1971). The first wave of interest was institutional. In the 1970s, marketing scholars focused on adapting marketing mind-sets, processes, and concepts to a wide range of nonprofit enterprises, initially universities, performing arts organizations, and hospitals. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, an increasing number of scholars and practitioners shifted away from this institutional focus toward what might be called a program focus. They recognized that the basic goal of marketing is to influence behavior, whether that behavior is buying a Big Mac, flying United Airlines, practicing safe sex, or getting one's child immunized (Andreasen, 1993). In each case, marketers mount programs to bring about these behaviors. Some programs, like that of United Airlines or the National High Blood Pressure Education Program, are very long term. Others, like many new cereal introductions and some health care interventions, are shorter lived.

This perception that marketing constitutes a proven and potentially very powerful technology for bringing about socially desirable behaviors is the engine motivating the growth of what might be called "the social marketing movement" over the last 15 years. This movement has established social marketing as a distinct subdiscipline within the general field of academic marketing. At the same time, it has led to the adoption of the technology by a wide range of private, public, and private-nonprofit organizations and institutions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Cancer Institute. There are now social marketing textbooks (Andreasen, 1995; Fine, 1981; Kotler & Roberto, 1989; Manoff, 1985), readings books (Fine, 1990), chapters within mainstream texts (Kotler & Andreasen, 1996), and a Harvard teaching note (Rangun & Karim, 1991). There have been reviews of the accomplishments of social marketing (Fox & Kotler, 1980; Malafarina & Token, 1993) and presidential addresses for two different consumer behavior organizations calling to researchers and academics to become more deeply involved in studies of social marketing (Andreasen, 1993; Goldberg, 1995). Centers for social marketing are present or proposed in Florida, Ottawa, Scotland, and South Africa.

Social marketing is now sufficiently established that it has earned its own critics. For example, Wallack (1990) argued that social marketing is too costly and time consuming and that its individual-level approach fails to remove the noxious environments that are the true causes of the behaviors it is trying to change. Wallack proposed media advocacy as the most cost-effective way to bring about important social changes. He concluded that "the effectiveness of social marketing remains limited" (p. 376).

Despite the healthy skepticism of its critics, social marketing is now both deepening and broadening its market penetration. For this reason, it is important for those who feel custodial responsibility for the field to insure that this growth is healthy. The challenges facing the field depend on whether one is broadening or is deepening the application.

Broadening Social Marketing Applications

Social marketing in its formative years was primarily associated with health problems as represented by two of the most important early applications, contraceptive marketing and high blood pressure (National Heart, Lung, & Blood Institute, 1992; Rangun & Karim, 1991). However, in the last 5 years, although health applications continue to dominate, there has been a broadening in the application of the technology to other areas. Andreasen and Tyson (1993) applied social marketing to get builders to plant or save more trees on the residential lots they develop. Others used social marketing ideas to get householders and businesses to recycle more often, and to get families to adopt more difficult-to-place children. Still others developed programs to get politicians and school administrators in Asia to increase the educational opportunities for girls (Schwartz, 1994), to encourage rural economic development, to reduce spousal abuse, and to lobby U.S. congressional representatives (Novelli, 1995).

As many authors and speakers have made clear, the principles of social marketing can apply to an extremely diverse set of social problems wherever the bottom line is influencing behavior (Andreasen, 1995; Kotler & Roberto, 1989). However, as managers and funding agencies begin to use social marketing in more and more disparate domains, it is important to repeat the following cautions about basic principles, which—in their haste to adopt the very latest social engineering fad—they may ignore.

Social marketing is about behavior change. It is not about education and propaganda, and individuals should not imagine they are doing social marketing if their primary goal is informing the public or trying to change some basic values. These are laudable goals and they may precede social marketing. But they are not social marketing! As a corollary, social marketing is not social advertising. Although communications tools are often central to social marketing programs, social marketing is much more than just communications.

Social marketing is not a grab-bag of concepts and tools (like focus group research) randomly used as needed or peppered throughout traditional approaches like health education. It is, first of all, a specific mind-set that puts customers at the center of everything the marketer does. Second, it is a process of doing social marketing. This process involves constantly going back and forth to the target market before and after planning and before and after implementation. And it is, finally, a set of coordinated interventions that do not rely only on communications.

Social marketing is not a panacea. It often must deal with huge problems where the expectations of funding agencies, governments, and the general public is very high. Yet, these very same problems typically involve very fundamental behaviors, attitudes, and values. Changing the way Pakistani men treat young women in their society is a lot more difficult than getting more kids in the United States to eat Froot Loops. As various scholars have noted (Bloom & Novelli, 1981; Kotler & Andreasen, 1991; Rothschild, 1979), social marketers have several special issues with which to deal:

Nonexistent demand—for example, where targets of a contraceptive social marketing program are members of a particular religious group who believe that children are "God's plan" and cannot be prevented or spaced.

Negative demand—for example, where drivers feel that driving under 55 mph or wearing a seat belt is unduly restrictive.

Intense public scrutiny—for example, where village leaders feel that a new breast feeding or oral rehydration program is a hostile Western attempt to eliminate traditional values and social patterns.

Nonliterate and/or extremely impoverished target markets—for example, when villagers cannot afford either the cost of condoms or, alternatively, the time to go to a health clinic to get free ones.

Highly sensitive issues—for example, where one wishes to ask Muslim women about their sexual behaviors in order to develop a more effective safe sex campaign.

Invisible benefits—for example, where one is promoting driving under 55 mph or getting a child inoculated but where success means that nothing happened (i.e., no accidents, no measles), which makes it hard for the target audience to see a connection between the recommended behavior and specific outcomes.

Benefits are often to third parties—for example, where one is trying to get individual households to recycle even though they do not directly benefit and, in fact, pay real costs.

Benefits are often hard to portray—for example, where one would like to show the outcome of safe sex or family planning without using clichéd pictures of happy, healthy individuals and families.

Social marketing is not mass marketing. Indeed, as is noted later, one of social marketing's important contributions is to insist that markets almost always need to be segmented, and in many cases segmented in unconventional ways.

Finally, changing behavior in many cases is only the first step. Too many programs are short lived, designed as one-time campaigns. For the difficult behaviors with which many social programs are involved, such quick fixes are likely to have equally quick lifetimes.

Deepening Social Marketing Interventions

Social marketing has been around long enough so that there are a number of organizations now in existence that have 15 to 20 years experience implementing and/or advising about social marketing. They have become better practitioners of this new technology and through newsletters, monographs, and manuals have sought to share their findings and insights with others in a range of formats: general management guides (Cabañero-Verzosa et al., 1989), manuals for communications campaign planning and executions (e.g., HealthCom, 1995), guidelines for a range of marketing functions (Elder, Barriga, Graeff, Rosenbaum, & Boddy, 1991; Seidel, 1993; SGMARC, n.d,), narrative histories of particular programs (Browne, 1994; Saade & Tucker, n.d.), program evaluations (Seidel, 1992; SOMARC III, 1994), and conference reports (Women, Infants, & STDs, 1991).

A review of this literature suggests that, if the field is to deepen its applications, attention must be paid to each of the three central elements of the social marketing approach. Progress can be made in widening the use of the customer mind-set, introducing new theory-driven planning models, and developing more sophisticated concepts and tools.

Widening the Use of the Customer Mind-Set

The essence of the social marketing mind-set is a fanatical devotion to being customer driven. And, most sophisticated social marketers have little difficulty being customer driven when it comes to their target markets. They thoroughly understand the need for customer research at various stages of the process. They know they must segment their markets (although often not as creatively as might be imagined). They can craft programs that directly address the needs, wants, and perceptions of the segments they select. And, they know they must pay careful attention to both cognitive and behavioral responses of those targets before, during, and after implementation.

However, where these marketers often fail is when they focus on other than final target markets. For example, it is commonly asserted that most social marketing programs can only succeed if they enlist the help of others to carry out program activities. Social marketers have limited budgets and, typically, immense challenges. So they must work with physicians, retailers, government bureaucrats, politicians, and the media to achieve their goals. Yet, when dealing with these potential partners, they often forget the customer mind-set that made them so successful in the first place. They forget that the bottom line of social marketing is influencing behavior and the cooperation of others is simply just another kind of behavior to be influenced. Thus, attempts to influence such audiences must also start with these audiences' needs, wants, and perceptions.

Yet, it has been my experience that too many program managers seek cooperation from important partners by arguing as persuasively as they can that the program needs the help. These myopic marketers describe the immense challenges they face and point out how cooperating partners can be instrumental in helping the social marketer achieve success. They say over and over again that help is desperately needed! The social marketers seem to think that the targets will be flattered by this call for help. But, even though they seldom realize it, the basic message they are sending out is: 'You should act in the ways we want because we will benefit from it!" The social marketer would never act this way when addressing final consumers. But, they will often act this way with television news directors, nurses, or pharmacists. They adopt a classic organization-centered approach (Andreasen, 1984).

Of course, what these social marketers need to learn to do instinctively is to cast the desired behavior and its consequences in terms of each audience's needs and wants. They have to show the news director how the news director's audience will be enthralled by a story about the social marketing program (especially if they provide a photogenic child for interviewing). They have to show nurses that participating in the program will help them learn new skills and increase their efficiency in their sphere of work. They have to show the pharmacists that participating will not only mean more sales and profits but will enhance their prestige in the community as a source of important new innovations and sage advice.

The principles are the same. Social marketers just seem to forget how widely they can be applied.

Introducing New Theory-Driven Planning Models

Most mature social marketing organizations have developed some form of boxes-and-arrows planning model to guide their operations. These models typically start with a formal situational analysis with a heavy emphasis on consumer research. This is then followed by planning, pretesting, and implementation, with the planning stage further subdivided to address major subcomponents of the program (e.g., segmentation, positioning, developing the marketing mix). The implementation stage is typically followed by some form of monitoring that then leads back in a recursive fashion to more planning, pretesting, implementation, and so on. Programs with finite lives and outside funding agencies also typically build into their model some form of final evaluation for the entire activity (Seidel, 1992).

These linear process models function very much like checklists. They indicate the steps and tasks that a careful social marketer is to follow if a program is to have a successful outcome. But, what is missing from most of the process models is any kind of underlying theoretical framework. The models tell managers what to do and in what sequence. But, they do not tie these steps to any particular framework that makes clear how what they do is supposed to work to impact critical social behaviors. This is a role, however, that can be played by one or more of the available social science theories discussed throughout this volume (e.g., Lutz & Bettman, 1977; Wilkie & Pessemeir, 1973).

Sophisticated social marketing managers are well aware of these theories of behavior change. But, the design and execution of social market...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I: PARADIGMS/PERSPECTIVES
• PART II: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES/PSYCHOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION
• PART III: FIGHTING AIDS/PROMOTING FAMILY PLANNING
• PART IV: ANTISMOKING EFFORTS
• PART V: THREE DIFFERING INSTITUTIONAL APPROACHES: GOVERNMENT, NONGOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS, PRIVATE CORPORATIONS
• PART VI: THE BROAD POTENTIAL OF SOCIAL MARKETING
• Author Index
• Subject Index