Social Marketing and Social Change

This page describes Audience Dialogue's approach to promoting social
change:our view of the problems with social marketing, and our
preference for a more participative marketing approach, similar to that
known as Communication for Social Change (CFSC for short).
Let's begin with social marketing. Most of its practitioners agree that
it does not involve selling products or services. With social marketing
(unlike commercial marketing), people are not persuaded to spend money,
but to change their behaviour - to stop smoking, to avoid AIDS by
practising safe sex, to use public transport, and so on.
Alan Andreasen, one of the founders of the social marketing concept,
posed the question "How is social marketing distinguished from
commercial marketing?" (This was in the March 2002 issue of the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing.) He suggested six ways in which social marketing is different:

1. The ultimate purpose of social marketing is changing people's behaviour (not selling a product or service).
   
2. Audience research is used to understand target audiences, to pretest interventions, and to monitor results.
   
3. Target audiences are "carefully segmented" to ensure maximum efficiency of the marketing campaign.
   
4. The main element of any influence strategy is to create attractive and motivating exchanges with target audiences.
   
5. The strategy uses all 4 Ps (product, price, place, promotion) not just advertising (promotion).
   
6. The competition to the desired behaviour is studied closely.
   

Some counter-arguments and qualifications from us at Audience Dialogue, taking each point in turn...

1. The ultimate purpose of social marketing is changing people's behaviour.
   
   Isn't this what they used to call "propaganda," as practised in Nazi
   Germany and the former Soviet Union? And how about the very effective
   "Kill the Tutsis" radio campaign in Rwanda in 1994: wasn't that an
   example of effective social marketing? The ethical implications of this
   approach scare us. Since one person's good cause can be another person's
   genocide, and the marketing industry has never been renowned for its
   ethics, maybe this "ultimate purpose" statement needs to be rewritten,
   with an emphasis on informed choice rather than behaviour change. How
   about this: "Giving people information that they can use to improve
   their communities." At least then they can argue about what "improve"
   means. And this makes it clear that the wanted change need not be in
   their own behaviour. (Often, it's the system that needs changing, not
   the individuals.)
   
2. Audience research is used to understand target audiences, to pretest interventions, and to monitor results.
   
   Agreed - but this could apply to all types of marketing. Most
   marketing doesn't involve much research, that's because businesses are
   not required to demonstrate the effectiveness of their marketing to an
   external funder.
   
3. Target audiences are "carefully segmented" to ensure maximum efficiency of the marketing campaign.
   
   This statement also could apply to normal marketing - as could these
   reservations... In principle, segmentation is a good idea. In practice,
   it's usually a waste of time, because it's rare to find segments which
   can be both defined clearly, and targeted efficiently through the media.
   Instead of vague "segments", we prefer to think in terms of stakeholder
   groups and multiple roles, because (a) these groups can be more clearly
   identified, and (b) roles tend to be more tightly associated with
   specific media.
   
   While we're at it, let's question the term "campaign". In a
   marketing context, it implies an advertising campaign - something that
   comes and goes quickly. A more appropriate term is intervention -
   a program designed to improve the existing state of affairs. But even
   that sounds like a one-off activity, when the truth is that mass
   behaviour change usually takes years, and multiple interventions. (For
   example, the slow success of the worldwide anti-smoking campaigns.)
   
4. The main element of any influence strategy is to create attractive and motivating exchanges with target audiences.
   
   This is self-contradictory: how can an "influence strategy" (such as
   media advertising) create "exchanges with"? Andreasen may have meant
   "exchanges for" - such as exchanging the pleasure of smoking for a
   longer life - and making this clear to audiences.
   
5. The strategy uses all 4 Ps (product, price, place, promotion) not just advertising.
   
   The 4 Ps principle is a very limiting concept of marketing. It
   focuses too much on what the so-called "marketer" is doing, and not
   enough on the active role of the marketed-to masses. As Audience
   Dialogue see it, marketing is a game that everybody plays, and the 4 Ps
   model applies only to sellers, not consumers or others affected. Ebert
   Gummesson's 30 Rs model (where Rs= relationship types) is a much more
   comprehensive approach - see a comparison between the 30 Rs and our own 6 Ss.
   
6. The competition to the desired behaviour is studied closely.
   
   Agreed. This seldom happens with commercial marketing, except when a
   leader in a "me-too" market is trying to increase its share, and
   becomes very interested in its competitors' activities.
   

Another point where we differ from Andreasen is his implicit emphasis on
individuals. Our experience is that large-scale behaviour change is
something that communities do, because peer pressures are much more
powerful than advertising.
So much for the normal approach to social marketing. We much prefer the
approach of the Communication for Social Change (CFSC) group, from their
1998 conference in Cape Town. This approach is more rooted in social
action than is Andreasen's. The CFSC group favours moving away from the
standard social marketing approaches in the left column of this table,
on to the approaches in the centre column...

Away from...	On to...	Audience Dialogue's comment on "On to"
1. people as the objects for change	people and communities as the agents of their own change	We completely agree.
2. designing, testing, and delivering messages	supporting dialogue and debate on the key issues of concern	Agree strongly.
3. conveying information from technical experts	sensitively placing that information in the dialogue and debate	The implication is that information from experts shouldn't be questioned. But "information" is not neutral: it's rooted in a context that's usually not stated, and is constructed on a pyramid of assumptions. So let's reword this criterion as: "engaging in a dialogue with relevant experts, to find the best application of their expertise to the local situation".
4. a focus on individual behaviours	social norms, policies, culture, and a supportive environment	Very important, to look beyond individuals
5. persuading people to do something	negotiating the best way forward in a partnership process	Yes, but as it's not possible to negotiate with a population of millions, it's vital to ensure that the negotiators are fully representative.
6. technical experts in "outside" agencies dominating and guiding the process	the people most affected by the issues of concern playing a central role.	Agreed - but the affected people are often hesitant, and need a lot of support to participate.

Despite a few minor reservations, we agree with the above CFSC
principles. The focus is more inclusive than social marketing, and thus
more effective, but also more likely to get bogged down in local
politics. We call our version of CFSC participative marketing - to emphasize that it's a process involving all stakeholders. They decide what changes they want - but as they may be at cross purposes, a method such as the consensus group technique can be useful to sort out what they actually agree on.
Social mobilization
This is another approach to social change, in the same general area as
social marketing and CFSC. Unlike traditional marketing, its focus is
not on the individual, but on how a whole community can change at once.
The principle of social mobilization (like Paulo Freire's concept of conscientization) is that the population are made aware of a problem, often through local media. The public will
changes, and people become motivated to solve the problem. Social
mobilization can be a powerful tool, but also a dangerous one, when a
population majority turns against minorities - as in Nazi Germany, or
when Milosevic was elected in Serbia in 1992. For more on social
mobilization, see the excellent book Social Mobilization and Social Marketing in Developing Communities, by Neill McKee (Southbound Press, Penang, Malaysia, 1993 - out of print, but the last chapter is online).

Difficulties of social marketing


Social marketing is more challenging than ordinary marketing, for all these reasons...

• Often, people get no obvious benefit from changing their behaviour.
  If a teenager enjoys the experience of smoking, why would he or she stop
  doing it, in the hope of not getting cancer in an unforeseeably distant
  future? And the beneficiaries of social marketing are often not the
  same people who are targeted in campaigns - perpetrators of domestic
  violence, for example.
  
• Results are much slower. People respond to a normal advertising
  campaign within days (when they do at all), but habits take years to
  change.
  
• Social marketing programs are usually commissioned by
  governments or NGOs. These are committee-based, and the committee
  members often find it difficult to agree on their goal hierarchies,
  given the multiple and often conflicting goals of the organizations.
  

By itself, social marketing doesn't change behaviour. Social change
needs more than marketing. Other important factors include the legal,
the economic, and the technological. Some writers would add educational
factors, but our view is that participative marketing is itself an
educational process.
James Grunig has written a lot about what he calls "symmetrical public
relations" - an idea closely related to participative marketing. After
extensive research with hundreds of organizations, Grunig found that the
most effective ones tended to use what he calls "symmetrical"
approaches to communication. Put simply: they engage in a dialogue with
their publics, rather than taking a spin-doctoring approach.

Participative marketing in practice


In the commercial world, a marketing campaign is usually set up with
great urgency. If a new product is launched, the development costs must
be recouped quickly, so advertising campaigns come and go in a few
weeks.
Participative marketing is very different.The budget is usually a lot
lower, and the process is slower, because it's often hard to reach the
target audience directly. Also, when people do change their behaviour,
it needs to stay changed. Without plenty of reinforcement, many people
are likely to regress to their previous behaviour. All this means that,
in social marketing, a long-drawn-out campaign is usually more effective
than a short, sharp one. Advertising often isn't very effective in
social marketing, but if it creates mild social pressures it can work
indirectly - though that often takes a long time (years, not months).
Thus effective participative marketing programs usually involve a lot of
community participation, and a wide range of different initiatives.
The indirect effects of participative marketing make it difficult to
evaluate the success of a campaign. For example, imagine a campaign to
decrease smoking among teenagers. It might involve 10 different
activities, at different geographical levels, and it might run for
several years. What if there's no change in the level of teenage smoking
after the first year, but within 5 years the percentage of smokers aged
15-19 has fallen from 30% to 25%. How much credit can the participative
marketing campaign claim for that? Or might this have happened anyway?
(5 years later, it's a different cohort of teenagers.)
A normal Program Logic Model
(one way of evaluating such campaigns) has difficulty handling these
effects. As part of our work in improving participative marketing, we
have been developing a multiple-ladder variation on PLM, that involves a
kind of "weaving" back and forth between the goals intended and their
side-effects and side-causes, and creating from those a set of
counterfactual scenarios. The purpose of the multiple ladders is to more
accurately to what extent the intended factors were responsible for an
outcome. This extension of PLM is touched on on this page about effectiveness. (Though the topic of that page is website effectiveness, the principles are identical.)
Another aspect of participative marketing is that it involves everybody.
So it's not just a matter of "marketing to" the general public, trying
to persuade them to change. if a social system isn't working well, it's
the whole system that needs changing, not just one part of it. If
people are doing something that seems destructive and unsustainable
(like smoking a lot), changing the whole system involves changing the
entire supply chain, not just the end users. To make extensive changes
to a whole system, in a democracy, requires widespread acceptance -
though not necessarily active enthusiasm - among all stakeholders
involved. This is not just the old-fashioned idea of "marketing" - it
goes beyond that, to redesigning a social system.

Further reading


For more background on Audience Dialogue's approach to marketing, see my book Participative Marketing for Local Radio, - particularly
chapter 1, which unlike the rest of the book is not specifically about radio.
Communication for Social Change
You can read about the 1998 Cape Town conference in a report by Denise Gray-Felder and James Deane on Communication for Social Change, which has a comprehensive website at www.communicationforsocialchange.org.
Some CFSC reports are on the website of the Rockefeller Foundation - a difficult one to navigate. The easiest way to find these links is to type Deane in the search box on the home page.
Early 2006:two new files on the Communication for Social Change website: Communities Measure Change
- a brief introduction to participatory monitoring and evaluation (8 page PDF), and
and a more detailed explanation by Will Parks,:Who Measures Change (48 page PDF)
Ottawa Charter
The Ottawa Charter was
a declaration on health promotion from the World Health Organization in
1986. This is broader than it might seem, as the WHO's all-encompassing
definition of health is "a state of complete physical, mental and
social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."
Despite "promotion" being only one aspect of marketing, the Ottawa
Charter is much broader in its scope than promotion in the usual sense.
It covers:

• Building a healthy public policy: political actions and
  interventions, including legislation, economic policy, taxation, and
  organizational changes. (Example: taxing tobacco to decrease its
  consumption.)
  
• Building supportive environments: securing and protecting healthy environments and natural resources.
  
• Strengthening community action: in setting priorities, making
  decisions, planning strategies, and implementing them to achieve better
  health.
  
• Developing personal skills: including knowledge of health-related information.
  
• Reorienting health services: to promote health (as opposed to
  discouraging ill-health) while focusing on the needs of the individual
  as a whole person.
  

Does all that sound really obvious to you? Maybe so, but it's actually
quite radical. It would involve major changes in the health systems of
many countries. Replace the focus on health with any aspect of social
change, and you begin to understand the powerful nature of the Ottawa
Charter. This is a much more sophisticated (and probably more effective)
approach than almost any commercial marketing.
Symmetrical corporate relationships
A website on Communications in Latin America has a concise summary of Grunig's approach.
RE-AIM
RE-AIM.org is a website with a useful framework for evaluating the success of social marketing. RE-AIM stands for

• Reach into the target population
  
• Efficacy or effectiveness
  
• Adoption by target settings or institutions
  
• Implementation - how consistent is the delivery of the intervention
  
• Maintenance of the effects of the intervention among the population.
  

In other words, an intervention is effective when it reaches the right
population, is effective, is adopted, is implemented consistently, and
is maintained. Again, this is obvious when you think about it - but few
interventions succeed on all five points.