Social marketing
Social Marketing
After studying theassigned readings for week 5,synthesize what you have learned by completing the following in essay format.Search online and find a website for an organization that has a campaign promoting a core issue that interests you (for example: The Red Cross and need for blood donations. NOTE: You may not use the example assignment just named here.).
Start your essay with a short overview of the organization and the issue (just a few lines) and then consider the topics we have covered in this weeks readings and discuss how they are reflected in what you see on this website.
What clear messages do you see?
What audiences is the institution trying to reach?
How has technology affected the way this organization presents itself?
Consider issues of Media Ethics and how they are represented or manifested in the website. Draw on examples offered on that website to support your observations. Specifically consider the content of21stCentury Communication: A Reference Handbook: Chapter 77: “Theories and Effects of Public Relations,” under the section Assumptions and Lay Theories. Which of these theories does the content of your chosen site most closely align with? Why? Explain your answer.
The essay should be in 12pt type, no more than 2 pages in length, double spaced. Approximately 500-600 words, and must be properly cited throughout the paper in APA format and must contain a Reference List.Support your responses with research from the LearningResources. Social Marketing Campaigns
Chapter 91: Social Marketing Campaigns
By:Timothy Edgar & Megan J. Palam
In:21st Century Communication: A Reference Handbook
Chapter DOI:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.umgc.edu/10.4135/9781412964005.n91
Subject:Communication Studies (general)
Keywords:audiences;campaigns;crabs;lawns;physical activity;social market;verbs
Social marketing is a perspective that is frequently used by people within the communication discipline to guide them on how to influence behavior. Social marketing can be traced to the writings of the sociologist G. D. Weibe, who in the 1950s asked the question Why can’t you sell brotherhood like you sell soap? (Weibe, 19511952, p. 679). Weibe was trying to make the point that marketing professionals over the years had developed very successful techniques for how to market to large-scale audiences in order to sell soap, cars, and other tangible goods. Weibe wondered why similar techniques could not be used to sell people an idea or a cause. In the 1960s and 1970s, other scholars began to follow his lead and began to develop the principles of what became known as social marketing.
To better help you understand what social marketing is, this chapter will be divided into two parts. The first part will provide an overview of the basic concepts and principles, and the second part of the chapter will offer two case studies of actual social marketing campaigns that will illustrate the concepts. The first case study tells the story of the VERB campaign that was aimed at 9- to 13-year-olds to increase their physical activity; the second case, which focused on environmental concerns, provides a unique example of how social marketing sought to help restore a threatened ecosystem in the Chesapeake Bay through an innovative campaign called Save the Crabs, Then Eat ‘Em.
What is Social Marketing?
Answering the question of What exactly is social marketing? has proved to be a challenge historically. It is not its own academic discipline; it is not a science; and it is not a formal theory or model. Perhaps it is best described as a tool or framework for behavior change. In an attempt to distinguish social marketing from other types of initiatives, the noted social marketing expert Alan Andreasen (2002) offered six defining criteria:
1.
Behavior change is the benchmark used to design and evaluate interventions.
2.
Projects consistently grounded strategy in audience research.
3.
There is careful segmentation of the target audiences to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness in the use of scarce resources.
4.
The central element of any influence strategy is creating attractive motivational exchanges with target audiences.
5.
The strategy attempts to use all four Ps of the traditional marketing mixproduct, price, place, and promotion.
6.
Careful attention is paid to the competition faced by the desired behavior.
In the paragraphs that follow, we offer a portrait of the basic principles of social marketing by using Andreasen’s six criteria as the organizing framework.
Behavior Change
As stated in the first of the six criteria, social marketing ultimately is about behavior change. That may sound like a simple idea, but it can be quite complicated. In many instances, people do not want to change their behavior because they see no reason to do anything that is different, and their current pattern feels comfortable. The other reasonis that it is difficult for social marketers to agree on the exact behavior they want people to change. Too often, campaign planners become sidetracked when they fail to make careful choices about their precise focus, and in the end, they confuse themselves and their target audiences. For example, suppose that you wanted to create an initiative in which your ultimate goal is to significantly reduce the rate of unplanned pregnancies among high school girls. To achieve your goal, the key behavior that you might ask the young women to engage in is to always insist that their boyfriends use a condom whenever they have sexual intercourse. Or the behavior that you might ask them to adopt is to make an appointment with their family physician to get a prescription for the oral contraceptive pill. Or yet a third behavior you might choose would be to have them abstain from sexual intercourse altogether. All three behaviors are directly tied to the goal, but each is a unique behavior in which an individual can engage without necessarily performing the others. When a behavior or set of behaviors becomes too complicated, there is a high risk that an audience will ignore the initiative completely and retreat to past behaviors that are comfortable, familiar, and simple to process.
Audience Research
A second important feature of social marketing is that those who design and implement an initiative must thoroughly understand the members of the target audience whose behavior they are attempting to change. All this might sound obvious on the surface, but there are many examples of failed campaigns where designers were well intentioned but chose a strategy that was expert driven rather than audience driven. Those who take an expert-driven approach assume that the message they wish to convey will be received and acted on by target audiences simply because the experts believe that it is in the best interest of the audience to listen, attend, and behave accordingly. The social marketing perspective emphasizes that without using audience research to gain a deeper understanding of the lives of audience members and how people view a particular issue, there is little chance of persuading people to change their behavior.
Good social marketers typically begin with what is known as formative research, which allows them to gain insight into the mindsets and actions of potential audience members. Two of the most common ways of gathering data about an audience are surveys and focus groups. Surveys allow social marketers to ask audience members very specific questions over the telephone, through paper-and-pencil instruments, or through an online questionnaire. In focus groups, social marketers can bring together members of the target audience in groups of about 8 to 10 people to have an in-depth conversation about how a particular problem affects their lives. In addition to surveys and focus groups, social marketers might also use other data-gathering techniques, such as immersion hikes (day trips with members of the target audience that permit relaxed, open discussions), ethnography (observing target audiences in their everyday environments), and person-on-the-street-interviews (interviewing unscreened respondents in locations where the behavior takes place) (Smith, 2006).
Once social marketers have gained insights into their target audience through formative research, they then typically engage in a process of pretesting message concepts and final executions of the messages to make sure that they resonate with the audience. The planning team might come up with what to them seems like a good idea based on their original audience research only to find out once they test it with actual audience members that it is not a good fit. Once implementation is under way, they should also engage in what is known as process evaluation to make sure that the audience is exposed to the message as intended. Social marketers also heavily emphasize outcome evaluation, which allows them to determine whether or not the strategy worked. That is, did members of the target audience actually change their behavior? If there is no evidence for behavior change, then the initiative cannot be considered successful.
Segmentation of Audiences
According to the social marketing approach, one of the most common reasons why behavior change initiatives fail is that planners target broad populations and assume that they can implement a message strategy with a one-size-fits-all approach. That is, an assumption is made that everyone within a population will respond to the same message in the same way. Although it is possible for that to happen, it rarely does. Social marketers pay special attention to what is known asaudience segmentation, which refers to the process of dividing a population into distinct segments based on characteristics that influence their responsiveness to interventions (Forthofer & Bryant, 2000). For example, suppose that you wanted to develop an intervention to persuade women in the 40-to-65 age range to get a regular mammogram for the prevention of breast cancer. Audience research might tell the social marketers that women in their 40s who are still raising children will respond to a message that is very different from one that will appeal to women who no longer have children at home and are close to retirement. If that is the case, then it is crucial to carefully segment the audience in such a way that the end goal remains the same for both groups of women but they receive a different type of message to motivate them.
Exchange
One of the most important principles that guides social marketers is the idea that people will only change their behavior when they feel that they are getting something fair and attractive in exchange. In other words, people only change when they clearly see that there is something in itfor them. The basis for this principle comes from exchange theory, which is derived from psychological and economic principles and assumes that we are need-directed beings with a natural inclination to try and improve our lot (Hastings & Saren, 2003, p. 309). Social marketers see exchange theory as a key principle that differentiates their approach from other strategies for behavior change, such as education, which assumes that knowledge in and of itself leads to change, and an approach based on regulation, which emphasizes law enforcement as the most effective way to change the behavior of people (Smith, 2006). The challenge for social marketers is to be able to frame the behavior in the minds of the audience so that they clearly see a benefit for themselves. The challenge becomes even greater if the benefit is not perceived by the audience as immediate. If social marketers try to present a payoff to an audience that is perceived as too far in the future, then they are not likely to respond in a positive way. A great example of this challenge comes from initiatives to try to convince teenagers to quit smoking or to not even begin. An obvious benefit is that people who do not smoke greatly reduce their risk of dying of lung cancer. However, enjoying the benefit of an additional 10 years of life is not something that someone can easily relate to when one is only 16 years old. Instead, social marketers have to present to teenagers an exchange that presents a benefit in the here and now. For instance, a more attractive exchange for 16-year-olds might be to quit smoking so that they do not have the constant unpleasant smell of tobacco and, thus, are more desirable as dating partners for the opposite sex.
Marketing Mix
The identifying characteristic with which many people associate the social marketing approach is what is commonly known as The Four Ps. This component, which is borrowed from principles of commercial marketing, includes promotion, product, price, and place. According to social marketing purists, an initiative cannot truly be referred to as social marketing unless all four Ps are part of the overall approach to behavior change.
The P that receives the most attention in any social marketing initiative ispromotion. People who study communication often are most attracted to this element of the marketing mix because it most directly relates to the creation of the message for a campaign. Promotion receives the most attention typically because the actual message becomes the face of an initiative, and it is the part people can most easily identify. Having a carefully crafted promotion certainly is essential to success, but rarely will promotion alone lead to behavior change. The communication options available to a social marketer are many and varied. One can, for instance, promote behavior change through advertising, public relations, education, counseling, community organizations, interpersonal networks, direct mail, signage, special events and displays, printed materials, and entertainment media (Grier & Bryant, 2005; Maibach, 2002; Smith, 2000). More specific promotional tools include TV and radio public service announcements, small-group discussions with target audience members, prescription pads for use by health care professionals, refrigerator magnets, newspaper articles, coloring sheets for children, and satellite broadcasts. The most successful promotional strategies typically incorporate a variety of channels through which the message is communicated to the audience.
The second of the four Ps isproduct. Whereas commercial marketers typically are trying to sell tangible products such as paper towels or computers, the social marketer has the challenge of trying to sell an intangible product that takes the form of an idea, social cause, or, as we have discussed most frequently in this chapter, a change of behavior. In many ways, the job of the social marketer is a more difficult one, because members of the target audience cannot easily hold or touch a behavior in the same way that they can paper towels or computers. The challenge, then, is for the social marketer to make these intangibles tangible in a way that appeals to the target audience (Lefebvre & Flora, 1988, p. 306). A tangible product also is more easily defined. If a commercial marketer asks a potential customer to buy Bounty paper towels instead of Brawny, consumers can easily find Bounty on the shelf in the supermarket once they know the name of the product and perhaps the brand logo. As we discussed in the section on behavioral focus, social marketers sometimes make the mistake of not carefully defining the behavior for the audience, and when that happens, target audience members often do not know what to do. For example, one of the greatest challenges in developing physical activity campaigns for adults is to carefully define the product so that there is no doubt in the mind of the target audience how to engage in the appropriate behavior. If, for instance, the message of the campaign tells people that they should engage in 20 minutes of physical activity 5 days a week, the initiative might not be successful because people are confused about whether physical activity refers to any physical movement or if they have to reach a minimum heart rate for the activity to count as part of the 20 minutes.
The third P isprice. In commercial marketing, price usually refers to the monetary value placed on a product (Edgar, 2008). In social marketing, dollars also factor into the price someone pays to change behavior, but price refers primarily to the totality of barriers that an individual must overcome to engage in the proposed action (Smith, 2000). That is, to engage in the proposed behavior, people typically are going to have to give up something they do not want to relinquish. Nonmonetary barriers can be social, behavioral, psychological, temporal, structural, geographic, and physical (Lefebvre & Flora, 1988). As we discussed when we talked about the idea of an exchange with social marketing, people are not willing to give something up unless they believe that there is a comparable payoff that will make the price that they have to pay worth it. Many people are willing to go into a restaurant and pay $50 a person for a meal because they are convinced that the pleasure associatedwith a fine meal and the ambience of a nice dining establishment is part of a fair trade for that amount of money. The customers give the restaurant $50 per person (plus tip, of course), and the restaurant provides them with a memorable evening. If social marketers ask members of a target audience to reduce their body weight, then people have to decide whether the advantages of not being overweight are worth the price they will have to pay to reach that goal, such as bypassing the enticing tastes of favorite foods, taking time throughout the week from one’s busy schedule to engage in an exercise program, and/or feeling embarrassed in front of family and friends at social occasions when they have to forgo desserts. The burden is on the social marketer to present the choice in such a way that audience members will view the price as a reasonable one.
Placeis the final P and refers to the process by which the product is made available to members of the target market at the time and place when it will be of most value to them (Maibach, 2002, p. 11). For social marketers to take advantage of the most ideal places, they have to identify what Grier and Bryant (2005) called path points, which are locations people regularly visit; times of the day, week, or year of their visits; and points in the life cycle where people are likely to act. The ultimate goal of the place strategy is convenience. That is, the social marketer wants to communicate to the target audience about the product at a time and place where it is easy for them to process the information, and the social marketer must find convenient ways for people to actually engage in the desired behavior. The importance of the place strategy illustrates why social marketers cannot concentrate on promotion alone. To be successful, social marketers might also have to take steps to make changes to the everyday environment of the target audience or, at the very least, get audience members to view their environment in a different way. For example, for an initiative aimed at getting adults to walk more, part of the overall social marketing strategy might be to increase the number of walking paths within a community so that the target audience members have more places where they can actually engage in the behavior. Or if the social marketing team is not able to create new walking paths, then part of their place strategy might be to redefine existing places that people had never before considered as potential sites for walking, such as a local shopping mall. A place strategy also includes consideration of the role of intermediaries, who are people and/or organizations that provide goods, services, and information and perform other functions that help facilitate behavior change (Grier & Bryant, 2005). For the shopping mall example, social marketers might enlist the cooperation of the owners of the mall to get them to agree to open the property earlier in the morning so that people can use the mall as a safe place for walking before any of the stores open. The mall owners might be persuaded that there is benefit in the arrangement for them because the morning walkers might be enticed to stay and shop once businesses open.
Competition
In the same way in which commercial marketers analyze their position within a competitive marketplace, social marketers must identify the behaviors that compete with the ones they want their target audience to adopt. For example, if a social marketer creates a campaign to help save the environment by asking consumers to drive their cars less and burn less gasoline, then they must carefully analyze how a reduction in car use competes with the need to get to work and complete everyday errands. Part of the overall strategy for a social marketer is to provide a way for the target audience either to eliminate the competition completely, which in many cases is not possible, or to get the audience to think about the competition in a different way so that the conflict is less glaring. In the gasoline reduction example, for instance, social marketers might try to get their audience to think about the commute to work and the completion of errands as merged rather than separate behaviors. In other words, they might encourage the audience to plan activities such as grocery shopping and picking up the dry cleaning on the way to and from work rather than doing the errands at different times of the day.
Case Studies VERB
The number of obese children in the United States continues to rise, creating a population at risk for lifelong health problems. The percentage of overweight children has even doubled in the past 20 years, bringing a needed effort to offset this trend. Reports indicate that childhood obesity in America stems from unhealthy eating and the lack of physical activity in children’s lives.
What Was the Behavior Social Marketers Wanted to Change?
To combat this epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was awarded $125 million in 2001 to create a social marketing campaign targeted towardtweens, a term used to refer to children aged 9 to 13 years, to increase their participation in physical activity. VERB was launched in 2002 to do just that. The campaign focused solely on increasing the physical activity of tweens. Because campaign planners neither specified the exact type of physical activity in which tweens should engage nor the amount or frequency with which tweens should be physically active, some social marketing purists might have a problem with the way in which the planners of the campaign approached the definition of the behavior. However, as you will see when we talk more about the product within the marketing mix, the campaign planners were intentionally vague to more fully engage the tweens.
What Was Learned from Audience Research?
The CDC knew that they wanted to target tweens, but to apply the principles of social marketing appropriately, they knew that they had to understand the tweens themselves as well as the important people in their lives. The campaign planners decided that because tweens are still dependent on their families, the campaign had to target their mothers as well (ages 2946). It was also important to reach community members who influence adolescents, such as teachers and youth program leaders. To get this information about the audiences’ needs and wants, the CDC conducted multiple focus groups with tweens and mothers. One of the most important lessons learned from the research was that most tweens wanted to be in control of choosing the activities in which they engaged rather than having the decision made by their parents.
How Was the Audience Segmented?
Because the campaign planners suspected that the issues surrounding physical activity might be different for various ethnic groups, separate focus groups were conducted for tweens of European white descent, African Americans, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian, and Asian Americans. The research revealed that, in fact, there were unique beliefs surrounding physical activity and unique barriers for each group that prevented the tweens from engaging in physical activity. Based on those results, the campaign planners developed unique variations of the VERB message for each of the major ethnic groups.
What Was the Exchange?
The planning team realized from the start that the exchange that they were offering tweens and their parents would not be an easy one to sell. For tweens to engage in more physical activity, they had to reduce the time spent doing some of the activities they currently enjoyed, such as playing video games and watching TV. With regard to the parents, increased physical activity on the part of their children had the potential to mean dollars spent. To counterbalance the loss that tweens and their parents might experience, the campaign planners positioned physical activity as something that would allow them to have fun, spend time with friends and family, and gain the admiration of their peers and community.
How Was the Marketing Mix Developed?
Theproductin social marketing is typically a precise behavior that the audience should engage in, cease, or maintain. VERB’s product was physical activity, but as we discussed earlier, the campaign planners did not precisely define the type of physical activity in which the tweens should engage or say how long they should do it. They did this intentionally. They knew that just like with any product on the market, physical activity had to be perceived as the winning item over other activities in tweens’ lives. The type of physical activity tweens wanted to do was up to them, giving them a sense of choice and exploration. That is, the tweens were actively involved in defining the specifics of the product.
Thepriceof physical activity potentially is financial, psychological, environmental, and/or time related. The benefits of the behavior had to outweigh the costs and barriers for tweens, their parents, and the community. Research gave insight as how to market the benefits, so that tweens and parents would be more likely to prioritize physical activity within their own budget. Marketing materials had to convince tweens and their parents that physical activity makes tweens happier, healthier, and even cooler than those who did not participate. In other words, VERB had to anticipate that tweens would make excuses for not feeling good enough when they play, by counteracting it with a message that it is much cooler to participate than to play video games or watch TV all day. Another barrier was the cost of buying equipment or enrolling in sports teams. If financial cost was a barrier, tweens and parents had the opportunity to go to the campaign’s Web site to learn about fun and safe ideas that were free or very low in cost.
One has to have aplaceto engage in physical activity, such as a park, school, backyard, or recreation department. VERB planners had to make sure that places for engaging in activities existed and that choices would be available year round. To make this happen, the campaign planners could not act alone. An important part of the place strategy was to develop partnerships within communities so that the demand could be met. For example, in communities where there were limited outdoor venues for physical activity, the campaign partnered with community centers to make sure that kids had a safe environment in which to play. Part of the place strategy also meant strategically marketing the message of VERB in locations where tweens would be exposed to the messages in their everyday lives, such as school; the campaign planners also bought TV advertising time on their favorite shows.
Thepromotionstrategy was a very complex one, because the campaign planners used a large variety of channels and types of message executions to reach the tweens and their parents. Many social marketing campaigns are at a disadvantage because they lack sufficient financial resources, but the VERB campaign was fortunate to have a multimillion dollar budget. The CDC carefully strategized to make the VERB brand a part of tweens’ lifestyle by intertwining a positive image of VERB and the product. To make the idea of VERB cool and relatable, the campaign planners used fun and colorful visuals. The tagline at the forefront of the campaign was VERBIt’s what you do, which gave tweens the sense of making their own decision rather than having their parents in control.
Here are only a few examples of how VERB was communicated nationally and locally:
Paid television advertisements:Rather than using free public service advertising, over which the CDC would have limited control on when or how often the ads would be aired, the campaign planners spent a large portion of their budget on a sophisticated paid advertising initiative by buying time on cable networks that tweens regularly watch, such as Nickelodeon.
Print ads:Print ads were placed in magazines that tweens read as well as in those their parents read.
Other media opportunities:Celebrities and characters from tweens’ favorite television shows, such asGilmore GirlsandKim Possible, starred in VERB commercials. CBS produced a VERB public service announcement directed toward parents that featured the sports legend Deion Sanders.
Web sites:The campaign Web site (
http://www.VERBnow.com
) was a key element of the promotion strategy. A game generator gave tweens the opportunity to create their own physical activities. Tweens could even write on a blog and talk about their favorite activities.
Schools:Book covers, planners, and lesson plans were given to schools to integrate into their classrooms to start the conversation about physical activity.
Community-based events:VERB joined cultural events such as pow wows to engage Native American tweens. Street teams distributed T-shirts, Frisbees, and temporary tattoos for tweens while creating a buzz about VERB.
What Was the Competition?
All these elements combined created hype about VERB and physical activity for tweens. This hype, or energy, in the campaign had to transcend beyond the competition that challenges tweens to refrain from engaging in physical activity. The planners knew that tweens wanted to play video games, preferred to do nothing at all, or had family obligations. Video games or television shows could not be eliminated as an option, but the campaign had to reprioritize so that physical activity was on the list of things to do for tweens. Parents also had to see the benefit of spending money or taking the time to help their tween engage in activity.
Outcome
A random sample of 3,120 tweens from across the country along with their parents was surveyed over the phone. The results showed that 74% of American tweens were aware of the VERB campaign within 1 year of the launch of the campaign. This exceeded the CDC’s goal of reaching 50% of tweens. In the first year, the surveyed tweens also reported 34% more physical activity than tweens who were unaware of VERB.
Further Readings
For more details on VERB, read two journal articles written about the campaign by Wong and colleagues (2004) and Huhman and colleagues (2005). You can also see examples of the promotional campaign at CDC’s Web site,
http://www.cdc.gov/YouthCampaign
.
Save the Crabs, Then Eat ‘Em
The second case study tells the story of a campaign with a very different topic from VERB, which like the majority of social marketing initiatives focused on personal health issues. This campaign instead focused on the environment and attempted to make the environment, which typically seems impersonal to most people, personal. The problem involved the Chesapeake Bay near Washington, D.C.
What Was the Behavior Social Marketers Wanted to Change?
The Bay has suffered from an overload of nutrient pollution, which threatens the quality of life and water in the bay. We usually think of the wordnutrientsin a positive way, but in the world of environmental health, they mean agricultural waste, waste from sewage treatment plants, and lawn fertilizers. Many people who lived in the area already knew that the Bay was severely damaged as an ecosystem, but most people either were not motivated to do anything about it or did not know how to contribute. Because lawn fertilizers make up 11% of the nutrients that load into the Bay, a reduction in lawn fertilizer usage had the potential to make a significant difference. In 2005, the Academy for Educational Development, funded by the Chesapeake Bay Program, identified the people who live in the greater Wash
