On Social Marketing and Social Change

The 2012 Social Marketing Conference: Getting Better at Doing Good

A major meeting on "getting better at doing good" will take place in Clearwater Beach, FL 15-16 June 2012. This theme for the 22nd Annual Social Marketing Conference reflects the global reality that government institutions, not-for-profit groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities and colleges and businesses are searching for better ways to improve people's health, the environment, work force development and social welfare. This international gathering will bring together social marketers and social innovators in a forum where we can engage our collective wisdom and talents to explore creative ways to teach and employ marketing to positively change the world.

There is still time to register. If you are interested, or still on the fence, here is the almost final program of major speakers and presentations.

Full Conference Session Presentations and Discussions:

Why Social Marketing is so Important
Ayman El-Mohandes, MBBCh, MD, MPH,
Dean, College of Public Health, University of Nebraska Medical Center

Advancing (Disruptive) Social Innovation in Academic Settings
Erin Krampetz, MA
Co-Founder and Community Director, Ashoka U

Emerging Ideas in Commercial Marketing and Their Relevance for Social Marketing
Phillip Kotler, PhD
S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

The Creative Discipline of Social Marketing
Lynda Bardfield
Associate Director, Strategic Behavioral Communication, FHI360

Fostering Sustainable Behaviors: Community-based Social Marketing
Doug McKenzie-Mohr, PhD
McKenzie-Mohr & Associates


Interactive Collaboratories with featured presenters:

Teaching Social Marketing at George Washington University: Answers, Challenges & the Road Ahead Monique Turner, PhD

Teaching Social Marketing at Brighton Business School, Brighton, UK  Matthew Wood, MBA

Marketing Social Marketing as Organizational Behavior Change Mike Newton-Ward, MSW, MPH

Training International Conservation Leaders: Changing Behaviors One Community at a Time Brian Day, MS & Katherine McElhinny, MA, Rare Conservation

Pull Yourself Up by the Bootstraps: Social Marketing and the Oklahoma Ethos Robert John, PhD

The Transformational Potential of Short-Term Social Marketing Training Events Francois Lagarde, MA
 

Concurrent Research Presentations:

Best Bones Forever!: A Case Study in Social Marketing (Elizabeth Osborn, MPH; Darcy Sawatzki, MA; Lynne Donner Lotenberg, MA; Valerie Borden, MPA)

Plate It Up Kentucky Proud: Statewide Social Marketing Campaign to Increase Consumer Purchase and Consumption of Locally Grown Fruits and Vegetables (Laura Stephenson, PhD)

Social Marketing Group Projects: A Strategy for Introducing Students to Social Marketing Concepts (Jane McKay-Nesbitt, PhD)

Practitioners to Professors: Bringing the Real World into the Classroom
(Jennifer Nichols, MPH; Melissa Taylor, MA)

The Role of the Servicescape on Emotional Regulation: An Exploration of Novice Blood Donors (Kay Russell)

Influencing Breastfeeding Behavior: The Use of Technology to Provide a Peer Support Service (Rebekah Russell-Bennett, PhD)

Using Mobile Phones to Track and Influence Multimodal Travel Behavior (Philip Winters, BS)

Personal Health Systems: New Technologies for Improving Personal Health (Andrew Raij, PhD)

And a closing full conference discussion on Integrative Themes and Action led by
Robert Gold, PhD, DrPH, Dean, University of Maryland College Park School of Public Health.


SO here's where to register and get more information. Hope to see you there!

Why Use Marketing in Social Change Programs?

My discussion on social marketing and social change with Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360, was published this week on the MKCREATIVE blog (#INTERVIEW: Craig Lefebvre, Designer of Public Health & Social Change Programs, Discusses Social Marketing - you will have to scroll down the page to find it). We cover the history of this blog, why it’s a great time to be a social marketer, the confusion of social marketing with social media marketing, and the next frontiers for social marketing. He ended with this observation.

MKC: You seem to be making a good case for thinking about problems from a marketing perspective, even if you’re not a social marketer.

CRAIG: I think the marketing approach can bring a systematic perspective for thinking about how we start to solve some of these problems that we see set up for ourselves, and can help us work through that process. That’s certainly why many of us got involved in social marketing. I started off wondering how do you reduce heart disease risk factors in an entire community? Not sitting in a patient education clinic! You have to think about changes at scale, and that’s what marketers and marketing as a discipline is really all about. People who are looking to change society or change their corner of their neighborhood can find a lot of inspiration in what marketing has to offer.

If you’re new to the ideas, or want a refresher, try these for starters:

The Change We Need: New Ways of Thinking About Social Issues

Making Change Happen: The Marketing Approach

 

Social Objects: Sharing Devices of Object-Centered Sociality

The most important asset you can have in a social media marketing program is something worth talking about - not a “message” to listen to, read or watch. There are no markets for messages, or to paraphrase the Introduction to the Institute of Medicine (2000, p.5-6) Promoting Health report, people in the health and social change communities have “messages” while the individuals they are targeting in communities have “lives.” Having lives means, among other things, that people are talking to each other as opposed to talking to someone else (that might mean you). Why do they choose to talk to some people and not others? Mainly because they share something in common, whether it is a passion for bowling, their dogs, work, Star Wars movies, a local sports team, being in the church choir, or attending Charity Balls. Jyri Engeström and Hugh MacLeod have advocated for the idea that all social networks consist of people being connected by a shared object – whether it is an intangible idea or a physical thing.

The development of social media parallels this object-centered sociality: we have sharing and SNS designed around pictures, music, videos, jobs, dating, diseases, hobbies, places and especially friends. This feature of social networks is often overlooked by many social media programs that attempt to ‘build communities’ around the producer’s interests (aka messages and brands), not people’s lives. Social networks form around social objects, not the other way around. The value of a social object is that they are transactional – they facilitate exchanges among people who encounter them. People see or hear a social object (like a juicy piece of gossip, a cute animal video) and immediately want to share it with their friends who they believe will also find it interesting, useful or entertaining. But the point of a social object is not simply to have something to share; it becomes the centerpiece of a dialogue between people.

Too frequently social media efforts try and discover something for people to share and wind up creating objects that are viewed and then forgotten in the privacy of their rooms and offices. Creating objects that “creatively communicate messages” is not the social media challenge; creating things that people talk about with each other in ways that relate to your program’s objectives is the key to having a social object. Social objects are personal, active, provocative (or surprising) and trigger natural, enthusiastic sharing.

When you hear about successful social media programs, if you look closely you will find a social object embedded in it. The easiest way to tell is by what the people involved with it are talking about. You have to listen and engage with the conversation around thier social object to get the big results in social media - not try and change it to suit your agenda. Otherwise, your social media program is just another message machine. As J.P Rangaswami put it: "If markets are conversations, then marketing is about the things that conversations are about. Not about placing those things or promoting those things, but about the things themselves.”

 

Reference

Institute of Medicine (2000). Promoting health: Intervention strategies from social and behavioral research. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Improving Arthritis Outcomes in Communities

A recent grant announcement from the CDC seeks to "build, support, and enhance state arthritis programs to substantially expand the access, availability and use of arthritis-appropriate evidence-based interventions...Furthermore, this announcement is designed to develop and maintain partnerships focused on: intervention dissemination and implementation, policy development and implementation, communications, and coordination with other chronic disease prevention/health promotion programs to further arthritis program goals."

So let me see, if we think about this as social marketers:

they want to improve product and service delivery of arthritis-appropriate interventions by using evdience-based approaches,

improve access and availability of these interventions,

increase reach and scale of programs,

alter the marketplace (context) in which therse interventions are embedded (presumably to change the costs and incentives for launching and particpating in these interventions),

craft communications around these efforts,

and coordinate activities with other players in the public health marketplace.

It sure sounds like they are looking for social marketing approaches to solving the puzzle. I wonder how many states will recognize the pattern;

AND I wonder if anyone will be focusing on including current and potential users of the programs in co-creating and implementing their approaches. It's interesting to me that the full announcement never refers to 'people who have arthritis' in their detailed approach to implementation. Another example of public health resistance to being people (market)-oriented?

SO much room for improvement - still.

Reporting from the World Marketing Summit

The 1st World Marketing Summit held in Bangladesh this past week provided a platform for sharing ideas among representatives from corporate, government and development agencies about how marketing can create a better world. Though I never received an official count, I estimate there were upwards of 3,000 marketing experts and students representing a variety of countries in Asia, the Middle East and the West. The 2 ½ day agenda was filled with over 50 presentations and more panel discussions that ranged from "Demarketing as a tool for social mobilization" to "Fostering sustainable behaviour" to "Financial innovation and its ramification for the society." Here are a few points from several presentations I attended.

Don Schultz, the father of integrated marketing communication, opened the conference program with his talk Creating a better world for emerging markets through marketing. His key point was that marketing using the supply chain approach (the 4P's of product, price, place and promotion) was designed to serve only about 20% of the world's population living in established markets. In this context marketing has performed very well in raising living standards (leaving aside its role in promoting consumerism). However, he argued that many of the assumptions that underlie marketing in developed countries are not present in the 140 countries (over 80% of the world's population) that constitute the emerging markets (for example, having stable economic and financial systems, well-developed logistical systems, and identifiable competitors who are operating legally). So the supply chain approach in which value is created by the manufacturer, baked into products, priced and distributed by sellers, extracted by buyers, evaluated by them using the value: price ratio, and then repurchased if needed does not fit the emerging market context. He called for an integrated marketing approach for emerging markets in which customer needs are superordinate over shareholder value. And he suggested as an alternative to the 4P's SIVA - Solutions, Information, Value and Access that should frame the marketing process from the customer's POV.

Gerard Hastings based his presentation on his forthcoming book The marketing matrix: How the corporation gets it power - and how we can reclaim it. He used several illustrations of corporate marketing practices that are harmful to people and societies, especially those of tobacco and alcohol companies. In particular, he noted the recent partnership between Diageo and Facebook to develop online campaigns for such brands as Smirnoff, Guinness and Baileys and wondered how such marketing will penetrate emerging markets "through their friends." [Note: research reported in the Financial Times' coverage shared that such campaigns can result in as much as a 20% increase in off-line purchases. The same article also noted Diageo's interest in using Facebook to tap into emerging markets, quoting their SVP for global marketing: “Facebook are working with us to make sure that we are not only fan collecting but that they are actively engaged and driving advocacy for our brands. We are looking for increases in customer engagement and increases in sales and [market] share.”]

Sandra Vandermerwe offered in her presentation, The future of customer focused strategies: To do well and do good,  a "marketing manifesto" that included principles of honesty, integrity, equality, empowerment, longevity and education that should serve as a foundation for  marketing activities.

One of my favorite presentations was by Dr. Kazi Anis Ahmed of the Gemcom Group in Bangladesh and the President of Teatulia Organic Teas that are grown in Bangladesh and are now available in Whole Foods in the US and Harrods in England [store locator]. Part of the story was how Teatulia used social media to connect with consumers. The other half was about their social programs including a cooperative in which members receive a milking cow and must pay back to Teatulia with milk and cow dung - the latter to use as the organic fertilizer in the tea garden. Members pay off the cows and own them in 2-3 years as well as any calves the cow has during that time. I am off to buy some now.

Robert Hutchinson of the Rocky Mountain Institute used his time with us to pose 3 questions he would like to have social marketers address: (1) How to market energy efficiency? (2) How to drive understanding and insistence for systemic solutions to energy problems at all levels of society? and (3) How to help drive matching of problems and solutions (that is, get information to people when and where they want it)?

Lawrence Chong moved the energy level of the group to a high level with his presentation Building purpose-led Asian companies to meet the obligations of a changing world. Talking "Asian to Asian, brother to brother," he challenged people to assess the state of poverty, saying that "Life is about the decisions we make, not the consequences." There is the Institutional Poverty of not having resources and infrastructure, but he focused them on Identity Poverty (being ashamed of one's own culture and adopting without question the beliefs and practices from other ones) and Intellectual Poverty (assuming that we already know everything and will not learn from others or that we cannot criticize our teachers, company executives or government who are presumed to be correct). He called on participants to have a purpose - "how will you shape the world?" And always ask yourself "What does it mean? Why am I doing this?"  He stated that the 1% who shape the world think deeply about meaning, are restless to change the status quo, and have a strong sense of obligation to their industry, their country or the world that supersedes everything else in their lives. Judging from the ovations and cheering by the end of his talk, there were a lot of students who want to be among those 1%ers.

Marc Mathieu, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Unilever, talked about inspiring and freeing the good within (a topic we have been with Marc before and posted about from a Transformative Consumer Research conference a few years ago). He talked about marketing as a “noble craft” in which brands can be used to help us imagine what could be, drive prosperity and progress and help consumers shift their behaviors to healthier ones. In the context of the Summit, "Marketing," he said, “can stand for something new… helping us, once again, imagine what could be.” He framed this change in marketing as one of putting people first, not consumers. The new marketing mix includes empathy, serving people, instilling brands with a POV, using brand power to change behaviors for the better and improve lives, and unleashing the magic of marketing by blending marketing science with the craft.

At the closing session, a WMS Declaration was presented that will later be posted at the website (I will get a link up to that once it is in final form). The conference also launched a number of Incubators that will conduct research projects focusing on marketing solutions to:

• food security and optimum consumption
• appropriate education for enhanced livelihood options
• access to health
• waste reduction and waste management
• future of marketing

The World Marketing Summit will continue to have an annual meeting over the next 4 years in which the conversations that were started in Dhaka will be expanded and informed by the work of these incubators. If we can harness the intellectual and social capital that was developed at this first summit, and continue to feed it with the commitment, energy and enthusiasm of its participants, we will have a global community and platform from which to argue that we can, indeed, create a better world through marketing.

Creating a Better World Through Marketing: The World Marketing Summit

Today I was among several thousand participants in Dhaka, Bangladesh for the first event of its kind. The World Marketing Summit brings together global leaders in marketing to discuss how marketing philosophies, approaches and insights can help discover innovative solutions to global challenges. The summit is an initiative of the marketing guru (yes, that’s how they refer to him) Phillip Kotler with the full support of the Bangladesh government. This level of support was notable by the attendance and opening speech given by Her Excellency Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister.

The opening session included remarks from Supachai Panitchpakdi, the Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and formerly the Director-General of the World Trade Organization. He noted the important role marketing must play in the development of markets in emerging countries and called for a new marketing that emphasizes:

• Having a moral value or compass (where he made reference to Adam Smith’s “other” book – The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
• Dealing with asymmetries of information in markets.
• Encouraging the technology transfer of marketing know-how.
• Increasing competition in south-south trade.

The Prime Minister called on the Summit participants to look for possible solutions to contemporary global challenges through the prism of marketing (a point we have noted in this blog before). She asked us to consider questions such as:

• Can marketing be used to moderate both consumer and market behavior so as to bring a greater balance between business interest and consumer interest?
• Can marketing influence the demand for goods and services?
• Can marketing help shape government policies and priorities for sustainable and green development?
• Can marketing approaches be modified and adjusted to help secure progress without worsening inter-generational equity?

The Prime Minister also encouraged us to examine how marketing can play a catalytic role in equitable development; help businesses internalize a development perspective in their work; further fair competition and consumer benefits; and create value and generate knowledge. She concluded with the observation: “If we can act in the spirit of sharing and promoting collective interest and benefit, many of our challenges in the areas of food security, nutrition and health, skill development for decent employment, and natural resource utilization would be easy to address…marketing can help politicians and policy makers shape societies based on fairness, mutual benefit and equity.”

As I listened to her and the other speakers, I knew why I was here. My soul soared and I thought: “It is a good time to be a social marketer.”

Walmart: Marketing Foods That Are Better For You

Corporations can do responsible marketing to improve people's nutrition behaviors (or call it social marketing). Walmart announces a new point-of-choice food labeling program that will add 'Great for You' on many of its own products and at the fruit and vegetable counter; it will also be made available for free to other brands - though I would not expect a stampede to that offer. In the NYT article today, the usual suspects are herded to proclaim that "the label will only go on a fifth of their products" and "in the midst of all this clutter of competing [food labeling] systems, how helpful [will] its approach...be"? Eeyore has competition too, especailly when it comes to improving food choices.

When you look beyond the new label (and it is admittedly hard for people who only have information and communication hammers to solve problems), let's look at some other Walmart initiatives mentioned in this same article and use some marketing benchmarks:

Audience - Walmart focuses on the budget-conscious family, a very different group from what many health educators choose - the 'ready-to-change,' nutrition-aware, woman.

Product - Walmart has been working with suppliers of national brands and private label products to reduce sodium, added sugar and trans fats in 165 products it offers.

Place - It has built 23 stores to specifically serve food deserts where people lack access to full-service grocery stores.

Price - It has lower prices for fresh fruits and vegetables (Walmart claims last year its shoppers would have spent $1 billion more buying similar products at competing stores). It has also worked with suppliers to cut the costs of items like reduced-fat peanut butter and fat-free salad dressing.

Promotion - And yes, it does have a point-of-choice promotion effort along with all the other communication it does around healthier food.

What the self-styled critics of this Walmart initiative may be missing is the total picture. They will nitpick on the communication, the validity of the labeling criteria, whether it is "exploitative" to build Walmarts in neighborhoods with no access to grocery stores, why ALL products are not created equal (no fat, no salt, no sugars for example), and why prices are STILL as high as they are for fresh fruits and vegertables. They will miss how the social marketing approach can be employed to address a number of pieces of the nutrition and obesity puzzle rather than focusing on just (their preferred) one.

Read the article for yourself, but first ask yourself: "are eggs a healthy food?" Now you are primed.

 

 

 

Applying Service-Dominant Logic to Social Marketing Programs

Many social marketing programs, and most public health ones, have shied away from working with their customers or members of their priority groups. Rather, we have stuck with the ‘marketing-to’ approach that Lusch (2007) describes as one of stimulating demand through use of the 4Ps in order to get customers to purchase goods, use services or adopt behaviors, and then be satisfied with their decision, in order to meet organizational (or social) objectives.

Service-Dominant marketing Logic (S-D Logic) marks a shift from this 'marketing-to' approach to a 'marketing-with' perspective (Lusch, 2007).  This 'marketing-with' approach is an adaptive process through which organizations learn about their customers and markets, and collaborate with these customers and other stakeholders to create and sustain value for themselves and society. For organizations that engage in public health and social change activities, this 'marketing-with' framework is similar to other approaches that seek to engage people in the change process – not be an object of it (see the community-based prevention marketing approach as an example, Bryant et al, 2009).

Following-up on the last post, one implication of S-D Logic for social marketing is that our customers rarely obtain 'value-added' from the behaviors, products or services we offer. That is, the notion that we conduct research to unearth the ‘benefit’ that will compel people to exchange with us is misguided; we cannot presume to be the final arbiters of ‘value’ – the user must create or find that value as they engage with the behavior, product or service we are offering. Marketers who attempt to imbue their products or services with value, or benefits that consumers will find attractive, are reflecting ‘goods dominant’ logic. Rather, social marketing can be thought about as facilitating customer experiences or discoveries of value when using the product, trying the service or practicing the behavior. In short, value is uniquely experienced by each customer when they use our offering – not in how persuasively or creatively we ‘sell it’ to them. The S-D Logic perspective encourages marketers to suggest what the value might be - value propositions (“we think you may like this because it…satisfies a need you are experiencing now, solves a problem for you, facilitates your getting a job done, or helps you reach a goal”) - that customers must then validate through their experience of using the offering (product, service or behavior) in their lives. This perspective on how value is created by users means we must design interactions (or service touch points) to facilitate value-in-use and feedback. This feedback, or exchange, can suggest how we might refine, augment or change our initial offering. 

To put this idea into action, let’s look at a tobacco cessation offering. In a classic social marketing approach, the first task would be to understand from the potential customers’ perspective, and there may be several segments of them with different perspectives, what benefits and barriers they perceive in quitting smoking. Along with other information we have about these customer segments, we design messages, products or a service to appeal to one or more of these benefits and/or reduce barriers; for example, older smokers sometimes resonate to “not smoking will allow me to live longer and watch my grandchildren grow up.” After testing these concepts and messages with members of the priority audience, we create materials and a program ‘look and feel’ to reflect this benefit positioning, launch it, monitor its uptake and completion rate and evaluate the results (for how long is a critical point here).

Using the S-D Logic framework for the same problem: first, we will think about the behavior differently – 'learning not to smoke’ versus quitting (a longer-term experience rather than a one-off quit episode). Then we would incorporate smokers into every facet of our discovery, design, creation and rollout of the program – not just invite them into focus groups and testing sessions. Finally, we would treat our value offering as a proposition and not be so sure we have actually ‘made value’ for a smoker who is trying to quit (see above for 4 possible approaches). This allows our offering to be subject to change and modification based on customer input and response (and not blame them for 'not getting it').

We would view the launch of our smoking cessation effort as the continuation of a conversation with them. Our role is to facilitate value creation as they quit smoking: they must integrate what we (and perhaps others) are giving to them as an active creator of value, not a passive recipient of benefits (Gronroos, 2011). We would also put into place feedback mechanisms about our value proposition (are we on the right track?).  We could then learn from them what their experience is and whether they are obtaining the value we proposed and they expected (a very valuable exchange for us!). They may surprise us by noting that over time they are experiencing other benefits that are now more important to them. Or perhaps the initial value (benefit) was misjudged and together we need to come up with alternatives for creating more value from not smoking than continuing to smoke (rather than refer back to promoting 'pros' and reducing 'cons' to alter a decision-making process). What we are doing is co-creating value (or call it wrap-around or ubiquitous supports) with the smoker after they have made a decision to adopt a new behavior and/or use our cessation product or service. That's when the work starts and "experience-in-use" is not some theoretical expression, but the everyday reality of the smoker trying to quit.

 The key shifts in thinking for social marketing that S-D Logic present to us are:

1.  Exchanges are not the giving of something for the receipt of something else (value-in-exchange) as is understood in the Goods Dominant (G-D) logic model. Rather, we should view exchanges as mutual sharing of knowledge and resources among the social marketing agency, the priority group or customers and other actors or stakeholders (co-creation of value-in-use).

2.  We need to focus on value-in-use to facilitate long-term adoption of healthier and sustainable behaviors. People we refer to as customers or clients are active agents in creating the value of our offerings and create value for us in return (if we are open to it).  When we embrace this fact, we are then committed to developing the means and opportunities to co-create value with them throughout the process of a social marketing program (co-creation is more than being involved in program planning and materials development, it is getting something of value out of it).

3. Within the larger networks in which we operate, the S-D Logic also involves creating value propositions for stakeholders and partners. As with customers, the value for organizations to participate with us comes from their investment of information and resources to co-create value in the partnership (it is not something that is simply handed over, or exchanged, with them). What the value proposition does is set the expectations for what these values-in-use might be (Frow & Payne, 2011): value is not intrinsic to participating, it must be continually created and recreated through the interactions of the partners with each other.

References

Bryant, C.A., Brown, K.R., McDermott, R.J., Debate, R.D., Alfonso, M.L., Baldwin, J.A., Monaghan, P. & Phillips, L.M. (2009). Community-based prevention marketing: A new framework for health promotion interventions. In R. DiCiClemente, R.A. Crosby & M.C. Kegler (Eds.), Emerging theories in health promotion practice and research (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (pp. 331-356).

Frow, P. & Payne, A. (2011). A stakeholder perspective of the value proposition concept. European Journal of Marketing; 45: 223 -240.

Grönroos, C. (2011). Value co-creation in service logic: A critical analysis. Marketing Theory; 11: 279-301

Lusch,  R.F. (2007). Marketing’s evolving identity: Defining our future. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing; 26: 261-268.

Note: A special thanks to Graham Hill [@GrahamHill] who provided several resources for me to consider and integrate into this discussion after the first post appeared.

Service-Dominant Logic and Social Marketing

Is it time for more of us to loosen our grip on the 4Ps of the marketing mix as a necessary ingredient or benchmark for social marketing programs? In the broader marketing world, a growing dissatisfaction with the 4Ps framework has been driving a fundamental shift in the conceptualization of marketing since the 1980s (described as “merely a handy framework” of managerial decision-making variables; Day & Montgomery, 1999). Constantinides (2006) summarized over 40 papers that have been critical of, or presented alternatives, to the 4Ps marketing mix framework. The essence of their arguments comes down to three issues:

1. The internal orientation of the marketing mix in which the four elements are controlled by the producer of goods, services and behavioral offerings and has little involvement or interaction with customers. The 4Ps are decided upon by planners and managers - perhaps 'tested' with customer groups, and then 'targeted' at them.
2. The shift in marketing activities from one-off transactions or exchanges to dynamic and tailored interactions aimed at building relationships and retaining customers across many different marketing domains (e.g., retail marketing, business-to-business marketing, web-based or e-marketing). This shift requires marketers to understand customer constructions and evaluations of value, be more flexible in their approach, engage with customers over longer periods of time, and innovate and adapt to changing market conditions - especially those related to technology and communication.
3. The rise in services as primary drivers of economic activity that have their own unique character not addressed by the traditional 4Ps - for example, People or Participants, Physical Evidence (of their value), Processes (of service delivery), the intangible nature of their offering and demonstrated value to customers, as well as unique legal and professional restrictions on providers of many services (licensure of health providers, lawyers and general building contractors being just a few examples).

Most of these debates have been on theoretical grounds rather than based on empirical studies; it is also true that most marketers continue to practice as they were taught in college marketing classes (Constantinides, 2006). Yet, the growing consensus is that the 4P marketing mix idea of 40 years ago is no longer as relevant for current markets, customers or marketers.  Some social marketers have examined these same concerns for our field and come to similar conclusions (Hastings, 2003; Lefebvre, 2007; Marques & Domegan, 2011; Peattie & Peattie, 2003).
 
A different worldview of marketing is emerging, one that seems well-suited to social marketing programs. In their seminal article, Vargo & Lusch (2004) state: “The purpose of marketing is to mutually serve.” The authors propose a Service-Dominant Logic to understand the purpose and nature of organizations, markets and society. In this post, and the following one, I extend the S-D Logic to social marketing (and thank Bob Lusch for his review and comments on an earlier draft).

Service dominant (or S-D) Logic reflects a change in perspective in marketing from one in which value is embedded into an organization’s offerings (such as value-added or functional utility) to an appreciation that value is co-created in collaboration with people formerly known as customers (Vargo & Lusch, 2004).  The fundamental assertion of S-D Logic is that all exchanges are service-based. Because the classic analysis of exchanges has focused on the immediate exchange of money for products, the value the product provides to a person (the customer) after the transaction is completed is ignored. Since the early years of social  marketing, many people have struggled with how to apply the logic of economic exchanges to social marketing ones - usually without much success. Vargo and Lusch reassure us that we have not been alone.

What S-D Logic shows us is that a tangible (product) or intangible offering (service, behavior) has value only when a customer ‘uses’ it. A person does not buy a hammer primarily for its features, for example, but the utility it provides in doing other things ('in use'). Similarly, people are not going to behave differently because of 'baked-in' or persuasive benefits such as longer, healthier or sexier lives. People will behave differently only if they find the new behavior (or discontinuing an old one) leads to self-defined value (benefits) when they engage in it (put it to use). Yet, how frequently, if ever, do we understand if our offerings actually result in value for people who use them (whether that value was what we proposed, or what the value is they 'created' or discovered when they used or practiced it themselves)?

The premises of S-D Logic (see below) guide us away from trying to create what we believe will be of value to people to a customer perspective that reminds us that it is how people utilize our offerings and experience rewards or value for adopting behaviors that should be our critical concern. People bring skills and competencies to encounters they have with us, and thus are always a co-creators of value, not passive recipients of what we judge they need or want. It moves us from being ‘customer-focused' not just in the beginning of a project when we conduct formative research, but throughout the process - especially when people discover or create the value of change for themselves. Process and outcome evaluations must become more sensitive to measuring value propositions and experiences-in-use if we are to understand how and why new behaviors are adopted, old ones discontinued and a better life is achieved by some, if not all.

S-D Logic is compatible with the notion that behavior change is a process and continually evolving; it is not one-off occasions that economic transactions trap us into thinking about. If we think about our offerings as transactions in which we ‘expose’ people to a messages to adopt certain behaviors or use a specific product or service, it shapes how we go about engaging with them (i.e., not for very long). The alternative proposed by S-D Logic is to think about exchanges of knowledge and skills, not one-way offerings; that the people we serve become producers of value for us as well as for themselves (co-value producers). The value of an S-D Logic perspective for social marketers includes asking what do we learn from our customers, are we open to changing ourselves and offerings as a result of their input and response, and have we created opportunities for them to participate in a reciprocal process?
 
The benefit of a social marketing offering is the value the customer experiences when they interact with it (whether it be using the product, trying the service or practicing the behavior). Value (or benefits) are uniquely experienced by each customer when they use our offering – not in how creatively we 'package' it or persuasively ‘sell it.’ Does your offering meet needs, solve an immediate problem or help one achieve their dreams? 

The 10 Foundational Premises of Service Dominant Logic (from Vargo & Lusch, 2008).
1. Service is the fundamental basis of exchange
2. Indirect exchange masks the fundamental basis of exchange
3. Goods are a distribution mechanism for service provision
4. Knowledge and skills are the fundamental source of competitive advantage
5. All economies are service economies
6. The customer is always a co-creator of value
7. The enterprise cannot deliver value, but only offer value propositions
8. A service-centered view is inherently customer oriented and relational
9. All social and economic actors are resource integrators
10. Value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary (experienced in use)


References

Constantinides, E. (2006). The marketing mix revisited: Towards the 21st century marketing. Journal of Marketing Management; 22:407-438.

Day, G. & Montgomery, D. (1999). Charting new directions for marketing. Journal
of Marketing; 63 (Special Issue): 3‐13.

Hastings, G. (2003). Relational paradigms in social marketing. Journal of Macromarketing; 23(1): 6-15.

Lefebvre, .RC. (2007). The new technology: The consumer as participant rather than target audience. Social Marketing Quarterly; 13:31-42.

Marques, S. & Domegan, C. (2011). Relationship marketing and social marketing. In G. Hastings, K Angus & C. Bryant (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Marketing.London: SAGE Publications, pp. 44-60.

Peattie, S. & Peattie, K. (2003). Ready to fly solo? Reducing social marketing's dependence on commercial marketing theory. Marketing Theory; 3(3): 365-385.

Vargo, S.L. & Lusch, R.F. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing; 68: 1-17.

Vargo, S.L. & Lusch, R.F. (2008). Service-Dominant Logic: Continuing the evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science; 36: 1-10.

Stump the Maven

Last week I asked for nominations for the best papers in the field of social marketing. Prizes were offered for any nominations that were unfamiliar to me. I received quite a few suggestions and five people came through with "stumpers." The winners are:

Alan Andreasen, PhD
Professor of Marketing
McDonough School of Business
Georgetown University
Washington, DC

Steven Chapman, PhD
Senior Vice President & Chief Technical Officer
PSI
Washington, DC

Nurit Guttman, PhD
Chair, Department of Communication
Head, the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics & Society
Faculty of Social Sciences
Tel Aviv University
Israel

Aarti Sewak
Nausori, Fiji Islands

Professor Alan Tapp
Director, Bristol Social Marketing Centre
Bristol Business School
Bristol, UK

Thank you to them and all the others who nominated papers for the SAGE 4-Volume Set on Social Marketing. The prizes are in the mail to the winners.

I'll keep you updated on the progress of the social marketing series.

Top 10 Papers on Social Marketing for 2011

It's that time of year for retrospectives on the state of whatever. Here we offer our top 10 papers on social marketing published in 2011. Each title has a link to the full article as an html and/or a choice of downloading a free pdf (toll gates are coming down slowly, but surely). They represent a diversity of theory, practice and research from around the globe, and several may get you rethinking your understanding of social marketing in 2012. That might be a good thing - ring in the new year with these!

EPODE approach for childhood obesity prevention: methods, progress and international development

A description of the world's largest childhood obesity prevention project operating in over 500 communities in six countries. Social marketing is a critical feature in the design and implementation of the project.

Got ACTs? Availability, price, market share and provider knowledge of anti-malarial medicines in public and private sector outlets in six malaria-endemic countries

Survey of the availability, market share and prices of ACT (the first-line malaria treatment) in six sub-Saharan African countries. This assessment provides information to inform and monitor programs that seek to influence supply and demand of ACT over the next several years.

Rebranding exercise: closing the gap between values and behavior

The specific socialization to exercise that individuals have had through the media, health care, and society has branded exercise as a vehicle that promotes "weight loss," "health benefits," and "disease prevention." This research suggests that it would be strategic to rebrand exercise as a primary method to enhance aspects of daily quality of life.

Socially-marketed rapid diagnostic tests and ACT in the private sector: ten years of experience in Cambodia

This paper describes and evaluates 10 years of a nationwide social marketing effort in Cambodia implementing subsidized ACT and rapid diagnostic tests (RDT) for malaria. The program includes behavior change communication and the training of private providers as well as the sale and distribution of Malarine, the recommended ACT, and Malacheck, the RDT.

Vigorous physical activity among tweens, VERB Summer Scorecard Program, Lexington, Kentucky, 2004-2007

Evaluation of a successful community-based social marketing effort to increase physical activity among tweens.

Why some do but most don't. Barriers and enablers to engaging low-income groups in physical activity programmes: a mixed methods study

A study to examine ways to increase participation in physical activity programs among economically disadvantaged groups. Although awareness of the benefits are high, the data suggest that there are some key issues relating to increasing recruitment and retention into physical activity sessions that have a greater impact on low-income groups than the general population.

Social marketing’s unique contribution to mental health stigma reduction and HIV testing: Two case studies

Two case studies—one on reducing stigma related to mental health and the other a large-scale campaign focused on increasing HIV testing among African American youth.

Condom social marketing in sub-Saharan Africa and the Total Market Approach

Condom social marketing interventions have advanced and achieved the goals of improving use and making condoms available in the private sector. It is time to manage interventions and influence markets to improve equity and sustainability.

Social marketing’s mythunderstandings

This paper looks at the mythunderstandings of social marketers themselves including definitional issues; the roles of education, law and advocacy in social marketing; and whether the sought behavior change must be voluntary.

An integrative model of social marketing

An integration of views about social marketing focuses on the core roles of audience benefits; analysis of behavioral determinants, context and consequences; the use of positioning, brand and personality in marketing strategy development; and use of the four elements of the marketing mix to tailor offerings, realign prices, increase access and opportunities, and communicate these in an evolving media environment.

International Social Marketing Association: 2011 Review

Regular readers have shared the history of developing a global network of social marketers.

In 2011, the International Social Marketing Association (iSMA) has been developing the promise to be the catalyst for a global infrastructure to serve social marketing practice, education, research and management.

The hard work of developing the legal and operational framework for the iSMA has been done by a small group who have volunteered their time and expertise to serve as founding board members. These people represent various parts of the world and are committed to crafting an organization that is dedicated to full representation of social marketers around the world in the common pursuit of advancing marketing approaches to the solution of social problems.

Our active Board members include:

• Tom Beall – USA
• Susan Dann – Australia
• Jeff French – England
• Jay Kassirer - Canada
• Nancy Lee – USA
• Craig Lefebvre - USA
• Christiane Lellig – Switzerland
• Robert Marshall – USA
• Win Morgan - USA
• Gael O’Sullivan – USA
• Barry Whittle – Guatemala

Our accomplishments to date include:

• Established the iSMA as a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation in Maryland, USA.
• Created corporate identity for iSMA.
• Developed a fully functioning iSMA website with specialized sub groups  and monthly member updates.
• Established Membership, Communication and Finance Committees.
• Secured an investment by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to support their development of health communication and social marketing capacity for infectious disease control in the European Union.
• Representation and presentations at the World Social Marketing Conference and the USF Social Marketing conference.
• Liaison with the Australian Association of Social Marketing.
  
• Established the European Social Marketing Network with its first meeting held in London on the 25th November.

There are many elements of the association development process that are nearing completion and the Board intends to present to the full membership for comment, action and votes over the next 6 months including:

• Mission and Values Statements.
• Strategic Direction and Priorities for the next 3 years.
• A Board structure and process for nominations and election of officers.
• Guidance for establishing regional, national and local iSMA affiliate groups and the harmonization of these relationships.

On behalf of all the Board members, we are thankful for the many social marketers who have contributed money to support the development of the association over the past several years - especially our Founders. We have deposited these funds in an iSMA account and put financial controls in place to monitor and approve use of these monies to support iSMA activities.  We are also appreciative for those members who are donating their time to serve on our committees and otherwise making contributions to the development of the association and the strengthening of the global network of social marketing.

We also want to thank the over 700 members of the Social Marketers Global Network, a member service of the iSMA for news, networking and collaboration. We value your trust in us, and each other, to make the commitment to participate in this journey to expand the effectiveness and impact of social marketing approaches to solve social problems in all their forms around the world. We intend to transform this network into an active, interesting and rewarding professional experience to support your social marketing work and career development. To fully particpate in the activities of the iSMA in 2012, including voting privileges, you will need to be a member.

If you have not already joined iSMA please take the step of becoming part of the growing global network. If you are a member please encourage at least one other person from you own professional network to join.

Standard membership is $49.95 USD or EUR 38.2 per year.

Student membership is $29.95 USD or EUR 22.94/year

Inagural membership for citizens of developing countries is $7.95 USD or EUR 6.06/2 years.

More information about membership registration and to make donations to the iSMA.

We look forward to having your support and commitment to social marketing in 2012!

Nominate the Greatest Hits of Social Marketing

What articles on social marketing would you recommend every faculty member, student or practitioner read? In the next 3 or 4 days please give the question some thought and email your ideas to me or (preferably) post them in the comment section of this post for everyone else to see.

It is not a rhetorical question… I am serving as the Editor of a major four (4) volume set on Social Marketing to be published by SAGE. The volumes will consist of previously published papers on all aspects of social marketing - from theoretical papers to research studies, in developed and developing country settings, and from environmental programs to public health, financial literacy and injury prevention. I am thinking about the project as curating the 'greatest hits' of social marketing - the most often cited, inspiring, trail-blazing and exemplars of practice and research. And I'd like your help to be sure I don't overlook important papers. Here is the recent SAGE 5-volume set on Health Communication as an example.

This is not a voting or popularity contest. The idea is to generate as many options as possible. Once I have put the complete list together (by the end of this week, December 30th), I will need to pare it down to a total of 1,600 pages by removing redundancies and articles that report on different aspects of the same project, assuring areas get attention (but not dominate), and illustrating the diversity of social marketing approaches and applications. In collaboration with SAGE editors, we will also have constraints as to what appears in the Volumes due to the fees some journals/publishers may charge for permissions to reprint (we have a limited amount of money allocated to paying these costs), inability to access high quality copies of original papers or artwork and who knows what other unforeseen circumstances that might pop-up. Here are some examples of articles I'm thinking about that go beyond the usual suspects:

• Bloom, P.N. & Novelli, W.D. (1981). Problems and challenges in social marketing. Journal of Marketing; 45: 79-88.
• Hastings, G. & Saren, M. (2003). The critical contribution of social marketing: Theory and application. Marketing Theory; 3: 305-322.
• Dearing, J.W., Rogers, E.W., Meyer, G., Casey, M.K., Rao, N., Campo, S. & Henderson, G.M. (1996). Social marketing and diffusion-based strategies for communicating with unique populations: HIV prevention in San Francisco. Journal of Health Communication; 1: 343-363.
• Lowry, R.J., Billett, A., Buchanan, C. & Whiston, S. (2009). Increasing breastfeeding and reducing smoking in pregnancy: a social marketing success improving life chances for children. Perspectives in Public Health; 129(6): 277-280. 
• Donovan, R.J., James, R., Jalleh, G. & Sidebottom, C. (2006). Implementing mental health promotion: The Act-Belong-Commit mentally healthy WA campaign in Western Australia. International Journal of Mental Health Promotion; 8(1): 33-42.
• Bertrand, M., Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. (2006).  Behavioral economics and marketing in aid of decision making among the poor. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing; 25:8-23.
• Nathan, R., Masanja, H., Mshindra, H., Schellenberg, J.A., de Savigny, D., Lengeler, C., Tanner, M. & Victora, C.G. (2004). Mosquito nets and the poor: Can social marketing redress inequalities in access? Tropical Medicine & International Health; 9(10): 1121-1126.
• Stephenson, R., Tsui, A.O., Sulzbach, S., Bardsley, P., Bekele, G., Giday, T., Ahmed, R., Gopalkrishnan, G. & Feyesitan, B. (2004). Reproductive health in today’s world: franchising reproductive health services. Health Services Research; 39: 2053-2080.
• Peattie, K. & Peattie, S. (2009). Social marketing: A pathway to consumption reduction? Journal of Business Research; 62: 260-268.
• Altman, J.A. & Petkus, E. (1994). Toward a stakeholder-based policy process: An application of the social marketing perspective to environmental policy development. Policy Sciences; 27:37-51. 
• Flocks, J., Clarke,L., Albrecht, S., Bryant, C., Monghan, P. & Blake, H. (2001). Implementing a community-based social marketing project to improve agricultural worker health.   Environmental Health Perspectives; 109 (Supplement 3); 461-468.

So what are your social marketing favorites (no books; articles that appeared in peer-reviewed articles have precedent or a chapter with a good explanation of why you think it is important)? Think about it between now and Friday and send your suggestions in by December 30th, 6PM EDT (more than one submission per entry is OK). Please include the full citation (reference) as I have done them in the above list so I can easily locate them. And to make it interesting, for the first 5 people who submit an article that stumps me (a good suggestion that is not already on my list of 85 titles as of today), I'll send you a free copy of On Social Marketing and Social Change: Selected Readings. Any submission that results in that article appearing in the Volumes will also have your name listed as a contributor in the Acknowledgments section of the set.

I can't wait to see what you come up with!

Getting It Right (and Wrong) in Social Media: Current Business Practices

How are your adventures in social media for behavioral and social change working for you?

Looking for some inspiration of what to do better or differently next year?

Cathy Hallingan writes in AdAgeDigital about Four Marketers Getting It Right (And Wrong) On Facebook. Her observations of commercial marketers complement what I was writing about in The 5 Fictions of Social Media in the health and health care sectors.

She notes that there may be as much as $3.8 billion spent in advertising on Facebook in 2011. But are these marketers creating any value or sustainable advantage for their businesses? Her answer for most of them is "categorically no."  Here's why:

• Most marketers approach Facebook purely as an advertising and engagement platform. The select few who are getting it right recognize and approach Facebook as a new business-building capability.

• Most execute programs only on Facebook.com. The select few who are getting it right also use Facebook off Facebook.com; using the open graph to develop relevant, compelling, personalized experiences on one's branded web properties.

• Most measure the media activity (reach and frequency, impressions, buzz, fan count) only. The select few who are getting it right also measure commerce activity (referral traffic from Facebook and the resulting conversion on one's site, customer acquisition).

She provides recent examples of the right and wrong approaches to using Facebook - Amazon, Step2, TripAdvisor and Louisville Slugger (pay particular attention to this one as it parallels much of what I see happening in public health applications).

Paraphrasing her guidance of how to judge the success of your Facebook (and other social media) efforts, we need to address the questions:

• What relevant and compelling consumer problem does it address? 

• How do your social media activities advance the behavioral and social change objectives of your organization?

Her conclusion of what is working 'right' for successful companies is that they are exploring and exploiting the 'social' aspects of the social media experience, not using technology in the same old ways…something we talk about here regularly.

A Renewed Social Marketing Conference: Call for Abstracts

We have been innovating in the approach and content of the annual social marketing conference held in Cleawater Beach, FL (aka Social Marketing in Public Health Conference, now in its 22nd year). The description and call for abstracts says it all...plan to be there.

The University of South Florida Social Marketing Conference (13-16 June 2012) enters its 22nd year with a renewed commitment to social marketing’s robust capacity to influence complex or “wicked” social problems. Social marketing has potential applications in a wide array of fields such as environmental studies, sustainability, transportation, financial literacy, education, not-for-profit management, labor relations, engineering, public health, and healthcare. All of these and others can benefit from social marketing’s consumer centered, strategic approach to influencing change. In recognition of social marketing’s expansive reach and increasing interest to persons in other disciplines, we are shifting the scope of the Social Marketing Conference beyond public health to welcome all professionals who work in or value the use of social marketing. [Ed Note: See The change we need: New ways of thinking about social issues.]
 
This year’s theme - “Getting Better at Doing Good” - reflects the global reality that government institutions, not-for-profit groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities and colleges and businesses are searching for better ways to improve people's health, the environment, infrastructures and social welfare. This international gathering will bring together social marketers and other social innovators in a forum where people can engage their collective wisdom and talents to discover new and creative ways social marketing can change the world for the better.
 
The four-day event consists of two major offerings: The Social Marketing Training Academy and The Social Marketing Conference. The Training Academy will continue its 20-year tradition of training professionals and students new to social marketing and others who want to enhance their understanding of the basic social marketing model.
 
The Social Marketing Conference will be enhanced to meet the needs of social marketers at all levels of experience. It will include conversational plenary sessions, interactive panels, and focused collaboratory sessions. We welcome social marketers, students and faculty, not-for-profit and government leaders, program planners and designers - all who share the commitment of getting better at doing good. The two-day conference will consist of opening plenary sessions with national leaders in education, design, organizational development and continuing professional development, and a closing plenary session with leaders in social marketing education. Each morning Opening Session speakers will introduce ideas from a variety of perspectives with time allocated in each one for participant questions and discussion. These will be followed by five (5) parallel sessions.  On the first day four of these sessions will be seeded with panel presentations and conversations that focus on a variety of topics relevant to the practice, application and dissemination of social marketing. The fifth parallel session will be for presentations of exemplary work in social marketing research and practice. A poster walk and reception is scheduled to close the first day to present additional examples of social marketing practice and research and create more opportunities for conversations among participants.
 
Following the Opening sessions on Saturday participants may attend one of five collaboratories – facilitated discussions designed to dive more deeply into emerging issues and ways to apply innovative ideas for social marketing education, training and practice. Collaboratories will focus on the public sector, non-profit organizations, academic settings and education and training consultation. Additionally, six “incubators” (small conference rooms) will be available for groups that want to explore specific topics they determine will help them, and the field of social marketing, get better at doing good. Our Closing Session will discuss integrative innovations in social marketing.
 
Networking and Co-Creation are Key Goals: The conference is designed to offer numerous informal opportunities for networking with some of the world’s best social marketers and leaders from other social change disciplines.  In addition to networking breaks, concurrent sessions are structured to give participants an opportunity to interact with presenters and other participants to explore and integrate new ideas into their own projects and organizations.

Call for Abstracts

Electronic Abstract Submission Deadline: March 31, 2012

The conference planning committee invites abstract submissions to be considered for oral and poster presentation.
 
Abstracts should demonstrate the application of social marketing strategies to behavior change, service marketing or improvement of social change practice.  They may describe social marketing programs, innovative research methods or theoretical advances. Conference reviewers favor abstracts that clearly illustrate key elements of the social marketing approach (e.g., how formative research is used to make marketing decisions; description of audience segmentation methods and results, evaluations of comprehensive marketing programs).
 
Of particular interest are applications of social marketing strategies to pressing social issues, promoting social marketing within an organization, demonstrating the sustainability and/or self-sufficiency of social marketing programs or using innovative methods to understand consumer needs and wants. Other suggested topics include, but are not limited to: the use of social marketing to ameliorate health problems and social issues concerning special populations; evaluation of social marketing programs and strategies; social marketing approaches to defining social problems; examining solutions to health problems; changing health practices in school and community settings; and training and education in social marketing.
 
Oral presentations will be limited to 15 minutes and should address one of the five topic areas featured in this year’s conference:
 
A: Education and Certification in Academic Settings (e.g., new approaches for incorporating social marketing into academic curricula and post-graduate training; development of competencies for graduate education and certification; exploration of training differences and similarities for social marketers working in environmental protection, global health, public health, and other disciplines; new strategies for incorporating lessons learned from social enterprise, social design, social media, and Service-Dominant logic into graduate education).
 
B. Social Marketing in the Public Sector (e.g., recommendations for incorporating marketing’s mindset into public sector organizations; strategies for training public sector employees to use social marketing more effectively; techniques for designing social marketing programs on a tight budget and short timeline; and using the Service-Dominant logic to market program services.)
 
C: Social Marketing in NGOs (e.g., strategies for incorporating marketing’s consumer orientation into service delivery and program design; lessons learned from social entrepreneurial programs; techniques for using social marketing techniques when funds and time are limited; and using the Service-Dominant logic to market program services).
 
D: Social Marketing Training and Consultation (e.g., state-of the art techniques for training and consulting with public sector and non-profit organizations; lessons learned from social enterprise; application of social design approaches into program development; emerging issues and methods in use of social media and mobile technologies).
 
E: Program Applications (e.g., new techniques for incorporating social design and mobile technologies into program development and implementation; application of social design approaches into program development; emerging issues and methods in use of social media and mobile technologies).
 
Submission Details:

• Send abstracts to Bobbi Rose at brose@health.usf.edu.
• The abstract should have the title, author, and author’s organization on the first page.
• The email needs to state the name, email and phone number of the contact person, and state preference of ‘oral’ or ‘poster.’ The preferences are given consideration, but they do not determine the final status.
• Electronic submission is March 31, 2012.
• Late arriving abstracts are welcome, but they are only considered for poster presentation.  Submitters will know outcomes in late April.
• The preference for formatting is in WORD, Arial font.

Support Opportunities

We are actively seeking sponsorship partners for The 22nd Annual Social Marketing Conference. Organizations or individuals can support specific events or become event co-sponsors in a variety of ways:

• Provide financial support one or more people from your organization to attend the conference on June 15-16, 2012 at Clearwater Beach, FL.
• Underwrite/subsidize participant costs at $600/per person (estimated cost for 3 nights and meals). (These costs are separate from registration fees.)
• Sponsor a special section/supplemental issue of a professional journal in which to publish the proceedings (this would include cost for editing and manuscript preparation and publication costs that are to be determined in consultation with the sponsor and targeted publication outlet).
• Sponsor webcasting of Opening and Closing plenary sessions and panels, video capture of conference proceedings, transcription of plenary sessions, other conference documentation activities, and meeting facilitation (the scope of these activities to be determined with the sponsor and the conference planning committee).
• Provide financial support for the conference. This support would offset costs associated refreshment breaks, lunches, signage, promotional costs, and the reception. Sponsorship levels include:

        Diamond - $25,000
        Platinum - $15,000
        Gold -$10,000
        Silver - $5,000
        Bronze - $2,500
        Copper - $1,000

 For more information regarding opportunities for giving, contact Bobbi Rose at brose@health.usf.edu     (813) 974-6158

 

Getting Back to Blogging

My apologies to regular readers of this blog. This past year was a busy one for writing. However, most of those words were directed towards chapters, journal articles and books. I promise to get more consistently back to blogging over the next few months. For those of you who would like to catch up with what I have been doing, please keep reading.

One project that ran through the first several months of the year involved selecting, editing and publishing a book of selected readings from this blog: On Social Marketing and Social Change (details here). It is now available as a softcover book and an e-book and is intended to provide an introduction to social marketing as well as be a supplemental text for courses in social marketing and social entrepreneurship. It also makes a great holiday gift for that hard-to-shop-for social marketer in your life.

Almost immediately after putting that to rest, I began working on an advanced social marketing textbook with Jossey-Bass. The first complete draft is finished and was submitted for outside review. Right now I'm waiting for the comments and will then dive back into it early next year. I hope this book fills the void that exists in having more advanced theory, research and practice in social marketing available for academics and students in schools of business, environmental studies and public health (to name a few).

And now a third book is in the process of development with SAGE Publications. More about that later this week.

I was also fortunate to be asked to contribute two chapters to the just released The Sage Handbook of Social Marketing. One chapter develops social perspectives on social marketing (a topic that has also been featured on the blog) and the other is co-authored with Phil Kotler on the roles of behavioral economics, demarketing and design thinking in social marketing.

And for switch hitting, I co-authored a chapter on health communication and health information technologies and their implications for Healthy People 2020 objectives in The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication.

For a shorter (and less expensive) read, there is my article on an integrative model of social marketing that appeared in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Social Marketing this year. You can still get a free download of the pdf here.

So I am back with lots of ideas to share with you and discuss here and in other venues (I do stay active on twitter @chiefmaven). Stay tuned in for more information about how you can contribute to my next book project. Pass it on...

Can Social Marketing Revitalize Communities?

The White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative Report (pdf; July 2011) summarizes the knowledge and experience base for building neighborhoods of opportunity. These neighborhoods are described as ones in which improved educational and developmental, commercial, recreational, physical and social assets are sustained by local leadership and lead to improved well-being and community quality-of-life. The idea of using social marketing to change neighborhoods and communities may seem absurd to people who believe that social marketing is ONLY about behavior change (or worse yet, using social media). Yet, the five strategies outlined in this report reflect many of the core ideas in our discipline. See if you can recognize them from the descriptions in the report.

1. Resident engagement and community leadership. “It is critical for leaders to understand residents’ views of the neighborhood, particularly the neighborhood’s needs and assets, and how residents want their neighborhood to change. Revitalization efforts involving, and in some cases led by, community members create a sense of ownership of the challenges, and help ensure the path forward is relevant, accountable, and sustainable.” (p. 5)

2. Developing strategic and accountable partnerships. “To create deep and lasting change in the community, high-quality interventions must be linked to address interrelated problems. This requires the development of strategic partnerships to achieve identified goals, as well as share accountability for the intended outcomes. Some key elements for effective partnerships are clearly defined roles and agreement upon a common vision, theory of the change, and theory of action.” (p.6)

3. Maintaining a results focus supported by data. “Data should not only measure population-level outcomes, but should also drive the development of the other elements identified in this report - engaging neighborhood residents, establishing strategic and accountable partnerships, securing and sustaining diversified partnerships, and investing in capacity building… data is a critical tool for building cross-agency accountability systems and tracking progress against desired results.” (p. 7)

4. Investing in and building organizational capacity. “Building and managing data systems, recruiting and retaining staff, and developing resources are examples of organizational capacity that take money, time, and energy. Developing these capabilities should be a key strategy of organizations pursuing comprehensive neighborhood revitalization, rather than afterthought.” (p. 8)

5. Alignment of resources to a unified and targeted impact strategy. “Communities with comprehensive revitalization efforts strategically align their resources in targeted geographic areas to move the needle to reduce poverty and neighborhood distress… targeting limited resources rather than spreading them thinly across an entire city offers greater returns, especially in high-poverty neighborhoods.” (p.8-9).

Two of the core social marketing elements are easily identified:

"Programs should be audience-centric; that is, based on understanding the people to be served by the program, having insights into how they perceive the problem and possible solutions in the context of their everyday lives, and engaging them to be co-creators and eventual owners of relevant solutions.

Audience engagement, from who is sitting at the policy table to who is sitting across from a teacher, is both a core value and outcome for success. It becomes part of a common framework for understanding and implementing programs with population-wide benefits."

[from The change we need: New ways of thinking about social issues]

You may also recognize the call for integrated collaborations across multiple sectors of the community. Yet, the challenge is to identify a common way to frame the problem, the hopes of the community and a strategy to achieve them (the theories of change and of action). As I pointed out in ”The change we need,” a social marketing approach would lead to strategies that include:

"… a set of integrated activities that analyze, design for, implement and evaluate programs that specifically address (1) products, services and behaviors that will improve individual and social well-being; (2) realign incentives and costs to facilitate behaviors for the individual and social good; (3) create opportunities and improve access to beneficial products, services and places that encourage and support behavior change; and (4) employ state-of-the-science communication strategies and tools to promote and support positive change at all levels of society - individuals, families and other social networks, organizations and communities."

Of the five strategies in the report, the issue of capacity building is one many social marketers totally overlook in their programs. Indeed, as I noted in my talk Designing for Change in Public Health Programs at the National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing & Media, the entire arena of services marketing is, with few exceptions, completely ignored in social marketing despite the fact that most sustainable activities require changes in how services are designed and provided. More of us need to be using marketing to improve services in our communities, not just designing messages and products, to initiate and sustain positive individual, community and social change.

If you want to use social marketing to expand your scope of impact from individual behaviors to community or social indicators, this report may help you rethink your models of change and practice. Yes, there are many gaps in their analysis and many steps between recommendations and implementations. But those are precisely the areas in which social marketers have so much to offer.

Make Every Day a Mandela Day

We have been in South Africa for the better part of the last two weeks and are fortunate to be here on Nelson Mandela Day. It marks a fitting end to the trip with the reminder to take action to help change the world for the better and build a global movement for good. Ultimately it seeks to empower communities everywhere. “Take Action; Inspire Change; Make Every Day a Mandela Day.”

Nelson Mandela Day is our time to recognize his legacy of service to humanity in the fields of conflict resolution, race relations, the promotion and protection of human rights, reconciliation, gender equality, the rights of children and other vulnerable groups, and the upliftment of poor and underdeveloped communities. It acknowledges his contribution to the struggle for democracy internationally and the promotion of a culture of peace throughout the world. Take 67 minutes today to touch and improve the life of someone else; here are 67 ideas.

 

Integrating Cell Phones Into Public Health Practice

More health professionals are exploring the use of mobile technologies, especially mobile phones, in their research and programs. However, many of them never get pass the 'gee whiz, new technology' phase and consider how to use mobile for innovative and scalable behavior change.

A couple of years ago I was invited to write an article on mobile technologies and public health from a marketer's perspective. Today, I received a note that it is the most downloaded article of all articles published in the journal in 2009 and 2010.

"On behalf of SAGE, I would like to congratulate you on this achievement and your contribution to the continued high quality and impact of this journal. To enable you to share this achievement with your friends and colleagues we have made your article free to access via the following URL in perpetuity so that they can read your article too."

Here's a closing excerpt from the article. You can now read it in its entirety whenever and where ever you like (I wonder how long 'perpetuity' is on the internet).

They are more than a communication device—they can become marketing tools that address all elements of the marketing mix when strategically considered in the context of how people use them. Cell phones are an always-on, two-way communication channel, a signal or cue for action, a resource of instant access to health information, a tool for social support and the development of social capital, a production tool, a way to engage audiences, and a data collection and feedback device…

As public health professionals, we need to adapt and change not only the technologies we use in our programs but our framework for looking at the world and thinking about what we do. In designing interventions that will effectively lead to behavior change, we have to ask ourselves as social marketers and public health professionals (a) do we harness the technology to educate people about issues and problems that are relevant and meaningful to them (not us), (b) is what we do engaging them in positive and meaningful ways with the technologies that they use, (c) is there an entertainment value to our offerings, (d) do people believe and feel empowered as a result of their experiences with our programs (products and services), and (e) do we take advantage of every opportunity to let our customers and clients become our evangelists and leverage these new social and mobile media? If we fail to do all five, we are failing them and ourselves.

Thank you to all the people who have already discovered and downloaded it. Now it's your turn. And, of course, feel free to pass it along.

Lefebvre, R.C. (2009). Integrating cell phones and mobile technologies into public health practice: A social marketing perspective. Health Promotion Practice; 2009:490-494.

The Anesthetics of Management

No doubt you are using social marketing and other approaches to social change because doing good is like breathing air for you: it is all part of your evil plan to make a living doing what you love and doing your best to make a dent in the universe. Many public, private and nonprofit organizations are in the exciting business of organizing and managing people like you to stimulate and facilitate social change. Yet, when I spend a few hours with some of these managers and staff, there is an anesthetic quality to their approach: a loss of all sensations and passions that originally drove them to this type of work.

Much of this loss of sensation seems to be the result of decisions that block out creativity, curiosity and courage among the workforce. Creativity that sparks new approaches to understanding or solving wicked problems (even when the current ones are "OK"). Curiosity to discover what the frontiers could be for personal and organizational growth and impact. Courage to stretch beyond the accepted and known (and not fear negative repercussions from colleagues and supervisors).

You or your organization may have anesthetic management syndrome if you find yourselves asking variants of these questions.

1. How can we remain invisible?
2. Can we just stick to doing one thing well?
3. How can we be all things for all people?
4. How do we keep our distinct professional identities?
5. How do we build and maintain silos of excellence?
6. What is our next project?
7. How do we benefit from doing things more slowly?
8. How can we become even more cautious and deliberate?
9. How can we more efficiently get from Point A to Point B?
10. How can we continue to treat each new challenge as a unique one?
11. How do we stop feeling time pressure?
12. Why don't we just do what we know how to do best?
13. Can we stay focused on the small stuff?
14. How do we keep personalities and passions out of our decision-making processes?
15. Can we develop a simple approach/solution that applies to most (all) of our work?

To become more creative, curious and courageous first means reclaiming your point-of-view about why you do what you do. Then change your professional networks, the people you mix with outside work, the books and other media you consume and the conferences you attend to ones that feed what you want to be - not what you have become.