Abstract
Hidden behind all the science and the razzmatazz of social marketing history lies one simple truth: if you want a Hispanic mother who distrusts modern technology to use a car seat, have a priest bless the damn thing before you give it to her.
And yes, social marketing attracted powerful women too. Carol Bryant, Beverly Schwartz, Lynne Doner Lotenberg, Lynda Bardfield, so many others; and later women like Susan Middlestadt, Carol Schechter, and Nancy Lee.
By the mid-1970s, men and women like John Farquhar, Jane Alexander, Nathan Maccoby, and Anthony Meyer were working on the Three Community Study at Stanford University. This study was to change the way medicine thought about prevention and social marketing thought about change. It looked at the ability of mass media to produce significant risk reduction with or without supplementary education. Mass media communities increased knowledge and made behavioral changes compared to controls. But perhaps Stanford’s most important contribution was its focus on multidisciplinary teams. Unfortunately, that contribution was ignored by too many of us who rushed to add focus groups and creative departments in lieu of genuine cross-interdisciplinary work.
Stanford did provide Dr. Anthony (Tony) Meyer the foundation to begin USAID’s 40-year commitment to mass media and social marketing. This is the most comprehensive and longest investment of its kind in development. Over 40 years, USAID funded studies and programs in more than 30 countries, investing tens of millions of dollars on social marketing for infant mortality, HIV/AIDS, nutrition, environmental protection, and malaria control.
It is interesting to note that during the early years of this effort, “behavior change” was reviled as Skinnerian; manipulative and controlling. Marketing for behavior change seemed like an evil, not a benefit. It is amusing to me now to see how ordinary and central to our thinking the idea of changing someone else’s behavior has become.
Over the next 10–15 years in Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America, the United States, and parts of Asia, a growing cadre of social marketers was being born on the firing lines. People left commercial advertising and public relations (PR) companies to join in the social marketing journey. Others in public health and environmental education, as well as communication researchers, sought short-term training and internships with ongoing social marketing programs. Nonprofits like the Academy for Educational Development added social marketing teams. Profit-making social marketing firms such as The Futures Group, PSI, and DKT grew in size and importance. Universities like the University of South Florida (USF) and John Hopkins developed communication and social marketing programs. Commercial advertising and PR agencies like Porter Novelli, Ogilvy, and others began to offer “social marketing” services. As the money grew, so did the competition.
Parallel to the international work, the tobacco wars were well underway in America and Europe. A cadre of smart advocates, Peter Mitchell, Gerard Hastings, and Craig Lefebvre were emerging with practical experience on how big tobacco sold products, and how to fight back. Marketing of tobacco was soon met by countermarketing of tobacco. Later Bill Novelli helped in creating The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and along with The Truth Campaign, another major ingestion of social marketing smarts occurred in our field.
With the outbreak of AIDS and the lack of treatment options, social marketing of prevention exploded. And it was AIDS that brought cadres of behavioral scientists into the field. Suddenly it was not enough to be cool. You had to have a theory.
Social Marketing Quarterly, started at USF by Jim Lindenberger and Carol Bryant, was the only journal with a specific interest in social marketing. It was the place you could go to find others, discover what was happening, and who was who. USF began a series of annual social marketing conferences, for years the only real venue to get together with like-minded folks.
But the field also became bifurcated into international and U.S.-based experience. The U.S. folks focused more on “idea” marketing—using communication to create awareness and promote the coolness of existing services. The international folks were faced with different challenges. There were no previous existing services. They created new services and products and marketed them to people in remote areas. Domestic social marketing was dominated by communication solutions; international social marketing by product and service marketing. Young people born into one tradition or the other knew nothing about the original roots and social marketing was suddenly anybody’s business.
At the same time, it was anybody’s business, it was becoming big business. Its academic roots also grew. Phil Kotler kept the books coming and helped introduce some of our greatest thought talent—academic practioners like Ned Roberto, Alan Andreasen, and Nancy Lee.
Social marketing was like a barnacle on the side of slow moving ship. Continuous waves of new ideas, theories, and fads—reinventing government, the tipping point, social norming, behavioral economics, and today, of course, social media—almost obscured the simple basic truth under all the decoration: If you want a Hispanic mother who is deeply Catholic and suspicious of modern technology to use a car seat, have a priest bless the damn thing before you give it to her.
Arguments over our identity have plagued the community for years. Despite endless attempts to create a definition that clarified how we were special, the best we could ever really do is “marketing applied to social problems.” Two practical responses to the question “What is unique about us?” have emerged: (1) I know it when I see it or (2) Who cares, just get on with it.
There is no established professional certifying agency or curriculum, no professional association with entry qualifications, and no watchdog to ferret out corruption or incompetence. People who joined from communication wanted to be communicators. People who joined from health education wanted to be educators, and people who came from commercial marketing wanted to be commercial marketers. Anyone who calls themselves a social marketer is one. Personally, that bothers me. I worry there is no real center to our field, but what the hell, let’s celebrate the reality.
The eclectic practice of social marketing provides us with few limits on what we can do, what ideas we can assimilate, what theories we can absorb, what fads we can ride, or what imagination we can bring to the problem of making the world a slightly better place. There is only one thing the world expects of us. We are supposed to be “cool.”
This image of coolness has led to significant infection rates by social marketing ideas into other forms of social influence. It’s true, we borrowed almost all of these ideas from mother marketing, but we gave them new meaning. Words like behavior change, branding, campaigns, customer, exchange, focus group research, the Four Ps, product and service design, segmentation, and of course, advertising have changed the way other programs think about their work. I’m sure it’s hard for many of our younger readers to imagine a world without focus groups or “customers,” but it’s true. When I was young, there were only surveys and people.
Perhaps the most powerful and controversial infection was to give the world a new name for the poor,the ignorant, the lazy, the noncompliant, or the irresponsible. Social marketers don’t call them audiences, beneficiaries, patients, or criminals. We call them customers.
What’s the difference? A customer has choices. An audience is there to listen and comply. A beneficiary is supposed to be grateful. A patient is supposed to comply. A participant needs power, and the irresponsible get punished.
Our job is to understand people and have faith in them. We think people do dumb things for good reasons. We believe they have the right to get something they want, in return for what we think is good for them. What’s the difference? Let me end with “The Front Seat,” a poem from a new set of poems by Garrison Keillor. Garrison Keillor From O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound
What makes a real social marketer? We care as much that people fall in love, as how safe they are when they try.