Abstract
I would like to thank the Editors and Editorial Board of Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ) for inviting me to serve as Guest Editor for this Special Contribution on “Social Marketing for Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change.” In particular, I would like to thank Sameer Deshpande, Editor, and Ryan Hollm, Managing Editor. This has been a terrific opportunity not only because SMQ is the field’s longest running journal but also because its Founding Editors—Carol Bryant and Jim Lindenberger—are two people I have come to admire, starting with our time together at the University of South Florida. For this Special Contribution, SMQ invited submissions investigating the use of social marketing to stimulate behavior change through improving policies, systems, and macro-environmental factors. Had it not been for Carol, Jim, and so many other wonderful people at the University of South Florida’s Florida Prevention Research Center, I doubt that I would have started down the path of studying participatory social marketing frameworks and the use of social marketing to influence behavior through policy, systems, and environmental change.
In the past, social marketing was subjected to the following types of critiques: Social marketing has a number of limitations that inhibit its usefulness…. The relatively narrow, reductionist approach of social marketing tends to reduce serious health problems to individual risk factors and ignore the proven importance of the social and economic environment as major determinants of health (Wallack, 1990, pp. 157–158).
Notwithstanding the fact that social marketing today is applied to a myriad of issues beyond the public health realm, awareness seems to be at an all-time high regarding the potential use of social marketing to stimulate behavior change through improving policies, systems, and macro-environmental factors. For example, many of the newest social marketing textbooks refer to the “upstream/downstream” metaphor (e.g., French & Gordon, 2015; Hastings & Domegan, 2018). In “Strategic Social Marketing,” French and Gordon (2015) observe: …academics and practitioners have begun to advocate that social marketing should go beyond just a focus on developing effective social behavioural interventions to embrace and make a contribution to social policy selection and development. (p. 126)
Our first contribution, from Borden, Cohn, and Gooderham (2018), is a welcome addition in the area of global sustainability. Initially, the authors observed that their “downstream efforts” to encourage individuals to compost at a university dining facility were less effective than desired in changing behavior. They had surveyed university dining facility patrons regarding knowledge, attitudes, and stated behaviors and barriers, which revealed distinct types of composters. Subsequent interventions were developed, primarily targeting the cluster, “needing assistance.” Downstream efforts to influence individuals (e.g., modeling the composting behavior) and educational interventions were not as beneficial as desired. In search of greater impacts, efforts to shape the patrons’ choice environment were implemented, with the addition of an individual to prompt patrons to compost. A significant increase in desired behavior was observed. Moreover, the demonstrated return on investment was used to leverage this institutional change; and this campaign created opportunities for securing grants to improve technological infrastructure, further encouraging behavior through additional environmental changes aiming to alleviate barriers of inconvenience. The topic of global resource consumption and production is one long investigated by systems scientists (Meadows, Randers, & Meadows, 2004), and this paper by Borden and colleagues is a welcome contribution from a social marketing perspective.
Speaking of systems science: the challenge of translating deep, systems insights into the implementation of solutions is not remedied by more persuasively communicating one’s recommendations but rather by involving stakeholders in the process(es) that led to the discovery of those solutions (Hovmand, 2014). Our second contribution, from McHugh, Domegan, and Duane (2018), provides readers with concrete protocols for the systematic mapping of potentially influential actors (i.e., stakeholders) who can affect or be affected by interventions. The authors provide a thorough review of a literature that reveals the widely known presence and interrelatedness of multiple stakeholders but also reveals the lack of approaches and tools to systematically identify and encourage stakeholder participation in social marketing initiatives. McHugh and colleagues then describe and demonstrate seven different protocols designed to identify, classify, and map stakeholders, as applied to marine environmental social marketing domains. In the words of the authors, “The participatory research context illustrates that working ‘with’ stakeholders rather than ‘on’ their behalf can build bridges and transform societies.” McHugh and colleagues make repeated use of the term social marketing systems, which I interpret as being similar to Waddell‘s (2018) term societal change system—that is, all the diverse efforts to create change on the same, difficult issue such as climate change or poverty.
Another difficult issue for which diverse efforts are being applied to create change is the mental health needs of children, youth, and young adults; and Rubenstein and colleagues (2018) provide our third contribution—a case study of a federal program that provides social marketing training and technical assistance to enable grantees to implement systems change in the field of children’s mental health service delivery. The social marketing program (“Caring for Every Child’s Mental Health”) is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The authors illustrate how a program at a national level can provide support to local, state, tribal, and territorial grantees to facilitate grassroots systems change using a social marketing approach. Rubenstein and colleagues share the lessons learned that can be applied to social marketing efforts across different issues, including ways to incorporate storytelling and data to effect systems change. Particularly valuable is their inclusion of a logic model illustrating the social marketing strategies for expansion and sustainability of “systems of care” for children’s mental health.
Through this SMQ Issue’s specially contributed papers, we hope to add to the social marketing profession’s known number of cases of social marketing for policy, systems, and environmental change as a contribution to the advancement of the field. Newton, Newton, and Rep (2016), in their manuscript evaluating social marketing’s use of the upstream/downstream metaphor, have stated that the metaphor has reached the end of its usefulness…. What is needed instead are new frameworks that can explicate the multidirectional relationships that give rise to the ill-defined problems facing society and provide guidance as to how these problems could be addressed (Newton, Newton, & Rep, 2016, p. 1117).
Until such frameworks become more ubiquitous, what’s a social marketer to do in order to untangle the “multidirectional relationships” that give rise to the social problems on which we work and to find “guidance as to how these problems could be addressed” (Newton et al., 2016)? Regarding the former, there now exist many fine examples of websites, presentations, and training modules that can help increase one’s systems thinking skills—that is, “the ability to see the world as a complex system, in which we understand that ‘you can’t just do one thing’ and that ‘everything is connected to everything else’” (Sterman, 2000, p. 4). At a pragmatic level, here are three things that you the reader can do to start building your knowledge, skills, and abilities to stimulate behavior change through improving policies, systems, and macro-environmental factors: Today: Visit one website devoted to systems thinking and explore its contents for applicability to your social marketing research, teaching, or practice. For example, The Systems Thinker is an archive of great material published over the years and includes insightful articles, case studies, how-to guides, and pocket guides (Leverage Networks, 2018). Next week: Review one of the many available presentations on systems thinking. For example, within the public health realm, the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice at the University of Washington has an archive of webinars including one on simulation-based learning in public health (Soderquist, 2010). Next month: Complete one of the open online courses on integrating systems thinking into your teaching, research, or practice. For example, +Acumen offers world-class online courses including one titled, “Systems Practice”—designed to help learners map a complex system to gain clarity and identify leverage points in the system where you can make a big impact (+Acumen, 2018).
Regarding the latter, I know of no easy formulas or shortcuts for finding leverage points—that is, “places in the system where a small change could lead to a large shift in behavior” (Meadows, 2008, p. 145). However, based on decades of rigorous analysis of many different kinds of systems (done by many different people), Meadows (2008) has proposed a list of potential places to intervene in a system, as an invitation to think more broadly about systems change. Numbers (e.g., parameters such as tax rates and subsidies) are dead last on Meadows’s list of potential leverage points. Despite being popular intervention points—for example, think of how many health marketing initiatives are focused on increasing “rates” such as screening rates—changing these variables rarely changes the structure of systems to produce more of what we want and less of that which is undesirable. Higher up on Meadows’s list of potential leverage points is information flows—that is, the structure of who does and does not have access to information. Based on just this one systems insight regarding the power of delivering feedback to a place where it was not going before, consider how many more social marketing initiatives could be designed differently for greater impact—for example, think of well-known examples such as the importance of electric meter placement in a household, sharing information regarding neighbors’ average household water consumption, and so on.
Even higher up on the list of potential leverage points is paradigms—that is, the mind-set out of which a system arises (Meadows, 2008). If you agree with me that the social marketing profession itself is a system (which it is) comprised of subsystems (e.g., academics, clients, and practitioners), then the shared ideas in the minds of our profession’s members constitute social marketing’s paradigm. Paradigms are the sources of systems. If the basic concepts and practices of social marketing are that we as a discipline do small change programs focused on small-scale strategies, then that paradigm will dictate our system goals, feedbacks, and everything else about the system. However, if the basic concepts and practices shift so that we as a discipline do more large change initiatives focused on large-scale strategies (e.g., policy, systems, and environmental change), how then might the social marketing system look and behave?
By highlighting the power of paradigms as a potential leverage point, I hope that this Guest Editorial and, more importantly, these authors’ three special contributions to SMQ (Borden, Cohn, & Gooderham, 2018; McHugh, Domegan, & Duane, 2018; Rubenstein et al., 2018) will somehow influence the paradigm out of which the social marketing system operates. I leave you the reader with the following potential research questions to ponder for future debate and investigation: To what extent can the application of critical social marketing (Gordon, 2011) play a role in efforts to facilitate policy, systems, and environmental change? What is the comparative effectiveness of social marketing initiatives that facilitate policy, systems, and environmental change versus those that do not? What are the trade-offs associated with pursuing policy, systems, and environmental change using a participatory social marketing approach (e.g., community-based social marketing)? What are the moral and ethical implications of social marketing initiatives that attempt to stimulate policy, systems, and environmental change? What are the most effective teaching modalities for helping social marketing students and other adult learners improve their knowledge, skills, and abilities to stimulate behavior change through improving policies, systems, and macro-environmental factors?