As defined in Chapter 1, social marketing is the application of the concepts and tools of commercial marketing to the achievement of socially desirable goals. Marketing is characterised by things like a consumer orientation, segmentation and targeting, advertising and sales promotions, and much research with customers and potential customers to ensure that things like packaging and pricing are appropriate for the product, and that the advertising is believable, relevant and motivating. Research and negotiations are also undertaken with intermediaries such as retailers, and with stakeholders such as unions and government, to ensure that making the product attractive, available and affordable will be facilitated by distributors and not hampered by structural and regulatory restrictions. In all these areas, the notion of an exchange process between the ‘buyer’ (target) and the ‘seller’ (marketer) forms a platform of operation.

Following on from our discussion in the previous chapter about the need to address social determinants with upstream strategies, in this chapter we look more closely at how social marketers can use advocacy to achieve change, and, specifically, how advocacy can be and is being used to address the world’s challenges relating to environmental change. As Margaret Mead is reported to have said: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’ However, Hubert (2000) pragmatically reminds us that most successes by NGOs result from strategic alliances with positive governments or politicians.

Acknowledging that different people may respond differently to different products and services and to the way information is presented to them, is a core principle in marketing. In fact, commercial marketers spend a great deal of resources identifying and determining which segments will be most profitable for them. Not surprisingly, then, market segmentation and target marketing have been emphasised from the start in the early literature defining or describing social marketing and its application to public health campaigns (e.g., Lancaster, McIlwain and Lancaster 1983; Manoff 1985; Novelli 1984). In today’s social marketing literature, the need to target programmes at different segments of the population is taken for granted.

Research and evaluation require specialist technical expertise. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of relevant research methods and to facilitate interaction with such experts rather than impart research skills.

We first distinguish between qualitative and quantitative research and present some of the major qualitative research methods. Qualitative research is particularly important because this is where strategy development comes from and where there is perhaps least understanding. We then describe the research framework of the US National Academy of Sciences as an overarching framework for research and evaluation.

Given that much of the application of social marketing is in public health, we then define the public health research concepts of prevalence and incidence, describe ‘epidemiological’ studies and note how to interpret logistic regression odds ratios – one of the major tools in public health research. Given that much formative and experimental research measures behavioural intentions as the dependent variable, we also comment on the relationship between intentions and behaviour, concluding with a brief discussion on research in Indigenous communities and rural communities in developing countries.

Preface

In the first edition of this book, we adopted the original definition of social marketing as the application of marketing principles and tools to the achievement of socially desirable ends. In our view, while there are clear differences between commercial marketing and social marketing (as there are between marketing fast moving consumer goods to domestic consumers and marketing industrial products to manufacturers), social marketing is simply an area of application of marketing techniques. Hence, this edition remains firmly based on the basic principles of marketing. This grounding reminds public health and other social change agents who have enthusiastically adopted commercial marketing techniques, that marketing – when applied correctly – is more than just a bag of advertising and promotional tools; it is both a philosophy and a set of principles about how to achieve mutually satisfying exchanges between marketers and consumers. Marketing, and therefore social marketing, relies on a comprehensive and fully integrated approach to achieving a campaign or programme’s objectives.

At the same time, the first edition broadened the definition and domain of social marketing by addressing two issues: first, to pre-empt debate about ‘who decides what is socially desirable’, the first edition proposed the UN Charter on Human Rights as the authoritative source for defining what constitutes a socially desirable goal; second, and following the UN Charter, the social in our social marketing emphasises the social determinants of individual and population health and wellbeing. Social marketing not only targets individual behaviour change, but also attempts to ‘go upstream’ and target individuals and groups in legislative bodies, government departments, corporations and non-profit organisations, who have the power to make policy, regulatory and legislative changes that protect and enhance people’s health, wellbeing and quality of life. From this perspective, social marketing attempts to bring about changes in products to reduce harm and enhance wellbeing; changes in places to facilitate adoption of desirable behaviours and inhibit undesirable behaviours; and changes in the political allocation of resources to bring about changes in the social and structural factors that impinge on an individual’s opportunities, capacities and the right to have a healthy and fulfilling life.

This chapter presents a number of models that assist in developing and implementing social marketing interventions. Although we have used the terms ‘campaign’ and ‘programme’ interchangeably in much of this book, or have simply referred to ‘interventions’, we first note the differences between planning for what might be called a ‘campaign’ and what might be called a ‘programme’. We then re-present our communication campaign planning model from Chapter 5 and extend it to campaign components before presenting more comprehensive models applicable to developing larger scale programmes.

The availability and types of media channels today have expanded substantially since the first edition of this book in 2003. However, in keeping (at least somewhat) with that old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same, recent global award winning advertising campaigns have been characterised by an emphasis on what people are now calling ‘traditional’ media channels: commercial television; commercial radio; print; and ambient media (Dawson 2009; Lannon 2008). For example, the Dove campaign we noted in Chapter 9 used viral ads and the Internet, but its major impact was via television advertising and the numerous well placed billboards – that were picked up by and publicised even further in mainstream news media.

Social marketing is just one ‘branch’ of marketing, where the branches reflect the area of application: for example, sports marketing; business to business or industrial marketing; not-for-profit marketing; religious marketing; political marketing and so on. However, social marketing is more than just the application of marketing to social issues: the key point of difference to all other branches of marketing, is that the social marketer’s goals relate to the wellbeing of the community, whereas for all others, the marketer’s goals relate to the wellbeing of the marketer (sales and profits, members and donations, political representation, etc.). If the wellbeing of the community is not the goal, then it isn’t social marketing.

The Act–Belong–Commit community-based social marketing campaign targets individuals to engage in activities that enhance mental health. It simultaneously encourages community organisations offering such activities to promote their activities under the Act–Belong–Commit banner. The campaign provides a simple framework for mental health promotion professionals to communicate with, and gain the co-operation of, potential partners and stakeholders within and outside the health system.

The campaign was developed as an upstream or primary prevention intervention. However, the campaign messages are also appropriate for at-risk individuals and groups (secondary prevention), and for people recovering from a mental illness (tertiary prevention). Hence, as it evolves the campaign is developing a number of programme components and partners for secondary and tertiary prevention.

The campaign is conducted by Mentally Healthy WA, a group based within the Faculty of Health Sciences at Curtin University in Western Australia (WA). This chapter draws on a number of publications available from the website (e.g., Donovan, James and Jalleh 2007; Donovan et al. 2003a, 2006a; Jalleh et al. 2007).

As noted in Chapter 2, commercial marketing has always been mindful of environmental factors that impinge on the consumer and on business in general. However, the regulatory and structural environment for commercial marketers is generally facilitative as governments tend to encourage commerce to maintain economic growth. However, that is not necessarily the case for social marketers who often have to lobby hard and long for regulatory and structural changes that enhance health and wellbeing.

Recalling our new additional 4Ps presented at the end of Chapter 1, this chapter illustrates a number of objectives for changes in products and places, but with the main emphasis on product changes. We analyse the competition from three main perspectives: (1) defining the competition; (2) monitoring the competition; and (3) countering the competition. Given the importance of early childhood development for later adolescent and adult behaviours, of special interest is the ‘competition for kids’. The targeting of children has gone from being virtually non-existent in the early 1950s, to specific targeting of child products, and, more recently, to an all-out drive to inculcate consumption values as the dominant cultural values. The commercialisation of schools in particular has been monitored extensively in the United States (see Annual Reports on School-House Commercialism). This monitor now includes the United Kingdom and Ireland (Molnar et al. 2008). Indeed, there is a growing backlash in North America (Klein 2000; Quart 2003), the United Kingdom (Glayzer and Mitchell 2008) and many other countries about marketing to teenagers and children, with food marketing being of most current interest.

Social marketing is fundamentally concerned with bringing about behaviour change. However, in most cases this first requires bringing about changes in beliefs, attitudes and intentions. Furthermore, some components of an overall comprehensive campaign may have limited objectives, such as an increase in knowledge, or an increased belief that individuals’ conservation behaviours can make a real difference, or to create a positive predisposition to act in a certain way when a relevant situation arises. The desired behaviour may then occur some time later when an appropriate situation arises. For example, a campaign to change discriminatory racist behaviours may have a component that first increases people’s knowledge about a particular ethnic group, removes misperceptions about that group and creates a more positive predisposition towards that group. That might then be expressed in various ways, for example, in more friendly behaviours towards members of that group in social situations, or more positive word-of-mouth about that group in conversations with friends, or supporting anti-discriminatory legislation in a public opinion poll. That is, changes in beliefs and attitudes are usually a necessary precursor to these desired behaviours.