Recently I sat in on a meeting of several insightful people, all who cared about preventing alcohol problems. Most of the folks had worked in the area of prevention for some years. Two or three were new to the field but brought fresh energy and ideas. One was a communications specialist who had sold snowmobiles and breakfast cereal. He was an expert in marketing.
Our goal was noble. We wanted to use marketing skills to affect social change. Our goal was not to sell a brand of something. It was to creatively capture people's attention and persuade them to take action to define and model alcohol use standards and behavior for those of legal drinking age. We were using the neutral methodology of marketing to attain a public health objective. We were using social marketing skills.
How to say what needs to be said
In social marketing, the goal is to improve a condition of public health or safety, but marketing is the operative word. We need to pay attention to a communication objective, identify a target audience, design a compelling message, find support for it and look for success indicators. We also need to spend some money, not a lot necessarily, but some. In using persuasion and the media to affect social change, those of us in the public health and prevention fields have entered a new era. No longer is it the sterile message at 2:00 a.m. after Twilight Zone on television as a public service announcement: "FIGHT DRUGS. WRITE WASHINGTON," a noble message that made little sense and connected with almost no one's life. Plus, boring as drying paint.
In the great noise and clutter of life, we need to borrow a page from our friends in marketing in order to capture people's attention and listen to our message: "Hey, look at this. It's important. Here's something you can do."
The challenge of social marketing is that there is an agenda beyond choosing brand X over brand Y. It's more complex than that-we want people to change their behavior. And we want to use communication systems to do it.
"A communication system is totally neutral," said the late Edward R. Murrow of CBS Broadcasting. "It has no conscience, no principle, no morality. It has only a history. It will broadcast filth or inspiration with equal facility. It will speak the truth as lightly as it will speak falsehood. It is, in sum, no more, no less than the men and women who use it." In the 1990s, smart public health specialists and those deeply involved in prevention will use marketing and communications media to accomplish public health objectives. We can be compelling and be helpful.
Competition for attention
Without smart social marketing applications, we can fall on one of two ends of the spectrum. First, we can "do pretty" with an attractive though lightweight message. We can help an ad agency, pro bono or not, win an award for a very creative campaign that doesn't help people. Or, we can hit the other end of the spectrum and have a public health message well grounded in the research that is so un-compelling in its communication design that it puts people to sleep. Again, it doesn't help people. In the past we've occasionally erred in doing this. We have assumed that because our public health or prevention message is a noble one, that we can be forgiven for bad and boring communication. Not on your life! Not anymore.
When we develop a flyer to compel parents to attend our program, and it's in the middle school gymnasium where we sit in undersized squeaky folding chairs after a hard day's work and a rushed dinner, and the program is entitled "You, Your Children and Drugs!," it's no wonder that people stay away in droves. One hundred chairs are set up, eight people are there, six who were on the planning committee, and all are depressed and deflated. Or, we could have the same agenda and have an attractively prepared series of images and words with the repackaged titled "What Healthy Families Should Know About Alcohol, Tobacco and Drugs," and give people permission to attend without worrying about a stigma of making some kind of statement about what's going on in their life simply by virtue of having shown up.
In the end, it appears that social marketing works best when the media of choice is combined with community activity. A colleague of mine once called it "media-plus." It's electronic or broadcast media with a clear, compelling message that is accompanied by opportunities in the community for people to become engaged in a call to action.
I'm reminded of that old commercial where the person with the chocolate candy bar bumps into the person with the peanut butter jar, and the combination is sweet success. So it is with persuasive communication and public health science.
And we call it social marketing.
A CREATIVE BLUEPRINT FOR SOCIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
Here are the main topics to consider, and questions to ask, when developing a social marketing campaign of your own.