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Can Social Marketing Change the World?

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Social marketing

Social marketing is the juice of social change

Communications is the orange juice of the nonprofit world: it’s not just for fundraising any more.  Many organizations are using social marketing to change the way people behave.

  • Cigarettes used to be cool and sexy.  Now they are seen as a public health hazard.
  • Drunk driving was the topic of jokes.  Now it’s seen as criminal behavior.
  • Binge drinking is currently being redefined from college hijinks to a serious problem with alcohol.

Are you using social marketing?  How?  What results have you seen?

 

Social Marketing: Good for Your Health

Social marketing is “the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good.”  If getting a lot of people to change their individual behavior over time will let you reach your goals, then social marketing may be a powerful tool for you.

How powerful?  In her book Robin Hood Marketing, Katya Andresen tells the story of how a nonprofit in Cambodia–a country known for its sex industry–convinced men to wear condoms.  Beth Kanter summarizes:

A journalist, [Andresen] was covering a World AIDS Day event in Phnom Penh.  She saw how the giant condom-shaped balloon emblazoned with the words “Number One” was attracting attention and scores of people were grabbing up free samples of condoms….

As she writes in the introduction of her book, “For once, I heard no doom-filled message of fear or shame.  In its place was an appealing sense of pride and fun.”  As it turned out the giant condom was part of a business-minded marketing approach by a nonprofit organization, Population Services International (PSI)….

She points out that PSI condoms are now available in virtually every brothel in Cambodia, helped by a law that has since mandated condom use in sex establishments.

Social marketing can change something as personal and ingrained as sexual behavior.  What problem are you tackling that’s more difficult than that?

 

How Social Marketing Works

People buy a product for many reasons besides the product itself.  They may like the image they think it gives them, or the people or values associated with the product.  “Think different” is not a feature of Apple computers.  It’s a vision of the kind of person who uses Apple computers.  Wanting to be that kind of person has made a lot of people buy Apple.

People “buy into” your social marketing campaign for many reasons, too.  The American Legacy Foundation’s truth campaign

tapped into adolescents’ need for independence, rebellion, and personal control by presenting appealing social images of a nonsmoking lifestyle–cool kids living without tobacco. According to research, the decline in youth smoking attributable to this campaign equates to some 300,000 fewer youth smokers and thus millions of added life years as well as tremendous reductions in health care and social costs.

One technique that I find appealing is simply showing your target audience, “No, everybody isn’t doing it.”  Spreading the message that the vast majority of college students are moderate drinkers, not binge drinkers, has gone a long way toward stigmatizing the extreme behavior of the few.

 

Should You Be Using Social Marketing?

The easiest examples of social marketing to find are in the field of health.  That is certainly not the only area in which it can be useful.  In the U.S., the Washington D.C.-based organization “Men Can Stop Rape” anti-rape movement have successfully used social marketing in posters and other media targeting a rape-prevention message at boys and young men.  And it can also work for more affirmative goals, like getting people to enroll in literacy courses.

Has your organization ever used a social marketing campaign?  What results did you see?

Are you considering using social marketing to change behavior in your community?  What would you like to learn before you start?

 

Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen: a review

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You care passionately about something.  You want other people to get involved.  You want their time, money, ideas, commitment.  How do you reach them?  Do you send out mail?  Work on your website?  Go deep on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram?  Sometimes it seems as if there’s a new way to reach out to people every day.  How do you figure out what will really work for you?

Robin Hood Marketing  Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen’s Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.Andresen, until recently the chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive.  She doesn’t let the latest fad distract her.  She gets right to the point.  And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves–we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.Read the book for the “Robin Hood rules” she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits.  Chief among those rules are “focus on getting people to do something specific” and “appeal to your audience’s values, not your own.”

Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take?  And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step.  Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance).  They’ll be more likely to listen to your reasons later.  But even if they don’t, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications.  Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews.  Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:

  • What can we ask people to do that will be “fun, easy, popular, and rewarding”? (for supporters)
  • “Who wins when we win?” (for partners)
  • How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists–they are a target audience too!)

I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review.  It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself.  And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter.  I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date.  That’s what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.

My one reservation about this book is the same one that’s been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately–even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers’ Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit.  These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual’s behavior, or even a lot of individuals’ behavior.  But that is not the same thing as social change.

Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power.  Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody’s lives.  You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.

Perhaps it’s just that social change is outside the scope of these books.  But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone.  That’s selling their books too hard.  They are worthwhile to read on their own merits.  People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.

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