What Is Social Marketing?
Social marketing is the use of proven-effective business marketing techniques to achieve beneficial social ends. Begun as a formal discipline in 1971 by marketing legend Philip Kotler, it went on to a mixed career, despite the fact that according to many reports it’s the most effective way to reach those ends.
Social marketing works. Social marketing can raise private funds and public consciousness. It can turn people away from destructive and self-destructive activities to positive and constructive behaviors. It can help corporations and businesses integrate into communities in mutually rewarding ways. It can make a profit, while profiting others. Social marketing is a way to shape society without coercion.
So why is it so rarely used?
Partly, no doubt, because most people have a very poor understanding of marketing, period, much less social marketing. Say “marketing” and the general public thinks of ads, or of salesmen hawking a product. And while advertising and sales may well be elements of the marketing process – or may not be – they are a very inaccurate picture of what marketing is and does. Or of its power in shaping what people and societies do.
The best example of how marketing operates (and why social marketing is a profound development of it) may be a concrete example.
Marketing Simplified
Imagine for a moment that you decide to sell a new product. A new soft drink, for example. How do you go about it?
Well, if you go about it badly, what you do is start with a new product.
Let’s assume a soft drink developer approaches you with a new drink. You taste it. You like it. So you assume others will like it. You invest a million dollars buying bottles and labels. You fill several thousands of bottles with New Pop. You create ads and hire salesmen and send them out to sell. You expect the orders to come in, and make you a fortune.
Only they don’t come in. And your investment is wiped out.
Why?
Because you’ve created and promoted your product in a vacuum. You haven’t studied the market. You don’t know if they want that product.
Nor have you found out what it is that that market wants or desires, period. Nor, what it needs to facilitate making a purchase. You’ve operated in the dark. You haven’t used any of the wealth of information contained within the market that can maximize the chances of you making a sale.
How would the above product be handled if it were properly marketed?
First, you would not simply assume that a new product was needed or desired, much less invest in its creation, unless you had reason to think that the public would be willing to buy such a product. Marketing always begins with research. A marketer would first examine the target public’s existing soft drink purchasing habits and practices.
What sorts of pop do they drink now? Where do they buy it? How much do they buy? How often? What other products will it be competing with? What are their prices? What parts of the market purchase more than others? Do people aged 18-25 buy and drink three times as much as people aged 65-75? What flavors sell more than others? Do ‘diet’ brands outsell brands high in sugar or carbohydrates?
Marketers study all relevant available existing material on purchasing habits. Then they go out and get further information that specifically addresses what kind of product the public might actually want.
For instance, the marketer will send out surveys to a statistically significant sample of the public. He asks them what aspects of their current soft drink they most like, what they least like, where they purchase soft drinks, why they prefer one brand over another, and so on. He asks what they might like to see available in a soft drink.
Imagine that this has been done, and that your survey tells you that it’s extremely unlikely that your new soft drink will be immediately featured at McDonalds or Burger King or any major outlet. Smaller stores or health food stores may offer it, and there’s always the dim possibility of internet sales, but initially your new drink will only be presented to a niche market segment.
But you’ve done your survey of the market, and what you find, unexpectedly, is that many of them are moved by health concerns. They drink diet soda in large numbers because they’re concerned with obesity.
You learn that many pop drinkers are also concerned about artificial sweeteners – that saccharine may cause cancer, and aspartame, neurotransmitter damage.
You learn (say) that many soda drinkers are also caffeine coffee drinkers, and that the favorite flavors of newly introduced brands are fruit-based – cranberry, apple, peach, in that order.
At this point you are able to develop the product: not a product that you necessarily like or that you assumethe public will like, but a product that reflects what the purchasing public will actually like – a product that reflects their desires and satisfies them.
Because the public wants low-calorie drinks but is concerned about dangerous artificial sweeteners, you use a low-calorie sweetener that is organic and has no record of negative side effects, such as Splenda.
Since the public rates certain flavors the highest, you produce a Cranapple-flavored drink.
Since that particular public favors caffeine, you add caffeine to the product and label it a ‘health pick-me-up’ drink.
Possibly you’ve had the idea of making the drink vitamin-enriched, asked the interviewed public whether they’d like a soft drink high in vitamin content, and they’ve said yes. So you add vitamins to the drink.
Result? A drink that gives the public just about everything they want in a drink. A drink, in other words, that is hard for them to resist. Because it satisfies all their criteria for what they want.
Marketing Extended
What I’ve described is only one element of the marketing mix – Product. The marketer then classically goes on to assess other elements such as Price (how much is the public willing to pay for the product?), Placement (where will they be able to purchase the drink and who will make it available?), and Promotion (where will they hear about it? What will they hear about it? What will the product’s packaging look like? What will it’s ‘brand identity’ be – a health drink? A ’science’ drink? A pick-me-up brain-booster drink?)
The key to good marketing is to reduce or eliminate guesswork. All the information needed to make the best possible decision is gathered through research, interviews, and focus groups. And when the solution that is most likely to work becomes apparent, that solution is chosen.
Moreover – and this is no small part of the power of marketing – that solution isn’t then simply applied blindly. Ideally it is tested beforehand on smaller experimental target audiences. Before going nationwide, the approach is tested in this city and that region. Once the process begins, it’s monitored throughout, and feedback is solicited.
Is it selling? Where? Where is it failing to sell? What factors account for the difference? How can the product (or price or promotion, etc.) be modified so as to maximize the product’s success? Are the sales goals realistic? Are they being reached?
A marketing approach is one that continually and systematically monitors the results that the product and the product’s presentation gets. And then adjusts both product and presentation till the maximum effectiveness is achieved.
Marketing Is Not Advertising
Now this approach is not at all like the common perception of marketing. Marketing is not some huckster trying to sell some product to the public that that public doesn’t want or need. Sales are generally an eventual element of marketing, true, but the core is rooted in research, dialogue, psychology, sociology.
“Give the people what they want,” may be an outcome of marketing. But the heart of marketing activity is data: finding out what the people want, and making it available to them in the most effective way.
Consider another example. Politics. A candidate wants to win an election. He has people engaged in political marketing find out the peoples’ concerns. Their main concern is the economy? He addresses the economy. They fear terrorism? He proposes measures that will reduce terrorism. They want a candidate who resembles themselves? He emphasizes that he’s lived in the area for twenty years (and, perhaps, de-emphasizes that he was born in another state and educated abroad.)
Essentially, this politican finds out what the voters want, re-configures how he presents himself till he appears to be what they want, and monitors the results he’s getting with his approach and tweaks it till he succeeds.
And he generally does succeed. In a recent survey it was reported that over 98% of Congressional elections were won by the candidates with the most money.
It’s not because those candidates spent their money on staff parties. The money went to pollsters, public relations agencies, events planners – marketing people, in short. Who looked at the information and scripted the speeches and crafted the images that the voting public was most likely to respond to. And so they did.
The Social Marketing Difference
Now this last example brings us to one of the most asked questions about marketing. Does the marketer simply reflect public preferences and satisfy them? Or can the marketer market new preferences and newchoices? Marketing can get people to want Coca-Cola. Can it get them to want peace? Tolerance? Healthy lifestyles? Charitable activities?
The results to date demonstrate that the answer is yes, and social marketing is the emergence of a collection of methods that embody that answer.
But the essential process is simple:
1. You define the problem you want to solve in quantifiable behavioral terms. Not ‘better public response’ but measurable numbers of purchases, donations, etc.
2. You gather as much information as you can on the existing situation, either by gathering pre-existing material or by further, targeted, methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc.
3. Having gathered the information, you formulate interventions that get subjects to engage in the desired social behaviors, or increase the likelihood that they will do so.
4. You monitor the results, and adjust the intervention in accordance with the results, till the target goal is achieved.
Social Marketing Works. Social Activism Doesn’t.
The evidence from social marketing efforts is in. Modern society has now developed the means and technologies to effectively shape social behavior.
The question becomes, what behaviors do we want to shape?
What kind of a society do we want to build?
What do we want people to do?
Current applications of marketing are uncoordinated and inefficient, often trivial, sometimes destructive. The soda pop example is a good case in point. Dozens upon dozens of companies spend billions upon billions of dollars developing and selling dozens upon dozens of varieties of soda pop. Some contain cancer-causing additives, others neurotransmitter-jamming sweeteners. Many are low if not totally lacking in nutritional content. Healthier alternative drinks are pushed aside, as indeed are many of the companies that make them, as the pressures of competition force them into collapse.
Is the public served? Yes. Badly.
But it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t even have to be left to others. At present social marketing is something professionals do for governments and corporations. Sometimes, to good effect. But private organizations are beginning to apply its principles as well. And small grassroots groups can do so too.
If their aims are to succeed, they will have to. Social marketing works. Social activism doesn’t. If social activism hopes to reach its goals, it’s going to have to use or incorporate social marketing approaches. Current models of social activism work poorly, in part because they’re geared to a rhetorical top-down approach which makes its case without reference to whether it’s listeners respond well to that case, and in part because they’ve tied their approach to an outmoded, again top-down, model in which governments frame laws and disburse funds and that is presumed to be the end of the problem.
Only it isn’t. Because the laws are not monitored to see if the laws work or not. Or if the funds are effectively spent or wasted, or if the effort isn’t adjusted when the results clearly are poor, or if there are noticable results at all.
Effecting positive social change means using methods and techniques that work. The methods and techniques that work are being summarized in the emerging discipline of social marketing. It can make our world radically better — or worse. Depending on the actions we take now.
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