Social Marketing

Advances in Research and Theory

Walter W. Wymer Jr, Debra Basil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136759710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Learn what marketing practices can positively impact behaviorThe success of the application of commercial marketing practices to change behavior for the betterment of society and the individual is getting more attention. Social Marketing: Advances in Research and Theory explores the use of social marketing through a variety of effective approaches. Chapters examine case studies and qualitative research to gain insight into the adoption of marketing practices to enable social change. This superb collection of top presentations from the SMART (Social Marketing Advances in Research and Theory) inaugural conference held in 2004 in Alberta, Canada provides examples of the latest commercial marketing practices to change behavior such as programs to encourage people to quit smoking or increase seat belt usage.Social Marketing: Advances in Research and Theory presents top experts who provide a wide variety of specific examples explaining ways to enable social marketing to positively impact behavior. This helpful resource provides a broad, useful understanding of this unique type of marketing and its goals. Chapters offer extensive references and detailed tables and figures to clearly present data.Topics in Social Marketing: Advances in Research and Theory include:

• a case study on approaches to anti-doping behavior in sports
  
• a case study reviewing the evolution of the Canadian Heritage anti-racism campaign
  
• applying social marketing concepts to increase capacity of programs in a state health department
  
• research into a recycling promotion technique
  
• using Internet technology to study the impact of anti-smoking messages
  
• issues involved in the voluntary change in behavior of automobile users
  
• charity support behaviors

Social Marketing: Advances in Research and Theory is an insightful resource valuable to academics and practitioners interested in social marketing, or anyone working with nonprofits to change individual behavior and better society.

Case Studies

The World Anti-Doping Agency: The Role of Social Marketing

Norm O’Reilly

Norm O’Reilly is Assistant Professor, Marketing, Faculty of Business, Ryerson University, 285 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5B 1W1 (E-mail: noreilly@ ryerson.ca).

Judith Madill

Judith Madill is Associate Professor, Marketing, Eric Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1S 5B6.

SUMMARY. Doping in sport poses a clear threat to the significant social and economic roles that sport plays in the world. To combat this threat, sport organizations and governments from around the world founded the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to eradicate doping from sport. This article reports on research that documents and assesses approaches to anti-doping behavior utilized since early in the twentieth century including those used by WADA to achieve its goal of eradicating doping in sport. In particular, it assesses the extent to which social marketing is used in its strategy. Results show that sanctions and education are the major approaches employed to combat doping and that social marketing has not been used. Findings suggest that social marketing strategies, as a complement to WADA’s current legal and education approaches, have a future role; demonstrating that, in a broader context, social marketing could enhance educational and legal approaches to behavior change. doi:10.1300/J054v17n01_01 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: < http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS: Social marketing, sport marketing, international policy, not-for-profit marketing, anti-doping

Introduction

Sport plays an important social and economic role in virtually every country of the world. Examples of the global influence of sport range from the estimated 3.7 billion people from over 220 countries who watched in excess of 36 billion hours of television coverage of the 2000 Summer Olympic Games from Sydney, Australia (International Olympic Committee, 2000), to the 60.3% of men and 39.7% of women who attended sporting events in 2002 in Canada (Marketing Research Handbook, 2004), to estimates that 35 million people worldwide played at least one round of golf in 2000 (World Golf Foundation, 2003). At the national level, countries use sport to promote nationalism (Palmer, 2001) and there are endless examples of star athletes who influence millions of people as role models in their local markets (Shanklin and Miciak, 1996).

Sport currently faces an enormous threat from doping. In recognition of this threat, numerous sport organizations and governments from around the world founded and continue to support the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its mission to eradicate doping from sport. WADA defines doping as “the occurrence of one or more of the anti-doping rule violations” (WADA, 2003) as outlined in eight articles of its World Anti-Doping Code. These rules are broad, including “the presence of a prohibited substance or its metabolites or markers in an athlete’s bodily specimen” (WADA, 2003), “tampering, or attempting to tamper, with any part of doping control” (WADA, 2003), and “administration or attempted administration of a prohibited substance or prohibited method to any athlete, or assisting, encouraging, aiding, abetting, covering up or any other type of complicity involving an anti-doping rule violation or attempted violation” (WADA, 2003).

In its short history, WADA has furthered anti-doping in sport. It has acted as the glue between governments and sport federations, bringing the majority of these organizations onside in the fight against doping (WADA, 2004b). It has attracted significant resources and funding (WADA, 2004d). It has brought profile to the cause as demonstrated by the inclusion of an anti-steroid message in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address to the United States Congress in January 2004 (Pound, 2004a). Further, WADA has played a role in bringing anti-doping to the forefront of some of the world’s most suspected candidates for doping abuse, including the Tour de France bicycling race, and track and field in the United States (Deacon, 2004). In these respects and others, WADA is a very successful organization, however, in order to achieve its mandate, the organization must overcome significant barriers because of the complex social change relating to anti-doping that it must achieve in a number of stakeholder groups.

The marketing literature has shown consistent interest in social marketing, and recent attention has focused on the need to clearly define social marketing and expand its areas of application. Andreasen (2002) proposes a branding campaign that seeks to increase social marketing’s share of the social-change market at the intervention, subject matter, product, and brand levels. It is the intervention level that is the focus of this article, where “social marketing can succeed by increasing the proportion of interventions that emphasize individual change (social marketing’s niche) over approaches that emphasize community mobilization or structural change” (Andreasen, 2002). The purpose of this article is to report on research that:

1. presents a background overview of doping behaviors, as well as anti-doping approaches, utilized throughout most of the twentieth century within the context of a discussion on the structure of high-performance sport;
2. presents an overview of WADA and the approaches used by WADA to achieve its goal of eradicating doping in sport. In particular, it assesses the extent to which WADA uses social marketing;
3. postulates a potential rationale as to why social marketing is not currently used in the WADA strategy. This considers the wide range of barriers identified in previous literature including a failure on the part of social marketers in building awareness of their field; and
4. examines the present conditions at WADA and explores how social marketing could be integrated into the WADA strategy. In particular, the article provides, in the context of Rothschild’s (1999) work, a broader and more generalizable explanation of what social marketing could add to educational and legal approaches for influencing athletes’ use of doping substances.

Although WADA the organization could be described as “unique,” it is an important organization that plays a critical role on the world stage by tackling a key problem in sport–doping. While focusing on WADA itself is important, a demonstration of the importance of social marketing as a means of social change will provide knowledge and support for the idea that other organizations acting at the intervention level can successfully adopt social marketing interventions as part of their strategy. The rationale for undertaking this study is derived from the important role that WADA plays in an important industry and the potential impact of social marketing both in that context and broader application.

Reflecting the major objectives for the article, it is organized into seven major sections. First, relevant background literature on social marketing is briefly reviewed. Next, the methodology used in the research is considered. Third, we provide a detailed background on the structure of high-performance sport, as well as an overview of doping behaviors and anti-doping approaches used to combat doping. The article then moves to an analysis of WADA, its development, organizational structure, funding, and the current approaches to achieving its goals. The extent to which social marketing is used and the barriers to its adoption are the focus of the next sections. We then discuss the potential of social marketing at WADA and how social marketing can contribute to furthering WADA’s policy goals and objectives. Of particular importance in this section is an assessment of Rothschild’s MOA theory (1999) in assessing generally how social marketing can complement educational and legal approaches to behavior change. Finally, the article’s major findings are summarized and conclusions are presented.

Background Literature: Social Marketing

It has been suggested that social marketing is a useful tool by which to develop and implement strategies and tactics toward changing behaviors (Andreasen and Kotler, 2003; Kotler and Roberto, 1989). In practice, social marketers work to encourage individuals or groups to adopt behaviors that are socially desirable (Andreasen, 1995). Previously, Andreasen, (1994) clarified that “influencing behavior is social marketing’s fundamental objective.” Social marketing is a relatively new agent of social/behavior change that resulted from the Kotler and Levy (1969a, 1969b) proposal that marketing principles and tactics could be applied beyond their traditional boundaries to the marketing of services, persons, and ideas. A two-sided debate involving multiple theorists followed in the literature with the side that argued for expanding marketing’s boundaries eventually winning over the side that argued for guarding marketing’s traditional application in buy-and-sell transactions. Following Kotler and Levy’s (1969a) suggestion that “marketing is a pervasive societal activity that goes considerably beyond the selling of toothpaste, soap, and steel” and asking “whether the principles of ‘good’ marketing in traditional product areas are transferable to the marketing of services, persons, and ideas,” the debate began. One group of writers argues for the expansion of the concept of marketing (Kotler and Levy, 1969b; Kotler and Zaltman, 1971; Lazer, 1969; Shapiro, 1973) while another group (Bartels, 1974; Hutton, 2001; Luck, 1969, 1974) questions the long-term affects of applying marketing concepts to broader contexts, inferring that the definition of marketing should include only buy-and-sell transactions. Within the debate, a number of significant theoretical contributions were made. Kotler and Zaltman (1971) provided examples of churches, museums, and symphonies using marketing to increase membership, and charities using marketing to raise money. Kotler (1972) crafted a generic and very broad concept of marketing. Shapiro (1973) demonstrated how marketing theory could be applied to non-government nonprofit organizations. Bagozzi (1974) proposes marketing as a behavioral system of exchange, which established the basis for the future development of social marketing theory.

By the late 1970s, the application of marketing tactics to areas other than the private sector had increased dramatically, identifying the importance of considering strategies and tactics in addition to those traditionally employed (Rothschild, 1979). The rationale for this shift was to account for the complex differences between sectors (Laczniak, Lusch, and Murphy, 1979). In this context, social marketing developed rapidly in the practitioner and applied research (DeJong, 1989) settings driven by the increased need of nonbusiness organizations for marketing services.

Recently, research has pointed out some of the antecedents that allow for social marketing to occur. These include (among others): (a) open competition for the acceptance of ideas and behaviors that exist in developed countries (Rothschild, 2001), (b) increasing pressures on policy makers to implement their policies, and (c) increasing mobility in society with its accompanying decrease in the strength of traditional group norms influencing individual behaviors (Ouchi, 1980).

Defining social marketing and determining where it fits among the many subdisciplines of marketing has been a challenge for the field (Andreasen and Kotler, 2003). McMahon (2001) positions social marketing as “part of a larger, non-private market sector marketing concern which includes public-sector marketing, government marketing, political marketing, not-for-profit marketing, non-government-organization (NGO) marketing, charitable marketing, cause-related marketing, and voluntary or third-sector marketing.” There is general support for the current definition articulated by the Social Marketing Institute (2003), defining social marketing as “the planning and implementation of programs designed to bring about social change using concepts from commercial marketing,” although other theorists support similar yet subtly different definitions. Andreasen and Kotler (2003) stress that social marketing benefits the target audience and society in general, not the marketer. Brenkert (2001) clarified that when defining social marketing, one must consider that it is defined by its twofold nature: “its aim and the method it adopts to achieve that aim.” Rothschild (2001) supports a definition that includes the dual objective of encouraging behavior change in the target audience and supporting the development of a related environment that is conducive to that change.

Recent advancements in the field include the development of the MOA (motivation, opportunity, ability) conceptual framework to manage social change (Rothschild, 1999) and the consideration of a relationship-based approach to social marketing (Hastings, 2003). Although applying the relationship paradigm advanced knowledge in the field, it was the development of the MOA implementation framework for behavior change that legitimized social marketing as one of the key intervention strategies of social change, along with educational and legal approaches. This relates to doping where each of education, law, and marketing are strategy choices available to WADA to encourage behavior change in athletes and their support teams.

The Adoption of a Social Marketing Approach

In practice, social marketing continues to struggle to grow as an approach to social change (Andreasen, 2002). Although many barriers to adoption have been identified in the literature (Andreasen, 2002; Rothschild, 1999), social marketing has been adopted and has been successful in a wide variety of circumstances and situations (Andreasen and Kotler, 2003). In many of these instances of success, social marketing has been used as an approach to complement education and the law as part of a comprehensive program of behavior change at the intervention level encouraging individual change (Andreasen, 2002).

A brief review of the anti-smoking literature illustrates how a social marketing approach can be effectively combined with laws prohibiting smoking and reveals a number of best practices that might be appropriate for use in anti-doping by an organization such as WADA. For example, a social marketing program must be evaluated and there are a variety of research methodologies by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Copyright
• Title
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• CASE STUDIES
• EMPIRICAL ARTICLES
• QUALITATIVE ARTICLE
• CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK ARTICLE
• Index