George and Public Relations Trends: A peep into social marketing

To begin with, I cannot claim to be very familiar with social marketing in its broadest sense. But a presentation by Shaun Kidney about a fortnight ago on “Winning Cause Campaigns” gave me even a clearer and more precise idea.

For those who believe in starting from the basics, social marketing was "born" as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to "sell" ideas, attitudes and behaviors. The duo defines social marketing as "differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization.

So social marketing can be said to be the systematic application of marketing along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good and hence seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society."

This technique, according to Kotler and Zaltman, has been used extensively in international health programs, especially for contraceptives and oral rehydration therapy (ORT), and is being used with more frequency in the United States for such diverse topics as drug abuse, heart disease and organ donation.

This means that marketing itself can influence above and beyond the marketing department, into people’s lives. For example to bolster its social marketing activity, Drinkaware sought the services of a PR/advertising agency to “help provide strategic counsel in addition to creative implementation” to help it move from general awareness campaigns to driving behavioural change among binge-drinkers. As a result, alcohol consumption was recorded to continue to fall, with 2009 the sharpest year-on-year decline since 1948, according to figures from the British Beer & Pub Association.

This is in tandem with the fact that social marketing calls for behaviour change, and not just attitude change. Consequently, persuasion approach is promoted and this props up change by creating opportunities for self-persuasion; and makes the audience feel good about change.

So just like PR practitioners, marketers have the opportunity to use their skills to influence throughout and beyond business. This can help them be seen as more than the department that spends money and it can encourage CEOs to use their skills more broadly. Additionally, marketers can be working for the benefit of society and not solely towards commercial gain.

Justin Basini: Make a fair return on your activities

For Justin Basini, who has held senior marketing roles at Capital One and Deutsche Bank, [social] marketing should focus on how business behaves in society, which he claims is a broader and more influential role than it currently is.

“Businesses need to make a fair return on their activities, but they also have a responsibility to drive positive social outcomes as a byproduct of their activities. Through this they can act for the common good,” said Basini in the Marketing Week of 10 September, 2010.

Examples to substantiate this are numerous. Marketing expertise helped oil company Shell reduce the accident rate of its drivers in Pakistan by using internal insight to create interventions to get its truck drivers to be more careful on the road; the NHS to reduce the number of women smoking when pregnant by focusing on their well-being and not just of the unborn baby, and Sainsbury’s to more than halve the number of plastic bags given out in its supermarkets. Significantly, none of these projects used paid-for media, rather the skills of marketers were enlisted to change behaviour.

So just like commercial marketing, the primary focus in social marketing is on the consumer--on learning what people want and need rather than trying to persuade them to buy what we happen to be producing. Marketing talks to the consumer, not about the product. The planning process takes this consumer focus into account by addressing the elements of the "marketing mix." This refers to decisions about 1) the conception of a Product, 2) Price, 3) distribution (Place), and 4) Promotion. These are often called the "Four Ps" of marketing. Social marketing also adds a few more "P's" in the name of publics, partnership, policy and purse strings.

Talking of publics, we should always remember that there are many publics including Latent publics- low in problem recognition and involvement; Aware publics- high in problem recognition, varying involvement and constraint and Active publics- high in problem recognition and low in constraint, hence planning, understanding and then segmenting the audience will always remain of paramount importance.

With partnerships, we should always be aware that coalitions trump solo acts hence partnerships are inevitable if cause campaigns are to be won using social marketing.

The model below may also help understand social marketing.