Chapter 45. Social Marketing | Community Tool Box

• What is social marketing?

• Who can do social marketing?

• Why is social marketing important?

• Basic principles of marketing: The "4 Ps"

• Stages of a successful social marketing effort

Community groups do many different things to solve the issues that interest them. A group fighting child hunger might advocate free breakfasts at school, increased funding for WIC (Women and Infant Children), and more child-oriented legislation from the state senate. And to accomplish each of these goals, the group will again probably do many different things: letter-writing campaigns, direct lobbying, and advertising in the media, to name just a few. Thousands of details and hard work by many people are usually involved in a successful initiative.

Looked at from a different perspective, however, it comes down to one thing. At the root of all of the group's work is one basic principle: change people's behavior. This is true not only for a child hunger campaign, but for almost any health or community development initiative. A coalition against violence wants people to stop committing acts of violence. A teen pregnancy initiative tries to put an end to children having children. And an organization for peace looks for the day when world peace is more than a lovely thought on holiday greeting cards.

This concept of changing people's behavior is the basis of this section, and of social marketing as a whole. We will talk about what social marketing is, and why it can be of use to you in your organization. Then, we'll go into more depth on marketing, and discuss what are known as the "4 Ps"--the four elements around which all types of marketing, social or profit-oriented, are centered. Finally, we'll finish with an overview of the stages someone will go through if their effort is successful.

It's a lot of information, and much of it is more conceptual in nature than many other sections of the Tool Box. The next three sections of this chapter, then, will try to ground these ideas more thoroughly, so they can be used in your day-to-day work.

What is social marketing?

So what, exactly, is social marketing? In Social Marketing Report, it's defined as, "the application of commercial marketing techniques to social problems." It means to take the same principles used in selling goods--such as shoes, television shows, or pizza--to convince people to change their behavior.

What does that mean? Well, instead of selling hamburgers, you're selling a life without heart attacks. Instead of convincing teenagers to buy blue jeans, you're convincing them to buy the advantages of postponing pregnancy.

What is the difference between social marketing and commercial marketing?

It's summed up in one key point: commercial marketing tries to change people's behavior for the benefit of the marketer; social marketing tries to change people's behavior for the benefit of the consumer, or of society as a whole.

What is involved in social marketing? In a nutshell, when conducting a social marketing campaign, you'll do the following:

• Identify what behavior you want to change (for example, increase prenatal counseling among expectant mothers).
• Identify your audience: Whose behavior do you want to change? It may be that you want to change the behavior of several different groups; in that case, you may want to influence them in different ways to bring them closer to the desired behavior. Such groups are often separated, or segmented, by age, gender, level of education, or race.
• Identify the barriers to change: through interviews, surveys, focus groups or other methods, you'll want to find out what makes it difficult or unattractive for people to make these changes. Do pregnant women feel uncomfortable at the area clinic, or are they made to feel stupid when they talk to the doctor? Is the clinic too far away? Can they not take the time away from their jobs?
• Reduce the barriers to change. Plan ways to make it easier, more accessible, and more attractive. Can the clinic stay open longer hours? Can physicians and nurses be better trained to discuss problems with women? This step might even be taken a step farther. Your organization might provide incentives for making (and sustaining) changes. Mothers who come to the clinic regularly through their pregnancy might receive coupons for free baby food, for example.
• Pretest your ideas on a small number of people, then modify your plan according to your results.
• Publicize both the benefits of change, and also your efforts to make change easier in a way that will draw people to take advantage of your efforts. Let people know what you're doing to help them--the best program in the world won't be used if people don't know about it. And of course, people need to understand the benefits of the behavior change. A pregnant woman will probably want to do what's best for her child, but may not know that she needs extra iron during her pregnancy. It's up to your organization to tell her.

And, although it's not technically a part of social marketing, you'll probably want to...

• Assess your results and see if you have created the change you wanted.

The above list represents just the bare bones of a social marketing effort. Each of these points will be discussed in detail later in this section, and in Section Four of this chapter. For a full example of a very successful nationwide social marketing plan, see the Examples section at the end of the main text.

Social marketing and advertising

A lot of people confuse social marketing with one of its components, advertising. But leaves are just one part of the tree--even when they're only part you can see. Likewise, advertising is a very important part of social marketing, but it's still just a part.

Is that confusing? Well, look at the following messages:

• "This is your brain on drugs," said the Partnership for a Drug-Free America's advertisement a few years ago, while picturing an egg frying on a skillet. That was a memorable advertisement; but if that was all the Partnership had done, it wouldn't qualify as social marketing.
• "Don't mess with Texas," was a well-known anti-litter campaign in that state. But if the ad had been aired without additional trashcans placed around the state, or without having been directed at specific group of people in Texas (such as youth, or immigrants, or tourists); it would have been nothing more than a catchy slogan. It wouldn't have been social marketing

On the other hand...

• Smokey Bear and his admonition, "Only you can prevent forest fires," when seen alone on T.V., are again just an advertisement. But taken in context of all of the work done by the U.S. Forestry Service, the result that emerges is a social marketing campaign. Smokey is trying to change a particular behavior (being careless with fire); his message is targeted at a specific audience (six to ten year olds), and information he provides (on commercials, on the Internet and elsewhere) overcomes two major barriers to children being careful with fire: ignorance and also the scientific, "it's no fun" barrier. Further, the message is supported with information provided to parents at the campsites, making it more likely they will provide reinforcement to the message. That's social marketing. It uses targeted marketing, reinforcement, and it reduces barriers--three key elements missing from the two examples above.

Who can do social marketing?

The bad news is, there is a definite art to it--it's not all something you're born with, and it's not only common sense. After all, people get degrees in this stuff; and major corporations such as Nike or Coca-Cola spend millions of dollars to ensure that their marketing campaigns are state-of-the-art.

Now for the good news: first of all, it's learnable. You may not have been born with phrases like market segmentation floating around in your head, but you can learn what they mean, and how to use them.

Second, it's scalable. Some campaigns are quite large, such as the National High Blood Pressure campaign discussed in the Examples at the end of this section. However, social marketing campaigns can also be quite a bit smaller. That is, you can do it on a local level, when you have limited resources. Just because your group doesn't run the Hyatt Regency, or hasn't resources anywhere in the same ballpark, that doesn't mean you can't take the same principles and put into effect the change that you want to see in your community.

Why is social marketing important?

So what makes the concept of social marketing particularly important? Perhaps you've been doing your work quite effectively for years without ever even hearing the phrase. That's actually pretty likely; the phrase was only coined about 25 years ago.

There are three major advantages, however, which suggest that social marketing is worthy of your consideration:

• It helps you reach the target audiences you want to reach.
• It helps you customize your message to those targeted audiences; and by doing so,
• It helps you create greater and longer-lasting behavior change in those audiences.

Bottom line? Social marketing is a good idea because it works.

Basic principles of marketing: The "4 Ps"

Before we discuss social marketing further, however, it's important to have a grasp on the principles of commercial marketing, since that is what it's based on. As community health workers, or members of non-profit organizations, the idea might seem a bit odd. We're used to a completely different mindset. Terms like "marketing" may conjure up images of big business and corporate greed; they certainly don't make us think of programs to try to help our neighbors.

Even so, your neighbors may not be open to your ideas and programs right off the bat, and you may find yourself having to persuade them. This is what social marketing excels at. The idea may be new for you, or a complete change in how your perceive things. That change, however, may end up being the breath of air your organization needs to become even more effective in changing behavior.

Does that make sense to you? Then let's go on to some of the basic principles of marketing.

The essence of all marketing can be summed up in what has been termed the "4 Ps." They are product, price, place, and promotion. Let's look at each in turn.

• Product -- The product is what you are marketing. For social marketing, the "product" is a certain behavior you are trying to change. It might be ending child abuse and neglect, or stopping people from committing suicide, or convincing people to not throw trash on the ground--or any other behavior that members of your community want to modify.
• Price -- How much will it cost a person to stop (or take on) a certain behavior? In social marketing, price isn't just a question of dollars and cents. It can also be a question of time (i.e., how long will it take me to find a trash can?), or how much of an effort a behavior change will take. A life-long smoker may be the first person to admit that smoking is an extremely expensive habit, but may still say the costs--in terms of effort, or possible weight gain, or nicotine withdrawal--are too high. He just can't quit.

A good social marketing plan, then will try to reduce these costs. An anti-litter campaign will try to place more trash cans around the city; a smoking cessation group might offer support groups to help with the effort, nutrition counseling to counteract weight gain, and nicotine patches to reduce the pangs of withdrawal.

• Place -- How difficult is it to change the behavior? What barriers are preventing it? If you are selling blue jeans, you want to have them in stores across the country, not just in one small boutique in Snellville, Georgia. Otherwise, people in Oregon won't be able to get them, even if they want to.

Likewise, if you are "selling" teen pregnancy prevention, what barriers make it difficult to prevent those pregnancies? Can teenagers easily obtain birth control, or is it difficult for them to get hold of? Maybe there isn't a good teen clinic in town. Or if there is a clinic available, maybe it's all the way across town, and it's only open on weekdays until 4:00, making it difficult to get to without missing school.

Social marketing efforts make it easier to change behavior by making sure the necessary supports are not only available, but also easily accessible to the most people possible. The less people need to go out of their way to make a change, the more likely they are to make it.

• Promotion -- Promotion is the last of the "4 Ps," and the one most easily associated with social marketing. Promotion is the advertising you do; be it in television commercials, letters to the editor, or red ribbons tied to car antennas.

Promoting your cause doesn't need to take a lot of money. It can also take place through less costly methods, such as good old-fashioned word of mouth. Convincing people through a one-on-one conversation can be just as effective at changing someone's point of view as the best made commercial, or even more so. (Think about it. Which would make you get a tetanus booster: a television commercial or a suggestion from your doctor?) Word of mouth is a highly desirable part of social marketing.

Remember, though--advertising alone is not social marketing.

Stages of a successful social marketing effort

With that understanding of marketing in mind, let's turn now to the focal point of an effective campaign--the consumer. People will have different ideas and beliefs at different times. For example, among smokers, some may not believe smoking is that bad for them, others might understand the risks but not care, still others may not want to take the effort to stop smoking, and a final group of smokers may be actively trying to quit. A social marketing campaign will see all of these beliefs (and their related actions) as part of a continuum, and try to move people along to the next step.

The idea is that these changes won't happen overnight. Most people won't go immediately from believing smoking is "cool" and not really understanding the health risks to quitting right away. Instead, a social marketing campaign might start them thinking that it's not the best thing to do--and after that idea has had time to turn around in their head for a while, another part of the campaign will help them quit, and yet another part will help them remain smoke free.

How are these beliefs shaped and decisions made? The following activities need to occur:

• Create awareness and interest
• Change attitudes and conditions
• Motivate people to want to change their behavior
• Empower people to act
• Sustain the change

In Summary

Social marketing can help change behavior to improve social problems. Is this something that can be used to further the goals of your coalition? The next section of this chapter will help you decide the answer to just this question.

___You understand that social marketing is the application of commercial marketing techniques to social problems.

___You understand that the difference between commercial and social marketing is commercial marketing tries to change people's behavior for the benefit of the marketer, while social marketing tries to change people's behavior for the benefit of the individual, or of society as a whole.

___You have identified the behaviors you want to change.

___You have identified your audience.

___You have identified the barriers to change.

___You have reduced the barriers to change.

___You have pretested your ideas.

___You have publicized both the benefits of change, and also your efforts to make change easier.

___You have assessed your results.

___You understand that advertising is only one part of social marketing.

___You understand that social marketing is scalable and learnable.

___You understand that social marketing is important because:

• It helps you reach the target audiences you want to reach.
• It helps you customize your message to those targeted audiences; and by doing so,
• It helps you create greater and longer-lasting behavior change in those audiences.
• It works.

___You know that the "4Ps" of marketing are product, price, place, and promotion.

___You know the "stages of change" in a successful effort:

1. Create awareness and interest
2. Change attitudes and conditions
3. Motivate people to want to change their behavior
4. Empower people to act
5. Prevent backsliding

Example 1: The National High Blood Pressure Education Program

The National High Blood Pressure Education Program (NHBPEP) is, I believe, the longest-running behavior-change program to use social marketing concepts, processes, and tools in the United States. It is certainly one of the most successful.

The NHBPEP was established in 1972 by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) after a series of epidemiological, clinical, and actuarial studies made clear that high blood pressure was a major risk factor for stroke and heart disease. The program's objective was to increase awareness of the linkage between these two conditions and to influence those with high blood pressure to obtain treatment for their problem.

When the NHBPEP began, twenty-three million American citizens were estimated to be hypertensive (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 1992) according to a relatively strict definition. In subsequent years, the definition of high blood pressure changed to include about sixty million people with blood pressure over 140 /90 or taking hypertensive medication. The program evolved over time as the audience changed. Initially, only 29 percent of the public knew of the link between high blood pressure and stroke and only 24 percent knew that high blood pressure causes heart disease (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 1973). Only about one-half of all hypertensives were aware of their problem. Thus, the behavioral focus in the early stages of the social marketing project was to get people to get their blood pressure checked. The principal approach to achieving this end was educating people about the link between high blood pressure and disease and getting them to their doctors for a checkup.

Ten years later, 59 percent of the population knew the relationship between high blood pressure and stroke and 71 percent knew it caused heart disease. Ninety-two percent knew that it cannot be cured and that a hypertensive person must always stay on a treatment program (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 1986). Even further progress was made by 1985, when 91 percent knew of the link to heart disease and 77 percent knew the link to stroke (Roccella, Bowler, Ames, and Horan, 1986).

By 1985, the NHBPEP had brought much of the target market into what I shall later call the Contemplation Stage, that is, aware of the problem and actively thinking about doing something about it. According to a 1985 National Health Interview Survey, about one-half of the population with hypertension had moved beyond the contemplation stage to plan and take action to control their blood pressure. However, almost one-half had not taken action. The project therefore shifted its focus in 1985 to "aware hypertensives" and securing greater levels of compliance (such as taking efforts to control the problem) from this group. This change in strategy was effective in raising compliance to 73 percent by 1988-1991 (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 1992).

Other behavior changes have also been manifested. Over 95 percent of hypertensives report cutting salt and sodium in their diets, 89% diet to lose weight, and 86 percent exercise (Roccella, Bowler, Ames, and Horan, 1986). However, research has shown that aware hypertensives have trouble staying with their new behaviors and that there remain variations in awareness and compliance across racial and gender groupings. Thus, in recent years, the NHBPEP has emphasized the Maintenance Stage of the behavior -change process and has continued to develop segmented programs for men and women, for Blacks and Hispanics, for young, middle-aged, and elderly people, and for people in high-incidence sections of the country. Plans for the decade of the 1990s involve closer targeting of Black males over age forty-five (a group where prevalence rates are high and treatment of compliance is low), and of hypertensives in the Stroke Belt (the part of the Southeastern United States where incidence of strokes among hypertensives is ten percent higher than in any other part of the country).

The program began with--and continues to use--a number of important social marketing principles:

• It focuses on behavior. The concern is not with educating and communicating information, but with getting hypertensives to undertake and stay with treatment programs.
• It works through intermediaries. It recognizes that the problem is too large for one organization to tackle and that many other health care institutions have an important stake in reducing the incidence of high blood pressure. NHLBI coordinates high blood pressure programs through forty-one partner organizations.
• It insists on a unified communication approach. Working in cooperation with Porte/Novell, a Washington, D.C. social marketing consultant, NHBPEP regularly develops carefully articulated communications objectives and strategies, defines target audiences, and establishes roles for intermediary groups. All messages are designed to reinforce one another.
• It starts by understanding the customers. The development of strategy begins with target audience members and their perceptions.
• It adapts to changes in the audience. Program strategy follows the target audience as it evolves through various stages of the behavior change process.
• It avoids mass marketing. Careful attention was paid to developing differentiated strategies for different market segments.
• Its message strategies have focused on consequences, both positive and negative, to the hypertensive person. These consequences include those of going through the treatment regimen (the behavior process) and also those of being successful in controlling blood pressure (the behavioral outcomes).
• Its message strategies have also focused on social influence.
• It emphasized the Place component of the mix. By making it easy to check blood pressure in homes and shopping malls, the program tore down barriers to implementing behaviors audiences knew were important.

From Alan R. Andreasen's Marketing Social Change. Used with permission.

• Why should you use a social marketing approach?

• When should you run a social marketing campaign?

• How do you manage a social marketing campaign?

"I'm not a doctor," runs the joke. "I just play one on T.V." Television and other forms of mass media, it seems, are often highly adept at making complicated tasks look simple.

This is especially true when it comes to marketing. A thirty-second ad for toothpaste will seem incredibly simple, even a bit silly--yet we'll find ourselves humming the jingle in the car on the way home. When we stop by the grocery store a week later, we might pick up that toothpaste, caught by its colorful box and placement on the shelves. We've been grabbed by a successful marketing campaign. It might seem so simple, we're barely aware of it--but it really represents a huge amount of research, design, and testing done by the toothpaste corporation.

Social marketing is based on the same principles used to sell that tube of toothpaste. It means to use commercial marketing techniques to try and improve social problems. A social marketing campaign might be used, for example, to try to reduce violence against women, or to increase the number of people who sign up as donors for the national bone marrow registry.

Managing a social marketing campaign might look fairly simple--like you're just putting up more posters to raise awareness of the lead poisoning problem in your community, for example. In reality, however, it's much more than that. Social marketing is no less than a shift in how you view and run your program or organization. It can be a very effective approach, but it's one with many details to consider.

On the following few screens, we'll try to make concrete how you can accomplish many of these details. We'll start by touching briefly on the importance of social marketing and when might be a sensible time for your group to draw up a social marketing campaign. Then, we'll dive into the details of how to manage a social marketing program. We'll include how to separate consumers into individual groups and how to find out what those groups want (and how you can give it to them). Then, we'll discuss designing the message, choosing the medium, and finally, implementing and evaluating your work.

Why should you use a social marketing approach?

Social marketing is an approach with a lot of advantages. Perhaps the two most pointed benefits are:

• It helps you reach your target audience. Social marketing makes you look at whom you want to influence, and how to sway these people most effectively. And, for this reason,
• It works. If the creative, thorough marketing has helped numerous companies make millions of dollars, there is no reason, that well run social marketing campaigns can't be even more effective, in changing people's behavior. After all, the benefits of good health    (or a clean environment, or an end to date rape) are surely more evident than the benefits of a pair of running shoes.

When should you run a social marketing campaign?

So when is the proper time to run a social marketing campaign?

It will depend quite a bit on your program or organization, of course, but generally speaking...

• When you are trying to change the behavior of a large number of people. If the number of people who you are trying to reach is small enough that they can be spoken with individually, or in a group, the time is probably not ripe for social marketing. For example, if you are interested in asking students at Pleasant Valley High School to volunteer at the upcoming spring fair, you might speak to them at an assembly, or visit individual classrooms. Development of a social marketing plan is more than is necessary. If, however, you want to increase volunteerism among everyone who lives in Pleasant Valley, a social marketing plan might be just what's called for.
• When you are trying to change behavior over a long period of time. Social marketing plans tend to be for long-term projects, when you are trying to change people's behavior permanently, or over a long period of time. Generally speaking, if you are asking people to perform a particular action once, efforts to convince them to do so wouldn't use a social marketing campaign. This is a bit tricky, because some of the same principles might be used; or such an action might be a part of a social marketing campaign. For example, asking people to give blood once at their office wouldn't be social marketing. However, a concerted effort by the blood bank to try to increase the number of people who donate blood regularly might use office blood drives as a part of the campaign. That effort as a whole might be a social marketing campaign, provided it used the marketing principles we have talked about.
• When you have the resources necessary to manage a comprehensive effort. As we've seen in the previous two bullets, running a social marketing campaign is not a short-term idea. It's more of a philosophy that will direct how you approach your work as a whole. Therefore, a social marketing campaign should only be undertaken when you're ready to use the time and resources it will take to make that shift.

This doesn't mean your organization or program has to have a lot of money to use a social marketing approach. Excellent social marketing can be done on a shoestring budget, if people are excited and willing to put a lot of effort into making it work.

How do you manage a social marketing campaign?

The management of a social marketing campaign is comprised of four major parts, which can each be broken down in turn:

• Defining and understanding: the problem, your goals, your target audience, and what they think about the problem
• Choosing strategies: Brainstorming possible strategies, choosing those which are most appropriate, designing messages, and pretesting your ideas
• Implementing and evaluating your work
• Do it all over forever

Defining and understanding: the problem, your goals, your target audience, and what they think about the problem

Define the problem.

This is the first step of your social marketing campaign. The problem is probably something you already understand, or you wouldn't be considering such a campaign to begin with. Whether it is child hunger or environmental abuses, you know what you've set out to solve.

Articulate the problem

What is not as certain is that you have articulated that problem, or that it has been written down and is understood in the same manner by all members of the group. If you haven't done so, now is the right time to work together and get it done. That way, everyone is starting the work from the same place, and future misunderstandings can be avoided.

Define the problem broadly

When defining the problem, be sure to do so broadly, without suggesting possible solutions. For example, your problem might be defined as, "Too many students drop out of school in our community," instead of "We need to improve teacher training so students will stay in school." Or, "Many women are physically and/or emotionally abused by their partners," instead of, "We need to build more women's shelters." By defining the problem more widely, the group remains open to more solutions, improving chances you will be able to solve the problem.

• Define your goals. The more distinctly you map out what you want, by when you want it, and how you are going to get there, the better equipped you will be to combat the problem or issue. Ending suicide is certainly a noble goal, but it's an intention you will have a difficult time fully realizing. Articulating smaller goals, or objectives, (e.g., we will decrease suicide by 15% in the next four years) fills in the details of the big picture. It can also be helpful to the morale of your group, by offering the chance to celebrate the successes you reach on the way.
• Define your audience. Usually, you will want to target different groups of people in different ways. For example, if you are trying to increase immunization of children under two years of age, you would probably try to reach teen mothers, members of the immigrant community in your city, and the case and social workers who work with parents (to name just a few groups) in very different ways. Breaking your audience into subgroups to target separately is often known as market segmentation.

How do you do it? By deciding what are important factors for your group. Do teen parents tend to immunize their children less often than older parents? If so, you might want to consider teen parents as a subgroup. Can case workers help convince parents to immunize their children? Then they might be another subgroup.

Traditionally, subgroups have often been created by the following characteristics:

• Age
• Gender
• Race or ethnic group
• Economic status
• Past behaviors
• Access to products

Which characteristics does it make most sense for your group to use? You might know immediately; all it will take is a few moments of brainstorming among members of your group. If you're not completely certain, or want to be sure you've thought of everyone, the following list of questions might prove helpful.

Questions to help choose appropriate subgroups:

• What are the possible subgroups? Be careful--you may want to use different groups from those listed above.
• Are there higher rates of the problem among any subgroups?
• Are some subgroups better able to address their problems?
• Are some subgroups more willing to address the issue?
• Can the organization afford the costs of addressing each new subgroup as a separate market segment?
• Do subgroups respond differently to marketing approaches?
• Do groups vary in the amount of resources available to them?
• Do they vary in the barriers they experience regarding change?

The answers to these questions will differ according to the problem or issue you are addressing, the resources you have, and the community you live in. Having the answers laid out in front of you, however, you are sure to make informed choices when choosing subgroups to target.

• Understand your audience. Once you have decided which groups you will target as part of your social marketing campaign, you'll want to learn as much as you can about them, both in general and about their views of the problem or issue you are working on.

First, you'll want to look up general information about people in your target group. Where do they live? How much money do they make? How much schooling have they had? Many such records are open to the public, and can be had from the Census Bureau, hospital records, school records, the public library, or elsewhere.

Next, you'll want to find out what your consumers think about the problem: how they feel about it, barriers to solving it, and what they want (what will convince them to change their behavior). This knowledge is crucial to setting up an effective campaign.

The marketers originally considered running only one campaign discussing the significance of the disease in their town. Looking at what they have learned, however, they realize that they need to create very different messages and services to effectively reduce the spread of AIDS in the area.

As social marketers, you will want to find out where members of your target groups are on this continuum, and how you can nudge them on to the next step.

For example, in a campaign to reduce the spread of AIDS, marketers discuss the problem with members of their target groups, and find clients have many different beliefs and attitudes about the disease. Some people are still unsure of what exactly AIDS is, or all of the ways it can be spread--they need to be brought to the "knowledge about the problem" stage. Others believe it is not a problem for them personally, or that "AIDS doesn't exist in our town;" these people are ready for messages on the problem's importance. Still others may believe in the problem's importance, and have taken actions to protect themselves, but do not do so consistently; they are having difficulty maintaining that change.

Also, you'll want to find out what's stopping people from using your program. If you don't understand the barriers and costs of your solution to your target audience, it's a good possibility your work will come to nothing.

You might think, "Wait a second. We have a program to teach adults to read, and it's free! There aren't any costs or barriers to coming and learning. Why don't we have more people who show up?" But by talking to members of groups you have targeted, you learn:

• Even though the classes are free, they are held far from where many potential clients live. Many people would need to take the subway to get there. That isn't free, and the subway isn't particularly safe at night, either. The money involved is a cost; and the lack of safety is a barrier.
• The classes are at night, the only time many people get to see their families. Giving up time with their loved ones is a cost.
• Many illiterate people are ashamed to admit to their loved ones (or even potential classmates or teachers) that they can't read. The stigma involved with illiteracy is a barrier.

After learning this information from potential users, the group is ready to make the changes needed to breathe new life into the program.

You also need to learn what people want--what can entice them to change their behavior. To use a commercial example, think about the campaign Pepsi ran not too long ago. They said, "Drink Pepsi. Get stuff," and by doing so, capitalized on people's love of getting "stuff" free.

Your program or organization probably doesn't have the resources of the Pepsi-Cola Corporation. But you can use this information on a smaller scale, and have very positive results. You might find out, for example, that many women aren't using the science and math tutoring center because everyone who works there is male, and (women feel) the tutors are often sexist and discouraging towards women. What the women want is to have some female tutors as well.

So how do you obtain this information? Well, there are a lot of different ways to go about it.

Some of the most common include:

• Observe individuals and behaviors of interest. If you are interested in teen smoking, for example, you might go to the local high school or the mall, and just watch people, taking notes about what is happening.
• Conduct behavioral surveys. Surveys can take place over the phone or in person, and can tell you a lot about what people do, and when and why they do it.
• Conduct detailed interviews. Interviews can give you a lot of detailed, qualitative information you can't get from the (often closed-ended) questions of a survey.
• Conduct focus groups. Focus groups give you many of the same advantages as interviewing. In it, members of your target group can talk openly about the problem, feeding each other ideas and telling you things you otherwise might not have heard.
• Survey people's satisfaction. Finally, a survey of satisfaction is helpful when people are already using your programs, and you'd like to see how you might improve your work.

Once you have heard from your target groups, you're ready to start planning.

Choosing strategies: Brainstorming possible strategies, choosing those which are most appropriate, designing messages, and pretesting your ideas.

• Brainstorming strategies. Now that you know what people want, or what potential barriers are, what can you do? How can you make it easier, or more attractive, for people to take advantage of your program? Several of you can work together to try to think up the most ideas possible.
• Next, decide how much time and how many resources you will spend on each of your subgroups. Most groups have finite time and resources, and you probably won't be able to concentrate on every group as fully as you would like. Where does it make the most sense to concentrate your resources? Do you want to concentrate on only one or two of the groups you have identified (perhaps the group most affected by the problem, or the group it will be easiest for you to help)? Or, do you want to spread out your work more equally over all of the target groups you have identified?

You might also try to decide if starting with any particular group is likely to set off a "domino effect;" that is, if you can convince one group to change their behavior, will that convince others to follow?

For example, if you can convince older students in a school to become involved in an effort to recycle their soda cans and newspapers, younger students might follow without any specific efforts on your end.

These aren't simple questions, and the answers aren't going to be readily apparent. But by taking the time to decide now, you'll save yourself work and headaches in the long run.

• Decide whether to use different strategies for different segments, or just use different messages and mediums. Looking at the ideas you have generated, can they be generalized across groups? Or are they more specific to groups with different challenges and needs?

For example, if you are trying to increase the number of students who use the free clinic, publicizing the benefits might be enough of a draw for students whose school is across the street. If you want to convince students from the high school on the other side of town, however, your task is more difficult. You might decide to open a satellite clinic on their campus, or provide free bus vouchers for those who come to the clinic.

However, if your group is trying to convince parents to immunize their children, you might have the same strategy for everyone you are targeting: promote the benefits of immunization and the advantages of the clinic. But the message would be phrased differently for high school mothers, for members of the professional community, and for members of the immigrant community, many of whom don't speak English. The medium would be different as well--the message for professionals might take the form of a technical article in the city magazine, for teens it might be a presentation at a meeting of teen mothers, and you might rely on word of mouth for the immigrant community.

Often, as we see in the immunization example above, strategies can be generalized for the different groups we work with. But be careful, and make sure that's true for your situation. Most importantly, remember the information you've received from members of those groups--using it will help your program to fly.

• Choose specific strategies with measurable objectives. With all of the information you have gathered in the above steps, the best strategies should already be emerging. When making the final decision, ask yourself which of the strategies you're considering...
  • Make the behavior change most attractive?
  • Decrease the costs of the behavior change?
  • Improve the customer's ability to adopt the behavior change?
  • Decrease the attractiveness of the competing behaviors?
• Design messages appropriate to different groups. Now that you know what you are going to do, how can you get the word out most effectively?

First, develop messages based on the strategies you decided on above. What do you want to say, and to whom? And most important, how are you going to say it?

Think about the language your target audience speaks. Sometimes, this is obvious--messages to Hispanic members of the community may be much more effective in Spanish; messages about illiteracy will be better placed on the radio or television than in the newspaper.

But even beyond this, the way you say things is important. Young people often have a language all their own, and if you are directing a message at them, it should be in their language. Some groups of people tend to be wary of any authority, and won't take kindly to having "expert opinion" thrown in their face; for other groups, this is the only thing they will listen to. You should have already discovered what is important to your audience; use this understanding as you design messages.

You might also want to consider using what's sometimes known as "panel design." That is, design messages that follow up on one another. For example, you might air advertisements or talk about the importance of physical exercise in general for a few months, and then, when the idea has had time to turn about in people's heads for a while, you can promote new exercise classes being offered at the community center. Or ads talking about the negative consequences of smoking can be followed by the creation of smoking cessation classes--which could be followed in turn by a support group for those who have quit. Using this method is an effective way of moving people along the "continuum of understanding" discussed earlier.

Finally, as the saying goes, the more the merrier! If you have the resources to create and disseminate many different messages, do it. Diversity is key to survival in the biological world, and we, as community organizers, would do well to learn a lesson from the natural scientists. The more times a message is given, and the more ways in which it is told, the more likely people are to really hear it--and finally, to follow it.

• Next, select channels of communication. Is television the best way to reach your target audience? Or is your intended audience more likely to pay attention to newspaper articles? Talks by experts? Word of mouth? Keep in mind budget limitations when you are deciding on your most effective medium, but be creative--there are many free or low cost ways to disseminate your message. It's up to the brainstorming power of your group to find them.
• Finally, pretest your ideas and messages. At this point, you've put a lot of time and work into your messages, and you're probably in a hurry to make them public. Pretesting your ideas with a few members of your target audience, however, is a very important step. Your message might be ineffective for reasons you hadn't thought of, or it could be insulting to members of your target audience. Pretesting stops an organization from embarrassing itself publicly, and lets you run messages with added assurance that they will say what you want them to.

Implementing and evaluating your work.

At this point, much of the hard work is over; you just need to go out and do what you planned. If you have planned the details carefully, this part should come together naturally.

After the plan has been implemented, though, you're still not done. Social marketing is a continuous process, and the next step you need to take is to monitor your work, and make sure it's effective. This evaluation is covered in great detail in: Evaluating Community Programs and Initiatives, but some of the highlights include:

• Defining your goals? we talked about the importance of this earlier in the section
• Establish a tracking system -- how will you know when you are making progress towards your goals? Choose measures to follow that will tell you if you are making progress. These measures will often be the objectives you have already found, or might be even smaller measures.
• Continue to modify your work based on results. If something isn't working, a small alteration is often enough to improve it significantly. If you're not sure what to do, ask members of the groups you targeted what they think.
• Finally, celebrate your accomplishments! Community change takes a long time to bring about; and (especially) if you're running a successful social marketing campaign, you're probably in for the long haul. So when small victories happen, make them the cause for a big celebration.

Do it again forever.

If a social marketing campaign is aimed at long-term behavior change in the community, then it really never ends. This is true for local health initiatives or any other intervention meant to change community behavior: It really only works when people can see it, and when they continue seeing it, day in and day out. If you turn your back for a minute, the whole thing can fall apart. Eternal vigilance is not only the price of freedom; it's the price of any social change program or initiative.

The only exception is when the goal is time-specific and narrow. "We want to make sure Wal-Mart can't build here" might be a time-limited campaign, and be over when it's over. Long-term behavior change is rarely so limited. For example, "We want all kids vaccinated" goes on until babies stop being born in the community.

In Summary

Managing an effective social marketing campaign takes a lot of thought, resources, and elbow work. As in regular marketing, a lot of "behind the scenes" work takes place before a 30 second advertisement is ever aired. Effective efforts, however, have made huge differences in the lives of us all. Campaigns have helped us reduce our risks for heart disease and lung cancer; they helped us eradicate small pox and are helping us to realize what the World Health Organization terms, "a world without polio." Your organization, too, can use this powerful tool to help you achieve your goals.

___You understand that social marketing means to use commercial marketing techniques to try to improve social problems.

___You understand that social marketing helps you reach your target audience.

___You understand that it works.

You understand when you should run a social marketing campaign:

___When you are trying to change the behavior of a large number of people.

___When you are trying to change behavior over a long period of time.

___When you have the resources necessary to manage a comprehensive effort.

You understand how to manage a social marketing campaign:

___You have defined the problem.

___You have defined your goals.

___You have defined your audience.

___You understand your audience.

___You have brainstormed strategies for change.

___You have decided how much time and how many resources you will spend on each of your subgroups.

___You have decided whether to create different strategies for different segments, or just use different messages and mediums.

___You have chosen specific strategies with measurable objectives.

___You have designed messages appropriate to different groups.

___You have selected channels of communication.

___You have pretested your ideas and messages.

___You have established a tracking system.

___You are continuously modifying your work based on results.

___You have celebrated your accomplishments!

Example 1: Metro Trains: Dumb Ways to Die

Public service announcements are known for being boring, so back in 2012, Melbourne Metro Trains decided to liven things up a bit with their visual marketing campaign, and came up with the perfect way. How do you convey a message to avoid deaths caused by train accidents? You add cute cartoons, a catchy tune, and some dark humor, of course! And so they came up with some catchy lyrics about several dumb ways to die – getting your toast out with a fork, doing your own electrical work, keeping a rattlesnake as a pet, selling both your kidneys on the Internet, to name a few.

As expected, the campaign went viral. Within 24 hours, the song reached iTunes Top 10 Charts, and has 140 million views on YouTube as of this date!

Read more about this example from The Yellow Sparrow.

 

Example 2: ALS: Ice Bucket Challenge

This one, you know it just had to be on the list. These challenges were all the rage back in 2013, and your Facebook newsfeeds were flooded with people pouring ice cold water on themselves, nominating people to do the same, and then donating some amount for the ALS Association. But here’s the best part: ALS never planned this campaign!

Wait, what?!

Yup, a golfer from Florida, Chris Kennedy, nominated a friend to participate in the Ice Bucket Challenge, which had nothing to do with ALS at the time.

Read more about this example from The Yellow Sparrow.

 

• Why listen to the people whose behavior you're trying to change?

• Who are the people to whom you need to listen?

• How do you contact those whose behavior matters?

• How do you listen to those whose behavior matters?

The Porterville Environmental Consortium was stumped. They'd been sure that their big push for cutting down on fossil fuel consumption would bear fruit. With visions of car-free bicycle zones, solar-heated and -cooled public buildings, and windmill arrays, they'd begun a campaign to convince the public that everyone in Porterville could pay less and live better by using alternative energy and practicing conservation.

But almost a year and several thousands of dollars later, the campaign seemed to be having no effect at all. The streets were still clogged with SUV's, brownouts were frequent, and the members of the Consortium were scratching their heads. They'd thought out the ads they used really carefully, filling them with scenes of windmills turning against a blue sky, solar panels on houses, and happy people on bicycles and walking. There were billboards in the neighborhoods near the university, and ads ran on public TV and on the university radio station. The Consortium couldn't understand why there was so little response.

What the Consortium had failed to do was ask the people who would have to change - the folks who'd trade in their SUV's for small cars, who'd give up their air conditioning and open the windows, who'd spend several thousand dollars to install solar panels - what would make them do those things. The Consortium's ads didn't address people 's concerns, but rather fed into them. A lot of people thought a windmill farm would be ugly, and they didn't want it anywhere near where they lived. Others wondered how they'd manage riding a bike or walking to work, when they hadn't exercised in years.

Many people never even saw or heard the Consortium's ads, because they weren't placed where most of the community would be exposed to them. By placing ads on public TV and radio and near the university, the Consortium was just preaching to the choir - trying to convince people who were already convinced. The Consortium's campaign never paid any attention to the people it was trying to reach... and it didn't reach them.

Social marketing is a great deal more than simply telling people what you'd like them to do. Now that you know what social marketing is in general. This section and those that follow will help fill in the details of preparing and running an effort that will get results. Here, we'll look at how to prepare an effective social marketing effort by enlisting the help of those to whom you're marketing.

Why listen to the people whose behavior you're trying to change?

There are two answers to this question. The first is a matter of simple respect. It's disrespectful of people - regardless of their level of education or economic status - to assume that you know best what they need or should want. You may have information or an understanding of a larger situation that they don't, and passing that on to them is both reasonable and necessary.

What you don't have, however, unless you've experienced it (and even then, everyone 's experience is different, and everyone experiences the same things somewhat differently), is an understanding of how their lives and situations feel to them, and what they need as a result. The way to learn that is to ask, and to listen carefully to the answers.

The second reason for finding out what people think is that it will improve both your social marketing campaign itself and its chances of success. If you aim your campaign at the exact aspects of issues that matter most to members of the target group, and couch those issues in the terms that they themselves use, they are more apt to pay attention and take action.

Commercial marketers use just this strategy in trying to determine whether to go ahead with the development of a particular product. They conduct market research, including interviews, surveys, and focus groups and talk to consumers in other settings about their habits, their preferences, what they'd be willing to spend money on. If reactions are positive to the product they're planning, they'll proceed, but they'll also continue to check consumers' reactions to the product at every stage, changing it to make it more marketable. In the same way, you can use the information you gain from listening to the community to "market " beneficial social change.

In college, the author was recruited for a focus group run by Gillette, maker of razors and shaving accessories. It was interested in trying out a beard-removing cream that would have made shaving unnecessary: you'd simply rub it on and wash it off every morning, and your beard would come with it. (Typically, this was not stated in the focus group, but it was obvious from the questions that the interviewer asked.)

The reason that you've never seen this product is probably that most other focus groups reacted as negatively to the idea as mine did. Even though shaving is often an annoyance, no one in the group of college students liked the idea of simply wiping hair off his face. Shaving is a male ritual, and none of us was willing to give it up.

In return for several hundred hours of interviewers' time and a few thousand bags of free samples, Gillette saved itself tens of millions of dollars in development and marketing money on a product that would have failed.

Who are the people to whom you need to listen?

The most important people to listen to are those whose attitudes or behavior you ultimately want to change. But who are they? There may be a number of different answers to that question.

A campaign to reduce and prevent youth violence, for instance, might involve a lot of different groups:

• The youth themselves, both those who commit violence and their victims (often the same people).
• Adults affected by - and often affecting - that violence: victims, parents and relatives of the youth involved, potential victims who live in fear, those who want to change the situation in their neighborhoods.
• Those who have professional contact with youth: agency staffs; teachers and other school employees; clergy; perhaps EMT's, emergency room physicians, and nurses who treat teenagers wounded or dying from gunshots.
• Police, probation officers, and others in the court system.
• Public officials and politicians who decry the violence and who make policy that affects it.

All of these folks may need to make changes in order to change the climate of youth violence in the community, and all have opinions that matter. That means that all of them - and perhaps others as well - need to be heard.

There are several ways you can go about identifying the people you need to talk to.

• Use your knowledge of the issue and the community. You may already know whether particular groups or issues have particular geographic connections. There may be distinct ethnic neighborhoods in the community, for instance. Neighborhoods or areas of the community might be related to income levels, to air pollution, or to violent crime rates. Some areas might have a higher-than-normal occurrence of certain diseases, or of fatal car accidents. Certain areas might be dangerous to outsiders, or to members of racial groups other than those of the residents. Depending upon your issue, you may want to seek out residents of these or other areas.

There may be connections among the issue and other factors. Particular diseases or physical conditions may be more common among some groups than others. (Black men are more likely to have high cholesterol than their white counterparts, for instance.) Some groups may be more at risk than others. (Homeless youth are prime targets of violence, for example, and, because they often use IV drugs and prostitute themselves, are at high risk for HIV infection.) The beliefs of some religious groups may make them distrust immunization. Immigrant groups may be blocked from services by language.

There are also political and historical factors that your knowledge of the community may make apparent. You may need to listen to both sides of a long-standing conflict or misunderstanding before your campaign can go anywhere. You may need to understand the concerns of policy-makers who have to walk a tightrope between their own concerns about the issue and the opinions of their constituents... or vice-versa.

• Use publicly available government information. Census data, annual town records, publications by such government entities as the Centers for Disease Control or the Department of Labor, local environmental impact statements, and the minutes of town boards can all contain valuable information about conditions and particular groups of people that might be important to your campaign.
• Read the latest research about your issue. Time in the library and/or on the Internet will be well spent, whether it just confirms what you thought or whether it introduces you to new ideas or information. There may be a group you should be talking to that you never thought of, or there may be connections that you'd never imagined between members of your target group and other conditions. (That connection between Black males and high cholesterol may not be common knowledge on the street, for instance.)
• Use information from the community itself. There's a host of information available from community leaders and observers, from the staffs of agencies and hospitals, from the business community (the Chamber of Commerce or even a local Small Business Development Center may have statistics about the workforce or about community buying habits), and from the newspaper and its archives. Using this and other community information, you can do some research of your own, and perhaps find connections or significant facts you didn't know about.
• Look for indirect targets. One of the things community informants can tell you is whether there are groups who aren't themselves affected by the issue who nonetheless need to be included. It may be that members of a particular group won't pay any attention to information from anyone but their clergy. If that's the case, then you need to consult the clergy, as well as those whose behavior you're hoping to affect.

The real targets may be those causing the problem in some way: parents of teens with racist attitudes; the whole community, through its tolerance of domestic violence; corporations that promote harmful behavior for profit; politicians who fail to fund necessary programs, or who don't understand the need for important services or policies. It's important to find out what they think if you're going to try to reach them.

• Consider how much of the potential target population you want to reach. You may be approaching only people from particular neighborhoods, ethnic groups or income levels. You may decide that you only have the resources to target teen smokers, rather than all smokers, or you may be addressing only unemployed women over 25. Those groups are the ones you need to approach in that case.
• You may be aiming at the whole community, in order to raise awareness of or change community sentiment toward an issue, or to generate community support for or against a proposed law, action, or policy. In that instance, you can try to talk to groups that include a cross-section of the community (high school classes or workplaces, for instance) as well as a broad range of groups with specific characteristics (groups from ethnic neighborhoods, churches, organizations, recreational and service clubs, professional associations, street gangs, welfare recipients, etc.)

How do you contact those whose behavior matters?

Once you've determined whom you need to talk to, you have to let them know that you want to talk to them. Contacting target groups is a subject that is covered in several other sections of the Tool Box. There are a few basic principles that are worth restating here, and a few others that relate specifically to contacting people in order to get their opinions.

• Use language the target group understands. This means using its first language in the case of a minority language community, and clear, simple English elsewhere.
• Put your message where the target group will get it. Make personal contact, put up posters, and hand out fliers in the neighborhoods you want to reach. Use community bulletin boards and post information in laundromats, supermarkets, and other places where people gather. Place public service ads in media outlets that your target group pays attention to (Hispanic radio stations, community newspapers, local access cable channels).
• Know and respect the culture and customs of those you're trying to reach. Don't ask devout Muslims to come to meetings on Friday, or Orthodox Jews on Saturday, for instance.
• Use trusted intermediaries. Start with the community people you know, or with the people who know everyone (clergy, for instance, may fill this role, as may neighborhood merchants or community activists). Not only do they have the contacts, but they are known by the community as well, and therefore more likely to be listened to.
• Make as much personal contact as possible. The more people you talk to directly, the more response you'll ultimately get.
• Let people know you're interested in what they think. Be clear that you 're asking for their opinions, and that you'll use what they tell you.

How to listen to those whose behavior matters: market research

Learning how people will respond to a social marketing campaign - i.e. what kind of campaign is apt to actually bring about desired changes in behavior - is a bit more complicated than asking "So - what can we do to convince you to stop smoking?" Market research at this stage focuses on finding out from the "customers" themselves how they're likely to behave and why.

Two issues should be mentioned before we look at how to carry out market research. First, if you're a large or well-financed organization, you may have the money for formal market research. If you're a smaller, grass roots organization without a lot of cash to spare, there are still ways to find out what the most effective approach might be, although they won't give you information that's as detailed as a formal research process. We'll try to look at both possibilities in the discussion that follows.

The second issue is that research of the kind described here is not the only source of information. Especially if you're a small organization with roots in your community, you may know important things about your target population that a research process may not tell you: their dreams and aspirations, what's deeply important to them, their emotional reactions, etc. Use what you already know, as well as what you find out.

What are some forms research can take?

Effective market research can be quantitative (expressed in numbers), qualitative (using description, observations, etc.), or both. Quantitative research gives you information that can be compared and analyzed easily; qualitative research often tells you more about the human beings involved. There are a number of different methods of research you can employ.

• Use indirect sources. We've talked about using indirect information - census data, government information, etc. - to identify target populations, and we'll see it again in the next section on segmenting your market. If the right information sources are available, it can also be used to help understand a target population 's decision-making process and what they'll respond to. Statistics on the percentage of households in a particular neighborhood that regularly recycle may hint at how responsive people in that neighborhood will be to arguments or advertisement based on environmental concerns. Consumer buying patterns might reveal that a certain group purchases lots of bicycles, sports equipment, home exercise machines, etc., which in turn can tell you something about that group's attitudes toward health and fitness.

Using indirect sources is one method that can make sense for smaller organizations. It won't give you all the information you need, but it is inexpensive - staff time is the major expense - and careful analysis can give you some good ideas.

• Conduct an ethnographic study. An ethnographic study is one in which researchers carefully observe a population. Originally, such studies were conducted by anthropologists to learn about other cultures, but now they're used in a variety of circumstances.

There are essentially two ways to conduct an ethnographic study:

• Non-participant observer. The image many people have of an anthropologist is that of a non-participant observer. He doesn't join in any way in the life of the group he's observing, but simply watches and listens, taking notes, pictures, and/or videotape or speaking his impressions into a audio recorder. He may do this for months, or even years, trying to fit together the pieces of the culture to create a complete image of its functioning.
• Participant observer. A participant observer is just that. She participates in the culture she's observing, becoming part of it to the extent possible. She doesn't just watch, but asks questions, joins in ceremonies, and often becomes a true member of the group. She still takes notes and uses a audio recorder or video camera, but her presence is much more purposeful, and her interactions with group members more natural.

One of the first - and perhaps one of the most famous - participant observers was the anthropologist Margaret Mead. In doing the research for her book Coming of Age in Samoa, she became part of Samoan culture to the point that she married a Samoan man (and left him at the end of her stay). She was roundly criticized for this at the time, and anthropologists still debate both the accuracy of observations and the effect on the culture of participant observers.

The big issue here is whether, by becoming a presence in the group you're observing, you change their behavior and influence their description of what they're doing and why they're doing it. While many anthropologists have come to believe that non -participant observation raises the same questions, some of the same issues pertain to market research.

How do you know that the folks you talk to will give you honest answers, and aren't just trying to please you or make themselves look good? Once you start asking people what they think or what their intentions are, instead of just watching how they react and what they do, you have to deal with the possibility of their intentional or unintentional dishonesty, as well as with changes in their thinking and circumstances over time.

Market researchers often use rapid ethnographic studies - immersing themselves in a particular situation (a mall, a beach, etc.) for a few hours or a day. They are very much participant observers - in fact, they decide on most of their questions beforehand. Researchers are often members of the groups being surveyed, so that they fit in, and their questions don't seem obtrusive or unusual. As a result, they can get a lot of information in a short time.

A newspaper article profiled a young man in his mid-20's who has what he describes as a "dream job." He's a trend spotter for a New York-based market research firm, and his job consists of traveling around the Boston area to places where there are concentrations of adolescents and young adults, and conducting rapid ethnographic studies - usually a couple of hours - to find out what's in, what's out, and what 's coming up. Carrying out much of his research in bars, in clubs, in malls, and in other places where young people are found, he just walks up to people and asks them questions. He chooses the young people he talks to by their style of dress, the way they carry themselves, and other factors that tell him they're trend-setters and initiators rather than followers. He himself was chosen at least partially because he's young, hip, and stylish.

A small organization often has a presence in the target population, and can ask questions of its members. An argument can be made, for instance, that any good street worker has to do an ethnographic study as a matter of course, just to learn enough to be accepted by the group he's reaching out to. A study doesn't necessarily have to be conducted according to formal anthropological principles in order to be accurate, and to yield useful answers to marketing questions.

• Carry out depth interviews. Depth interviews are intensive individual conversations with people. They can take place in people's homes, or out of the home in malls, clinics, workplaces, or other places where the target population can be found. (The young man in the box above actually combines rapid ethnographic studies and depth interviews, depending upon who's available and the nature of the place.)

Depth interviews are particularly appropriate when the issue at hand is a sensitive one - birth control, obesity - and when you want individual responses, rather than a sense of the general thoughts of a larger group or a whole population.

• Convene focus groups. A focus group is a group of 6-10 people, ideally strangers to one another, who are alike in some significant way or ways:
  • Demographics (age, gender, income, education, etc.)
  • Geography (residents of the same or similar neighborhoods, rural areas, housing complexes)
  • Physical or other personal characteristics (disability, inherited disposition to particular conditions)
  • Psychographics (political views, religion, values, etc.)

The group is facilitated by someone both trained for the purpose and aware of the goal of the particular focus group. The point is to guide a discussion which gives the facilitator the desired information without members of the group knowing exactly what that information is. (The point of not revealing the true purpose of the group is to guard against the kind of dishonesty mentioned above. If people don't know exactly what you're getting at, they may be less likely to try to impress you or other group members, or to try to lead you astray.)

Focus groups have a number of advantages over other methods. They are less expensive than depth interviews, because they reach a number of people at the same time. They place participants in an informal, natural setting - a conversation rather than an interview - and the resulting discussion often brings out ideas that wouldn't have surfaced otherwise. People are also less on their guard in this situation, and a skillful facilitator can guide the group into areas they may not have explored individually, and get more honest responses than would be possible in a depth interview.

While a large organization with a marketing department will run focus groups according to the rules in a marketing textbook, smaller organizations can take advantage of this technique as well. If you know the questions you need answered, a good facilitator - a counselor or other human service person experienced in running groups, for instance - can steer a group to yield that information. Furthermore, already-existing groups can function as focus groups. The dynamic of the group changes somewhat in that situation, but having the information is still far more useful than not having it. Any community has numerous groups - service clubs, participants in programs, church groups, civic organizations - that are representative of parts of the community, and can be tapped in this way.

A community college conducting a community assessment used already-formed groups at workplaces (members of a particular team on a particular shift), a medical center (members of a group of mothers with small children), an ethnic sports and social club, and an adult literacy tutoring program to gather information about needed services. The college based its offerings on the focus groups' feedback, and found it was accurate. The classes were full, and there was a steady stream of potential students waiting.

• Conducting surveys. A survey can be oral or written, and can be aimed at either a particular group or a whole community. In its simplest form, it is a list of easily-answered (i.e. yes/no or multiple-choice) questions. It can be sent out in a direct mailing, distributed and collected in a public place, conducted by phone or in person (again, in a public place or door-to-door), or some combination.

Surveys can be quite accurate and useful if they're carefully constructed, but they have some serious drawbacks. One is that, without some knowledge of statistics and of how to target a group of people that truly represents the population you want to question, it is difficult to know whether your results tell you what you want to know.

Researchers of all kinds often try to construct a "representative sample," a group of people who represent exactly the larger population the researchers want to survey. Political and other opinion polls, for instance, may seem to tell you what everyone in the country thinks, but they're based on surveys of only a few thousand people, not 280 million. These few (usually three to five) thousand people are selected so that the percentages of different races, political parties, income levels, and other factors among them exactly mirror those in the country as a whole. The assumption is that their opinions will also mirror those of the country as a whole.

Another disadvantage is that direct mail returns of surveys and questionnaires are always small - the average is only about two to five percent, and 15 percent is large. Therefore, even if you mail the survey to everyone in town, you'll hear only from those who care enough about the issues to respond. The opinions of those who don't respond - by far the majority - may be totally different. The same holds true if you conduct the survey by phone or by stopping people on the street. Large polling organizations have the resources to call many more people than will respond, and also have the name recognition to make it likely that people will respond. Small organizations usually have neither, and therefore may find surveys less useful, unless the target population is quite limited.

Determining what questions to ask

Actually deciding on what you need to know isn't always easy. Alan Andreasen, in  Marketing Social Change, suggests that the best method for coming up with the right market research questions is to work backward.

The sequence follows this pattern:

• Identify the decisions that need to be made as a result of the research, and who will make them. Some possible decisions:
  • Whether to run a social marketing campaign at all. If there are only a few people involved in the issue in question, there may be other ways to address them.
  • Whether to aim at only the target population, or at others who may have influence.
  • What kind of message to use.
  • How to frame the issue. Smoking cessation, for instance, can be seen as a matter of the smoker's health; her children's health; her children's concern for her health; an economic matter (a two-pack-a-day habit eats up a reasonable portion of a low -income budget); an esthetic concern (the smell of smoke on clothing, furniture, and breath, ashes on the rug); etc. What will grab the target population?
• Determine what information the decision-makers need in order to design and run an effective campaign. This is the most important step in designing research. What do you really want to know? In a social marketing campaign, it will essentially be the answer to the question "What will it take to get people to change their behavior?", but that by itself won't help much. What you need is information relating to how people will actually behave:
  • The decisions that people have to make in order to change their behavior
  • What kind of information they need in order to make those decisions
  • Who and/or what influences those decisions
  • What kinds of messages the target population and those who influence them will respond to
  • How ready they are to change
  • What kinds of costs they'll trade for what kinds of benefits - what they actually want
  • What kinds of messages they'll actually pay attention to
• Check with the decision-makers to make sure that what you've come up with is what they really need. If you're a small organization, or if you're the decision -maker in a large organization, you can probably skip this step, because you'll already know the answer.
• Decide what kind of analysis you'll need to complete your study. Create your research methods and design.

This step assumes a formal research study - Andreasen is a professor of Marketing, and looks at this area largely in terms of formal studies conducted by large non -profit corporations like museums, hospitals, or United Way. Formal studies are ideal, but the reality is that few small organizations have the resources to engage in them.

In a small organization, it's more likely that you'll analyze data informally. If you're analyzing numbers, you'll make educated guesses about what's significant (67% of smokers say they want to quit - that sounds like a population worth going after.) If you're analyzing what people say, you'll use your knowledge of the population and the community, as well as your intuition, to understand what it means. Your results may not be as reliable as those from a carefully-conducted formal study, but they'll give you a framework within which to work, and they'll be a great deal more useful than no information at all.

If you have some background in statistics - or if you can get someone, perhaps a graduate student, to help you - you may in fact may be able to perform some fairly complicated statistical procedures, using only a home computer, or even a statistical or scientific calculator. This will give you even more information, and may be able to point you in an unexpected or particularly fruitful direction.

• Determine the questions you need to ask to get the information you need. How can you actually find out what you want to know? While a simple direct question can be valuable in many cases, often a direct question won't yield a real answer. People sometimes give the answers they think researchers want to hear, or the answers they wish were true, or answers that they think are accurate, but aren't. To get accurate information, you may have to approach it indirectly.

In addition, there are different ways to ask questions, even in an interview. Some possibilities:

• Straightforward questions (Do you want to stop smoking?)
• Probes, or follow-up questions (What exactly do you mean when you say...? Tell me more about that.)
• Ratings (On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being not at all important, and 5 being very important, how do you rate these as health risks: Smoking, unprotected sex, swimming in a public pool, drug abuse, eating raw shellfish.)
• Conversation (Tell me about how you feel about smoking.)
• Hypothetical situations (What would you do if you were in a club, and you lit up, and someone next to you asked you not to smoke?)

Let's look at the list of necessary pieces of information again, and formulate some possible questions for each item.

• The decisions that people have to make in order to change their behavior. Some decisions that may seem obvious may in fact be less so once you examine them. If you're trying to convince people to take advantage of an intervention, for instance, even if they're willing, they may have to make decisions about child care, or about changing other domestic arrangements (not being home to cook dinner). They might have to admit to a problem that has larger significance in their lives (The reason that I can't hold a job is that I can't read). To uncover those things, you might have to ask "What are the drawbacks to doing this?", "What would help you make the decision to do this?" or "What might be difficult about doing this?" and continue to probe the answers to those questions.
• What kind of information they need in order to make those decisions. To find out what information people need, you may have to ask what they know already, or what they'd like to know (harder, since people don't like to reveal ignorance), or what they'd like their kids to know (for something like smoking cessation or substance abuse treatment, or a medical program). Here, setting up a hypothetical situation might be helpful (Suppose your best friend got lung cancer from smoking. How would that change things for you?)
• Who and/or what influences those decisions. You might be able to discover who influences them by asking whom they admire, or who's important in their lives. You could also probe to find out whom people believe - family members, authority figures, community activists, friends, academics, etc.

The answers here might be surprising. Some people might be strongly influenced by their children's opinions, for instance, because of their kids' importance to them, and/or because of wanting to be good role models and be respected.

• What kinds of messages the target population and those who influence them will respond to. Here, you might show people examples of different kinds of messages - humorous, authoritative (4 out of 5 doctors recommend...), appealing to reason, etc. - and ask them to rate their effectiveness.

A series of TV ads intended to curb teen smoking, run by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, focused not on smoking's health aspects, but highlighted such issues as physical attractiveness (smoking makes your breath smell and gives you wrinkles), role modeling (your younger siblings will do what you do), and fitness for sports (smokers lose a step on the basketball court). Research had shown that most teens can't conceive of themselves as anything but young and healthy, but they can understand and respond to the other arguments. A health-based campaign wouldn't have been effective, but the actual campaign was.

• How ready they are to change. This is an extremely important issue. As we'll see in the next section, a whole campaign may be based on moving people to the next point in the scale of change rather than to the end point. Some questions here might include "Tell me what you know about this issue," rating the importance of the particular issue on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale, and "How confident are you that this will work for you?"

In Section 2 of this chapter, Conducting a Social Marketing Campaign, a six-step scale was proposed to describe people's positions, from complete lack of awareness to having incorporated changes into their lives:

Knowledge about the problem.
Belief in the problem's importance.
Desire to change.
Belief in one's ability to change.
Action.
Ability to maintain the change.

Throughout this chapter, when we refer to people's readiness for change, we'll refer to this model.

• What kinds of costs they'll trade for what kinds of benefits - what they actually want. There are all kinds of costs associated with changing behavior. They may involve money (paying for medical services), time (giving up family or leisure time to participate in an intervention), emotional issues (a spouse's disapproval), social issues (giving up friendships based on shared behavior), logistics (finding a babysitter), or physical or psychological pain (physical therapy, quitting addictive drugs, dealing with your own responsibility for your problems). What do people need and want in order to be willing to pay these or other costs? Questions here might be asked in a series: "Would you attend a program if it were in another town? If you had to pay for it (and how much would you pay)? If it offered services in your home? If it offered child care?" But what you also need to ask is "What's the ideal outcome for you?"

When a car manufacturer or a drug company sets out to develop and market a new product, the first thing it wants to know is what people want. If people really want SUV's, then that's what the car company will make, and furthermore, it'll market them in the ways that speak to that desire. They'll advertise the vehicles as powerful, as tickets to freedom, as comfortable, as environmentally responsible (as bizarre as that may sound), as taking you to beautiful and inaccessible places - whatever people give as their reasons for considering buying a 4-wheel drive vehicle when they live in suburbia, and only drive to work and the movies and the supermarket, with occasional trips on the Interstate.

• What forms of messages they'll actually pay attention to. A last set of questions can tell you what forms of messages people will actually notice. Do they read print ads in newspapers? Do they remember and respond to TV commercials? Do they get most of their information from friends and relatives? Do they act on the information they get from their favorite radio station? "How do you decide what brand of orange juice to buy?" may be a question that will give you information on this issue. Others may be "Where do you mostly find out about what's happening in the world?" or "Where do you hear about new products or services?" A rating question may help here as well.

Once you've decided on the method or methods you'll use to conduct your research, and on the questions you need to answer, there's only one more step: do it! If you ask good questions of the folks whose behavior matters, and pay careful attention to the answers, you'll have the information you need to design a social marketing campaign that will lead to the results you hope for.

In Summary

Before you start a social marketing campaign, it's vital to understand what your target audience will respond to. The best way to find out is to ask them, and to listen closely to their answers.

Before you can ask them, you have to determine who they are. Some of the important people to listen to may not be those who are actually being asked to make changes, but those who influence them - family members, peers, professionals, etc. Once you know the people whose opinions you're interested in, you need to contact them. You have to do that in language they understand, and in a place and medium where they 're likely to get the message.

Market research - in the form of secondary sources, ethnographic studies, depth interviews, focus groups, and surveys - will help you listen in structured ways to those whose behavior you're hoping to affect. It will give you answers to the important questions about their behavior - what decisions they have to make in order to change, what information needs to inform those decisions, who or what influences their decisions, what kinds of messages they'll respond to, their readiness to change, what kinds of costs they'll trade for what kinds of benefits, and what form of message they 're likely to pay attention to.

Once you have that information, you're ready to go on to create a campaign that will help to spur the changes you hope for.

Why should you listen to those whose behavior you're trying to change?

___You listen out of simple respect.

___You listen because it will improve both your campaign and its chances of success .

Who are the people to whom you need to listen?

To identify those to whom you need to listen:

___You use your knowledge of the community.

___You use publicly available government information.

___You read the latest research about your issue.

___You use information from the community itself.

___You look for indirect targets.

___You consider how much of the potential target population you want to reach.

___You aim at the whole community if necessary.

How do you contact those whose behavior matters?

___You use language the target group understands.

___You put your message where the target group will get it.

___You know and respect the culture and customs of those you're trying to reach .

___You use trusted intermediaries.

___You make as much personal contact as possible.

___You let people know you're interested in what they think.

How do you listen to those whose behavior matters?

___You know the forms research can take:

• Indirect sources
• Non-participant observer ethnographic studies
• Participant observer ethnographic studies
• Depth interviews
• Focus groups
• Surveys

Determine which questions to ask:

___You identify the decisions that will need to be made as a result of the research , and who will make them.

___You determine what information the decision-makers need in order to design and run an effective campaign.

___You check with the decision-makers to make sure that what you've come up with is what they really need.

___You decide what kind of analysis you'll need to complete your study.

___You determine the questions you need to ask to get the information you need.

• What is segmenting the market?
• When might you segment the market?
• How can you segment the market?

Suppose you're trying to put together a social marketing campaign to reduce youth violence in your community.

A lot of people are going to have to change their behavior for that to happen:

• Gang members and other youth who engage in violence are going to have to find other ways to settle disputes and to solve problems, and to choose to use them.
• Non-violent youth may need to learn to practice behaviors less likely to make them victims.
• Teachers, policemen, and others who deal with youth may have to change their approaches.
• Adults in general may have to pay more attention to young people.
• Community residents may have to make it a point to be on the streets more, especially at night.
• Parents may have to change the ways they discipline their children, or even change their own attitudes about violence, and their own violent or violence-accepting behavior.

In addition, some of these people may welcome the opportunity to change, and others may resist it. Others may not even be aware that youth violence is a community problem.

You might conduct your violence reduction campaign with a single message, delivered through a particular channel - let's say a TV campaign.

But each of these groups may need a different approach to be convinced to change in ways that will affect the issue. Each of these groups is a different segment of the market. If you were selling them cars instead of promoting violence reduction, you'd do market research to find what each of them wanted in a vehicle, and then gear your ad campaign to convince them that they'd get it if they bought what you were selling.

You can segment the market in the same way for a social marketing campaign, making it more likely that your message will be heard. This section will help you understand what market segmentation is, why you'd want to use it, and how to make it work for you.

Much of the literature on social marketing seems to assume that all social marketers are large organizations with access to big media outlets and professional-quality ad campaigns. This chapter of the Tool Box assumes that social marketing can be done on any number of levels, and that even small organizations with minimal budgets can use social marketing principles to achieve change in their communities.

A successful social marketing campaign can be conducted by word of mouth and hand -drawn posters if it adheres to the principles repeated throughout Chapter: Social Marketing of Successful Components of the Initiative: customer-centeredness; change for the sake of the individual and community, rather than for the organization; clear behavioral goals based on the stated needs of those who are expected to change; pre-testing of messages; and willingness to adjust not just the campaign but the substance of your services, service delivery, support, etc. to make change easier.

What is segmenting the market?

"Segmenting" is a marketing term for dividing up your audience into groups according to particular criteria. The members of each group have at least one important factor in common with the other members of the same group, and that factor sets them apart from all the other groups.

The criteria that you use to determine your groups should have some relationship to how they'll respond to your message. Segmenting will help determine how you deliver your message as well as its content.

If we return to the youth violence reduction campaign referred to in the introduction, we can see several ways the different segments we need to address could be separated. "Youth" might be broken down into gang members and non-gang members, for instance, or into under-16 and 16-and-over. Your segmenting choices would depend on how different the messages might need to be to reach particular groups.

Perhaps a message delivered by a popular hip-hop group would reach most youth in the community, regardless of gang affiliation or age. But it would take a very different message and messenger to reach business people or parents. Segmenting the market can help you make sure that your message is not only getting to everyone who needs to hear it, but increases the likelihood that they will listen to it.

Market segmenting enhances your ability to figure out the four P's of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. The different segments of your target population:

• Need different products (e.g. need different services, or the same service delivered in different ways, or are interested in different benefits)
• Are willing to pay different kinds of prices in time, money, or effort to make the behavior changes you're aiming for
• Can be reached in different places (through different media outlets, or only through personal contact, or only through third parties)
• Will respond to different types of promotion.

Segmenting your market helps to assure that everyone gets what he needs to support the process of change you hope he'll go through.

When might you segment the market?

The easiest and cheapest social marketing strategy is to blanket the target population with a single message. Segmenting the market takes some effort and resources, and designing a campaign that appeals to several segments takes a great deal more. When does it make sense to pay the price?

When you're concerned about a particular segment of the population because of the incidence or severity of a problem among its members, or because it may have fewer resources to advocate for or protect itself. Some examples:

• Young Black men, especially in hard times, experience a far greater rate of unemployment than their white counterparts (high incidence).
• Even though the rate of breast cancer is similar for several groups, the death rate for one group is far higher than for the others (greater severity).
• The high-death-rate group in the example above may have no easy access to breast -cancer screening and no information about it (lack of resources).

When listening to the target population makes it obvious that it's composed of a number of different segments with different concerns and different ways of viewing the issue and the world.

When it's clear - from market research or simple common sense - that you'll need very different messages to reach different segments of the target population.

Project Literacy US (PLUS), a mid-'80's cooperative effort among the federal government, ABC, PBS, and hundreds of local newspapers and radio stations, ran ads in the media to encourage the development of and enrollment in adult literacy programs. Media people quickly learned that ads emphasizing the scope and human cost of illiteracy as a problem attracted calls from volunteers who wanted to help. Ads featuring successful adult learners talking about how literacy had changed their lives attracted potential students.

When some segments of the target population are easily reachable and others aren't. It may require very innovative approaches to reach homeless people, for example.

When your organization has the resources and the capacity to tailor its marketing to different segments of the target audience. If you're running a media campaign, you'll need the money to pay for - and perhaps to create - several sets of ads and/or the time to spend placing newspaper stories. You'll need to have, or have access to, the expertise to understand what your campaign should look like, and to devise it. Even if your project involves delivering the same brochure in different languages, it may still require additional costs. And if your campaign is run as a public service by media and created pro bono by an ad agency or PR firm, you'll still have to spend a lot of time with those folks so they understand how to present your message.

"Pro bono" means "for the good" in Latin, and refers to work done for free as a community service by businesses or professionals.

Whichever situation applies, organizational capacity is critical. The best-planned social marketing campaign can't be carried out without the proper resources of money, time, and staff. A well-planned campaign that fails because of the lack of these resources is just as futile - and looks just as bad - as a badly-conceived and badly -planned campaign. Only when you're sure of the ability of the organization to take on the costs necessary to be effective should you start looking at segmenting your market.

How can you segment the market?

Social marketers in general choose their segmenting criteria from one or more of five general categories: demographic, geographic, physical/personal history, psychographics (related to beliefs and values), and behavior.

Demographic.

Demographic characteristics have to do with people's vital statistics, the sort of information you might get from census figures. You can find out how many of your target population fall into different demographic categories by checking the latest census data (You can get it in the library or on line at the  your local town planning office, tax records, and other public documents.

Some of the demographic categories you might look at are:

• Gender
• Age
• Marital status
• Family size
• Ethnic/racial background
• Income
• Education
• Religion
• Employment status
• Citizenship
• Language spoken, if other than English

People may belong to two or more target groups, or a target group may include two or more characteristics. Some of the census tables in fact provide a look at how two or more characteristics (race, age, and income, for instance) overlap. There can be overlap as well among characteristics in all five of the criteria discussed here. You could be looking, for instance, for parents in a certain age group, living in a certain neighborhood, with particular attitudes toward authority, who don't know about a particular element of child nutrition.

Geographic.

This one's simple: it refers to where people live. Often, that's an important factor in reaching a targeted group. Besides country, region (e.g. the Midwest), and state, there are some other geographic divisions you might use:

• Area (for example, upstate) or county
• Locality, if rural

Village names, for instance, often endure long after most of the village is little but foundation stones and cellar holes, or after it has become a thriving neighborhood in a larger community. These names are also often used to identify rural areas that are now thinly populated. Knowing them may be important to understanding who and where your target population is.

• City or town
• Area or neighborhood of a city or town

The area of Cambridge, Massachusetts between Massachusetts Ave. and the Charles River is called Cambridgeport, and Cambridge residents have always defined it that way. One neighborhood of Cambridgeport was still, in the 1950's and '60's, called "Greasy Village," because it had been in the path of the prevailing winds from a rendering plant. Greasy Village was a distinct neighborhood, with recognized boundaries and the loyalty of its residents.

• City block

In the past few years, because of advanced computer technology, it has become possible to prepare detailed maps of towns, neighborhoods, even city blocks that show where people with specific characteristics live. The geographic and demographic or other information are both entered into a specially configured computer system, and it produces a multi-color map that shows how the two sets of information coincide.

A GIS (Geographical Information System) map could show, by use of color, all the Hispanic households in a city, for instance, or all households with annual incomes over $60,000, or all Hispanic households with incomes over $60,000. Depending upon what you're looking for, a GIs map could make it easy for you to see what areas of a city or neighborhood to target with your specific message.

Physical/personal history.

This category includes the physical and medical characteristics and personal experiences that groups of individuals have in common that may influence their responses to social marketing.

Some of these include:

• Physical disability.
• Family history (including abuse, medical history, alcoholism, etc.)
• Risk factors for diseases or for social conditions (Abused children are more likely than others to become abusive parents, for instance.)
• Current physical and/or mental health status.

Psychographic.

Psychographic characteristics are those that fill out demographic ones with people's lifestyles, beliefs, and values. Demographics may tell you about someone's income; psychographics tells you what she thinks the government should do with her taxes.

Some psychographic characteristics that might interest a social marketer:

• Political views, including both party affiliation and the radical-liberal-centrist -conservative-rightist spectrum.
• Values and moral system.
• Social attitudes, touching on such issues as homosexuality, welfare, abortion, etc.
• Actual religious beliefs, as opposed to simply "being" Presbyterian or Islamic or Eastern Orthodox.
• Environmental awareness and attitudes.
• Health consciousness.
• Conceptions of parenting. These can range from neglect to over-protection, from permissiveness to authoritarianism, with infinite variations in between.
• Attitudes toward authority, from blind acceptance to outright hostility.

A commercial marketer would be looking for very different psychographic characteristics than many of those above. Tastes in music and entertainment, what kinds of vehicles people prefer, what kinds of newspapers they read, attitudes toward sports, color preference - these are the kinds of things they might pay attention to.

Just as several of the characteristics in the list above - attitudes toward authority and level of conformity, for instance - could be important to commercial marketers as well, there may be some on a commercial marketer's list that could have an impact on your social marketing efforts. Don't write off anything until you've considered all its implications. How people get their news, who their heroes are, which public figures they consider believable, and, yes, their color preference (bright red posters might be more effective than bright green ones) might all turn out to be important information in a campaign to promote better prenatal care or curb domestic violence.

• Level of conformity.
• Attitudes toward education.

Behavior.

For a commercial marketer, behavior means behavior in relation to the product she's trying to sell: brand loyalty, how people decide to buy a certain product (its price, its quality, its reliability, its brand name), how they'll use it, whether they've bought it before, how much they know about it, etc. For a social marketer, behavior also means behavior in relation to what you're interested in, but that translates into a somewhat different set of characteristics.

Social marketing campaign. There, a six-stage model was proposed to describe people's positions, from complete lack of awareness to having incorporated changes into their lives:

• Knowledge about the problem. The first step is knowing that the problem exists. There has to be awareness before there can be any movement toward change. The level of someone's knowledge may have a lot to do with whether or not he's willing to think about changing his behavior.
• Belief in the problem's importance. Once people know about the problem, they have to believe there is a reason they should be concerned about it. That often means understanding how it applies to them personally.
• Desire to change. People have to decide that there's a reason that they or the situation have to change. Many people, for instance, know that smoking is a health issue, and that it is important to individuals and society, but still aren't ready to quit themselves.
• Belief in one's ability to change. Those reluctant smokers in the paragraph above have to believe they can quit before they'll make an effort to do so.
• Action. At this point, individuals have resolved the previous four issues, and are ready and able to do something about the problem.
• Ability to maintain the change. Once someone's taken the appropriate action, it's still not all over. If the action was personal - quitting smoking, for instance - that action has to be maintained over time to be effective. Quitting for a week isn't enough: quitting for a lifetime is the goal. That means consciously not smoking every minute of every hour of every day until not smoking becomes as unconscious and familiar as smoking once was. Even then, it's important to be aware of temptation, and to be able to resist old impulses.

Understanding where people are on this scale is among the most important factors in deciding when and how to segment your market. Aiming your message at a segment that's defined by its willingness to consider changing behavior toward the issue may be the most effective way to approach that change.

Some other issues to consider in developing a social marketing campaign are:

• Concern with cost. How much is your target population willing to pay? Can you reduce the costs to make change more attractive? As discussed in Section 2 of this chapter, there are costs for changing behavior and attitudes. Sometimes they're financial (paying to recycle, for instance, or adding regular dental care to your medical bill for the year), sometimes they're measured in work (packing up that recycling, doing GED homework, getting extra exercise), sometimes they involve time (taking evenings away from the family to participate in a program, giving up several hours of leisure time to volunteer each week), and sometimes they're psychological (facing your embarrassment and fear of failure in order to enroll in an adult literacy course).
• Willingness to take risks. Is there a segment of the target group that's more likely to be willing to take the risks of change? Can they lead the way for others ? Are there some who are really reluctant? Can you reach them, or are they so unwilling to risk it that they're not worth targeting?

Everett Rogers, in Diffusion of Innovations, looks at those who are among the leaders in adopting new ideas, techniques, or products. Not surprisingly, he finds that they tend to be less conventional, more widely knowledgeable, more willing to take risks, and more independent than those who are less eager to try new things.

These innovators essentially try out new things for others, and, if the use of those things is successful, ultimately lead others to adopt them. It may make sense in some social marketing circumstances to appeal particularly to innovators, who will then act as opinion leaders in the long run.

• Degree to which they're influenced by friends and others. Will some segment of the target group do almost anything if enough of their friends are doing it? Or, conversely, will some never do anything until at least some people they know are already doing it?
• Motivation by reason, as opposed to emotions or fears or impulses. Everyone acts irrationally at least some of the time, but is that the rule for some segments of the population? Are some likely to be swayed by logical arguments, while others can only be appealed to on some other level?

Different segments of the target audience may have different levels of involvement in and knowledge about the issue, may have different attitudes toward it, and may respond to different kinds of arguments and information about it. As a social marketer, you can reach each of these segments - or each of the ones most important to your campaign - by aiming your message specifically at it, using what you know about it.

• Third parties. In addition to these five touchstones of commercial market segmenting, social marketing often requires another. Particular target groups, or many members of those groups, may not be influenced directly by a social marketing campaign. They may be much more likely to listen to family members, doctors, neighbors, etc. If that's the case, then you need to target those third parties rather than those whose behavior you're hoping to change.

But how do you decide which of all these criteria to use to define segments of your population? As explained above, there are numerous ways that a community or a group can be segmented by using and combining criteria. Given all the different choices, how do you divide your audience into segments that will be helpful to you in a social marketing campaign?

The answer is in the target audience itself. As with all social marketing, segmenting needs to be focused on the people whose behavior needs to change if the campaign is to be successful.

Deciding which segments to focus on

Once you've defined segments, you have to determine what your targets will actually be. As always in social marketing, the best answer is to turn to the "consumers" themselves, i.e. those people whose behavior you want to change. If you examine who needs to change, whose changes can be most helpful to your campaign, and what their stances are on change, you'll have a pretty good idea whom to target. There are some formal criteria to help you make that decision.

Once commercial marketers have segmented their audience, they use four basic criteria to decide which segments to target: measurability, accessibility, substantiality , and actionability.

Measurability.

For a commercial marketer, this is the ability to determine whether a particular segment is large enough and has enough purchasing power to be worth pursuing. For you, it's whether change in a particular segment of the population will have a significant effect on the issue you're addressing. If your goal is to make sure that all five-year-olds in the community have had a full range of immunizations, for instance, you know you want to target their parents. But what about their grandparents or older siblings? Can you determine whether there are there enough of them, and whether they're important enough in influencing parents' decisions to make targeting them worthwhile?

Accessibility.

Can you reach a particular segment with your message? If immunization is rare in a particular language minority community, but you have no "in's" to that community, and no one available who speaks its language, that segment is not accessible, as things stand. By the same token, a neighborhood whose residents mistrust outsiders and pay very little attention to any information that doesn't come directly from people they know is also less than accessible.

Accessibility is a matter of degree. A commercial marketer may not care if a particular segment becomes part of his customer base or not, as long as his bottom line is healthy. A social marketer may have very different feelings about a particular segment of the population, and may be willing to spend vast amounts of time to develop accessibility to that segment. Cultivating personal contacts, learning the language and culture, and spending time in the community are some of the ways that you might create access to a particular segment. They all take time, but may be worth it if that segment is important to your goals.

Substantiality.

Is the segment large enough and likely to yield enough of a return to be worth targeting? Developing a social marketing campaign around immunization may not be worth it if only a few families have failed to immunize their children. It would make much more sense in that case to spread your message by personal contact.

Actionability.

The segment has to have characteristics that are distinct enough to make it possible to target a campaign specifically to it. "Parents of children under five" may not be distinct enough for a social marketing campaign to encourage immunization. You may have to target separately to teen parents, single mothers, families without health insurance, families whose locations make it difficult to get to a clinic, etc.

Besides these four basic criteria for segmenting an audience, it's important to include one other:

Position on the change scale.

As described above, segments can be defined by their position on the scale of change, from lack of knowledge about the problem to maintaining the new behavior. This position, according to Alan Andreasen in Marketing Social Change, is the single most important criterion for segmenting your market.

People need to know about and understand the issue before they can even begin to think about acting on it. Once they know about it, they have to be convinced of its relevance to their own situation, of the benefits of changing their behavior, of the possibility of change, etc. Each stage requires a different approach to move people to the next stage of the process... and moving them to the next stage is the proper goal, rather than trying to get them all the way to the end in one effort. Research seems to show that by tailoring the marketing message to the appropriate stage of the change process, social marketers are most likely to get behavioral results in the long run.

Addressing the targeted segments

Once you've decided whom you want to target, what's next? The first step is to consider what kind of social marketing campaign you want to conduct. Commercial marketers usually see themselves as having three choices, depending upon their needs and resources : undifferentiated marketing, differentiated marketing, and concentrated marketing.

Undifferentiated marketing

is the practice of developing one message aimed in the same way at everyone you want to reach. In the early days of TV, particularly, most commercial campaigns were run this way. A single ad, or a series of similar ads - often humorous - would saturate the airwaves for weeks or months: Speedy Alka-Selzer, the Ajax Cleanser jingle, and "See the USA in your Chevrolet" are all familiar to those who watched TV in the '50's and early '60's. They permeated everyone's consciousness, and created an enormous awareness of the products they advertised.

That's the up side. The disadvantages of an undifferentiated campaign lie in trying to create a message and presentation that will speak to everyone on some level. That's difficult even when the members of your target audience are all similar in some way: teen mothers, or gay men, or unemployed adults. When the audience is diverse, the difficulties mount. What White youth will respond to may be very different from what older Black people will. Democratic apartment-dwellers may have reactions opposite to those of Republican homeowners.

In addition, an undifferentiated message is usually pretty general: support this issue; do this, don't do that. The subtleties of the message are lost ("This is your brain on drugs." All drugs? Over-the counter drugs? The first time you use them?), as are the differences between what you might want one segment to do (Don't start using drugs), as opposed to another (Talk to your kids about the real dangers of using drugs).

The great advantage of undifferentiated marketing is that it's inexpensive, in both time and money. If you're short on resources, it may be your only logical choice. Your message gets to a broad range of people with a minimum of fuss. When you're trying to raise the awareness of the whole community about an important issue, it may be the best way to spread the word.

Conducting an undifferentiated marketing campaign could mean you're not segmenting the market at all (your target is "everyone"), but it doesn't necessarily. You could pinpoint certain segments you want to reach, then conduct an undifferentiated campaign aimed at all those segments. Your target audience, for instance could be "people at risk of contracting HIV," which might include segments as diverse as IV drug users, affluent sports figures, gay men, sexually active teens, and prostitutes.

A differentiated marketing campaign

separates out those segments it actually wants or needs to reach (the groups included in "people at risk of contracting HIV," for instance.) Then it designs a message and presentation specifically for each segment.

Once again, this type of campaign has some disadvantages. First, it can be complex, especially if you're trying to reach a large number of segments. You have to come up with a tailored message for each group, one that is not only aimed at helping that group understand what and why it should change, but one that its members actually respond to.

It's not just a matter of whom you aim at, but whether you hit them or not. Many ads aimed at teens, for instance, are useless because they're conceived by 45-year -olds who seem to have no memory of what it was like to be 15, and whose conception of teen language and behavior is formed by images in the media - usually created by other 45-year-olds - rather than by listening to real kids.

Some adults respond to images of authority figures - doctors, lawyers, teachers - while others view them with hostility or consider them silly in the context of a marketing campaign. Some people respond to real-life experience - e.g., the older woman who once modeled for cigarette ads, and who has lost her larynx to smoking -related cancer. Some respond simply to reason: if statistics say that people who exercise regularly live an average of five better-quality years longer than those who don't, then it makes sense to exercise. In order to be effective at differentiated marketing, you have to have a clear idea of what your target segments find compelling.

Differentiated marketing can be very expensive, both in time and effort and in money. In addition to the energy needed to create a different message and presentation for each segment, there are the costs of producing and distributing all these different messages. Even if the campaign is a local one, involving mostly volunteer labor and ideas, it will require a serious investment of resources.

On the other hand, differentiated marketing, if done well, can be extremely effective at reaching exactly the groups you want to reach, and motivating them to make the changes you're working toward.

If you're planning a differentiated marketing campaign, organizational capacity is a big factor. In general, according to Nedra Kline Weinreich, in Hands-On Social Marketing, a small organization shouldn't try to handle more than three segments at a time. If your resources are limited, you're apt to get better results overall if you target just one.

Concentrated marketing

As the name implies, concentrates on the single segment, or very small number of segments that include those most crucial to the campaign's effort. Rather than all of those at risk for HIV, for instance, it might target only those at the greatest and most immediate risk (IV drug users, perhaps ).

Deciding whom to target in a concentrated campaign depends upon what the goal is. If you're trying to change perceptions in the community, you might target those who are most influential. If you're trying to deal with the spread of a problem, you might want to target those who are most ready and most likely to change their behavior as a result of the campaign. If you're trying to turn around a bad situation, you might aim at those most immediately affected by the issue at hand. Yet another way to choose a segment is to target those who might be most susceptible to the campaign, regardless of their readiness or how severely they're affected by the issue.

Concentrated marketing has the disadvantage of ignoring many segments that may be affected by the issue or may be helpful in bringing about the desired changes in the community. It chooses to cover one small piece of the total market extremely well, but at the expense of ignoring a large portion of the community.

If you have limited resources, however, or if there are only one, or very few segments that need to be reached, concentrated marketing may be an excellent strategy.

Other considerations

If your audience includes both teens and middle-aged business people, it's probably pretty obvious that you wouldn't use the same message, or at least the same form of message, for both of them. For the former, you might choose to emphasize what their peers are doing, and - if you're using the media - present the message in a rapidly changing rock video format. For the latter, you might appeal to practical or economic reasons for change, and have those reasons presented straightforwardly by a professional-looking person in a suit (or, better yet, by Alan Greenspan).

Some other kinds of division also require different kinds and/or forms of messages.Some of the segments to think about include:

• Education and social class. In our supposedly classless society, these are almost the same. People who grew up as lower or working class become middle class almost automatically if they graduate from college. Even if they work at blue-collar jobs, they retain a different sensibility than those with no college background, and are apt to respond to different kinds of messages.

The key in all of this is to choose a message and a medium that's comfortable for the segment you're aiming at. What's familiar or obvious to one group - rap music, for instance - may be confusing, or even offensive, to another.

• Language. If different segments speak different languages, or speak in different slang, they need to hear your message in the language in which they're most comfortable, or in straightforward standard English that they can all understand.
• Culture. Different cultures may dictate different messages, even if their languages are the same. The message and its presentation have to conform to the expectations of the culture if you expect people to hear it.
• Offensiveness. Some people judge a movie, for instance, on whether or not the people in it swear a lot, or whether it includes sex scenes. The nuances of plot and character are lost in their outrage over particular words or actions. Comprehensive family planning, involving birth control and the possibility of abortion, can be seen by devout Catholics and Orthodox Jews as insulting to their religious beliefs.
• Levels of awareness. Those who are sophisticated about the issue may find a simple approach insulting, or may ignore it as obvious. By the same token, those who know little about the issue can be confused and alienated by complicated explanations or arguments.
• Levels of affluence. You may want to ask more affluent people for contributions, while you pitch a message requesting volunteer time or help in spreading the word to those who have less money to offer.
• The interest of the target audience in heeding your message. If you're asking your audience to make some specific change in attitude or behavior, they need to understand why it will be in their interest to do so. If they're to be catalysts for change in others, why should they be? Doctors, for instance, may not need convincing that it's in their and the public interest to urge patients to adopt healthy lifestyle habits. Politicians, on the other hand, may not have a vested interest in improving constituents' lifestyles, unless they see those constituents as powerful allies, or unless they can do it in a short enough time so that it will help them get reelected.

As with all of social marketing, the best practice is to start with those whose behavior you want to change. If you listen carefully to their needs, wants, and opinions, and pretest messages with them, you are likely to be able to choose the right segments and devise a campaign aimed at those segments that gets results.

In Summary

An important part of a social marketing campaign is segmenting your market, i.e. dividing it into coherent groups, each of which might respond to a different approach. Creating an approach for each segment of your target audience will make it more likely that your message will be heard and followed.

Commercial marketers use four standard sets of characteristics for segmenting the market: demographic (vital statistics - gender, age, income, education, etc.), geographic (where people live), psychographic (beliefs, values, tastes, opinions), and behavior.

Once you've identified market segments using these characteristics, you can determine whether particular segments are worth targeting by looking at four criteria:

• Measurability: whether you can determine that a segment is large and important enough to your issue to be worth pursuing.
• Accessibility: whether you can reach a segment with your message and with whatever else is necessary to achieve your purpose.
• Substantiality: whether the segment is in fact large and important enough to the issue to target.
• Actionability: whether the segment is distinct enough to be targetable (i.e. does it have characteristics that set it apart enough so that a message and approach can be designed specifically for it).

After you've decided which segments are worth targeting, you can pick an undifferentiated, a differentiated, or a concentrated marketing approach to make the best use of your available resources and to reach as much of the target audience as you can.

Careful segmentation of your market will increase the chances of your social marketing campaign's success.

___You have segmented the market for the behavior change you seek, dividing people into groups based on shared criteria. these shared qualities may be or relate to:

___Demographic

___Geographic

___Physical/personal history

___Psychographic

___Bahavior

___Third party influences

___You have decided which segment to focus on, using five criteria:

___Measurability

___Accessibility

___Substantiality

___Actionability

___Position on the change scale

___You have chosen the type of social marketing campaign you will conduct,  which is one of these types:

___Undifferentiated marketing

___Differentiated marketing

___Concentrated marketing

Example 1: From Stilettoes to Moccasins

This music video was developed to give a voice to Aboriginal women healing from drug abuse, addiction, and problems with the law. Its form and content allow it to specifically reach out to young, Native women.

The video is part of a community-based research project conducted by the University of Saskatchewan (U of S), National Native Addictions Partnership Foundation (NNAPF), and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA). Please see the project website for more information.

• What is effective social marketing communication?

• What are tools for reaching the target audience?

• How do you approach common barriers to effective social marketing communication?

• How do you develop effective messages?

A woman and a little girl walk through a field on a beautiful summer day. Birds sing, bees buzz, the wildflowers are extraordinary... all is lovely. Suddenly, the woman starts to sneeze. She walks faster and faster through the field, her sneezes coming closer and closer together. She begins to run toward a house in the distance, sneezes wracking her body. At last she reaches the house, flings herself inside, and reaches frantically for a bottle on the kitchen table. Cut to the smiling woman back in the field, making a daisy wreath for the little girl's hair. The name of a well-known allergy medication flashes on the screen.

If you're not allergic to pollen, this ad may not mean much to you, and you might not even notice it. If you are allergic, you know all too well the sensation of being overwhelmed by sneezing, and the extreme discomfort that brings. You're likely to pay attention to the ad, and perhaps to look into the medication. After all, if it works for that woman...

To be successful, a social marketing campaign has to reach people with a message that will help them decide to change their behavior. If the message isn't understandable, if it doesn't reach its audience, if it scares or offends them too much, if it doesn't seem to apply to them, or if it simply doesn't register at all, they won't respond.

Running an effective social marketing campaign is, as much as anything else, a matter of effective communication. In this section, we'll discuss designing, constructing, and placing messages that your target audience will respond to.

What is effective social marketing communication?

In the Community Tool Box chapter Developing a Plan For Communication, communication is defined as "the process of transmitting ideas and information about your initiative throughout the community." Effective social marketing communication does that in such a way that people are aware of the message, understand it clearly, and respond to it positively.

Although, as we'll see, social marketing communication has its specific attributes, it is still subject as well to some general rules for communication:

• Communication is a two-way street. You have to be sure that what your audience understands is the message that you meant to send. There are several issues that can provide difficulties here.
  • Language. Is the message in a language that people can understand? Effective communication may require putting your message in a language other than English if that's the language of the target community, or it may mean making sure that your message is in clear, simple English.
  • Non-verbal communication. Your body language, tone and pitch of voice, and clothing - or those of actors or spokespersons - all send powerful messages of their own about whom you intend to reach. If you're using images -- in photographs, video, or film -- will your audience immediately recognize and identify them? The setting, ;the type of music, and the choice of actors or spokespersons are also important.
  • Culture. Different cultures communicate in different ways, so you have to understand the culture of your target audience to communicate effectively. Looking toward and away from people have different meanings in different cultures, for instance. It's important to be culturally sensitive in order both to be understood and not to offend.
• Communication has to be accessible. No matter how creative and potentially effective your message is, it can't do much good if your audience isn't exposed to it. You have to put it where they can't miss it, which means using the channels they're most likely to pay attention to. We'll discuss this in greater detail later in the section.
• Communication has to be noticeable. Even after the message is placed in the right channels, it has to have some characteristics that will help it to break through the barrage of messages that bombards everyone every day. People not only have to be exposed to it, but they have to pay attention to it for it to have any effect.

Tools for reaching the target audience

In order to make sure that your message is understandable, accessible, and noticeable, you need to pay attention to four areas:

• The channels through which you transmit the message
• The design of the message itself
• The use of spokespersons
• The way the message is linked to familiar themes and values of the target audience

Channels.

If you use channels creatively and mix them well, you're much more likely to get your message to those for whom it's intended. The channels have to be ones that your target audience is exposed to. The Spanish-language or hip-hop radio station, the neighborhood laundromat or Hispanic market, and the local Catholic church might all be places where young Hispanic parents would come into contact with your message, for instance. People are more apt to see posters or signs in their neighborhood than elsewhere, and to pick up fliers in places where they're already thinking about the issue. (They might be more open to child nutrition information at a health clinic or at the WIC office, for example, than in the video store.)

Another factor that will influence your choice of channels is what resources you have available. If you're a large national organization with a considerable marketing budget, your choice of channels is obviously wider than if you're a small community-based organization largely dependent on staff and volunteers and the generosity of community members.

There are numerous possibilities here. While paid advertisement is one of them, other information distribution channels, as well as entertainment, can also serve the purpose well, even - or especially - for small organizations without large marketing budgets.

Advertisement

• Paid ads in print (newspapers and magazines) and on radio and TV are perhaps what most of us think of when we imagine trying to get the word out. The particular type of ad and the particular channel used will be determined at least partially by the availability of resources.
• Public Service Announcements (PSAs). Radio and TV stations are required by their licenses to run a certain number of free PSAs for non-profit entities. Many stations will help you write the copy, and will perform them as well.
• Billboards and signs. These can be creative both in the way they're designed (see below) and in the way they're presented. People walking the neighborhood with sandwich boards, for instance, might draw more attention than a simple posted sign, and they could also provide information and answer questions.
• Sponsorship of or links to events, radio or TV shows, sports teams, etc. This kind of thing can be done at almost any level, from sponsoring a local first-and -second-grade soccer team to having your message splashed on national TV, depending upon your resources and connections.

Information channels

• Posters. In appropriate locations, couched in simple language, and with tear -off phone numbers or other information, these can be very effective.
• Fliers and brochures. As discussed above, these can be more compelling in places where the issue is already in people's minds.
• Organizational and community newsletters. These may range from church bulletins to the internal newsletters of global corporations.
• Promotional materials. Items from the familiar caps, T-shirts, and mugs to skateboards, tongue depressors, or imprinted lollipops ("Lick poverty now!") can serve as effective channels for your message.
• Comic books or other reading material. Reading matter that is intrinsically interesting to the target audience can be used to deliver a message through a story that readers are eager to follow, or simply through the compelling nature of the medium and its design.
• Internet sites. Depending upon the audience, this can be a successful way to reach a large number of people. You probably need to think carefully about links from other sites, and about a strategy to make the site easily accessible through search engines. An Internet presence would probably work best in combination with other approaches, so that the URL would be listed in other channels.
• Letters to the Editor.
• News stories, columns, and reports (on TV and radio as well as in newspapers and magazines) that you suggest, are featured in, or contribute to. Many media outlets have specific avenues for participation (National Public Radio "Letters" segments, for instance, or Newsweek's "My Turn" column).
• Press releases and press conferences. These may announce the kick-off or status of a campaign, simply provide information about your issue, or showcase new information about the issue that may help to change people's perceptions or behavior.
• Presentations or presence at local and national conferences, fairs, and other gatherings.
• Announcements and presentations at public and institutional or organizational gatherings. This can include anything from a short presentation at a local church or school to a fleet of sound trucks blanketing a city with a social marketing message.

United Way of America makes a video every year that it distributes to all local United Ways to use in their fundraising efforts. Professionally produced and narrated by a well-known celebrity, the video adds both credibility and substance to the local campaign by spotlighting a particular issue, and is used as part of a presentation by member agencies or volunteers for the local United Way.

• Community outreach or street work. Having one or more staff members spreading your message in the community can be very effective if they have the right connections and networks.
• Community or national events. The Great American Smokeout, National Literacy Day, a community "Take Back the Night" evening against violence, and hundreds of other community events can serve to convey a message and highlight an issue.
• Public demonstrations. A public demonstration on your issue doesn't have to be confrontational: it can be positive and upbeat, and still grab the public's attention. (Please see
• Word of mouth. If you can get to a few key influential people, they can help to extend a social marketing message to a whole target population simply through their networks and their day-to-day contacts.

Everett Rogers, in his book Diffusion of Innovations, shows how an innovation can be spread quickly once it is adopted by a critical mass of key people. A famous study in Japan showed how, in a population of several hundred monkeys, a new behavior (washing the sand off food) at first spread very slowly. One monkey, then another, mostly young, learned the behavior and began to use it. It took weeks for the number of monkeys washing food to reach about 100, but at that point, the new behavior became universal literally overnight. We're primates, too: when enough people get the message, it spreads rapidly to the rest.

Entertainment

• Movies. Various social marketing messages have been encapsulated in movies ever since the beginnings of the film industry. Movies have carried messages about the status of women, adult literacy, homosexuality, mental illness, AIDS, and numerous other social issues.
• TV. The groundbreaking '70's sitcom All in the Family and 60 Minutes are examples of the different ways television can effectively convey social messages. In Mexico, where TV soap operas are extremely popular, they have been used as instruments to change behavior in areas such as family planning and child nutrition.

In addition to being the message, entertainment can be used for marketing in other ways as well. An organization could, for instance, arrange a screening of a movie or TV show - at a local theater, and/or with the cooperation or even participation of some of those involved in the creation of the piece - which highlights a particular issue. The media could be invited, and the event could generate a good amount of publicity.

• Theater and interactive theater. Since the ancient Athens, when Aristophanes' Lysistrata, for instance, protested the Peloponesian War, theater and interactive theater - where the audience becomes part of the drama, either through questioning the actors or actually taking part in the stage action - have addressed social issues.

Art Ellison, a New Hampshire adult educator, started an interactive theater group to help people better understand the issues facing adult literacy students. As a result of that troupe's performances at conferences and meetings, the idea spread to other New England states. Massachusetts now has two adult literacy interactive theater groups - composed of adult educators and learners - that perform throughout the state.

• Music. Music has been used as a social marketing tool probably since the beginning of human history. It has inspired devotion to every major religion, nurtured patriotism, encouraged revolution, spurred the labor movement, and acted as the rock upon which the American Civil Rights Movement was based.

Music is such a powerful tool to influence people's behavior because it bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to the emotions. Many pieces of music still performed today began as, essentially, elements of social marketing. Martin Luther wrote "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God " to spur the Protestant Reformation, while "We Shall Overcome" buoyed the spirits of black and white freedom workers and protesters in the darkest days of the Civil Rights Movement.

Music performance can also be an effective social marketing channel, even when the content of the music is not specific to the issue at hand. Benefit concerts, or concerts aimed explicitly at raising the profile of an issue or behavior, can draw large crowds and spread a message simply by the participation of the performers.

• Message design. The design of the actual message - what it looks like, what it sounds like - can greatly affect how well it reaches the target audience. Design alone can make a message more or less understandable, accessible, or noticeable, no matter how well you've chosen the channels through which it's offered. As a result, the creativity and attention you expend on the visual and audial elements of your message are crucial.

Visual elements

If your message is in a visual medium - print, TV, movies, the Internet - whether it's moving or stationary, there are particular issues to consider. If you're able to have your messages designed by a graphic artist or filmmaker, she'll probably have lots of ideas about these issues. In order to contribute - or if you're your own designer - it will be helpful to consider:

• Color. Bright colors tend to attract attention, but sometimes say the wrong thing, clashing with the actual content of your message. You might use bright colors to advertise a health fair or a smoke-out; you probably wouldn't use them to bring people to a memorial service for victims of AIDS.
• Unusual visual elements. Infrared photography, black-and-white abstract design, distortion, speeded-up or slow-motion film or video, and other interesting visual effects can be engaging, if they're not too jolting.
• Particularly beautiful or arresting images. The raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, the silent scream of the young woman leaning over a fallen student at Kent State: a photograph -- or film or video image -- can cement a message in a viewer's mind, and symbolize that message long after the exact words that accompanied it are gone.
• Movement. A still photograph can trap tremendous movement, while a film or video can have virtually none. Movement, whether encapsulated in a photograph or used literally in a film or video, tends to capture attention.
• Accessibility. The familiarity of the images or print you use, how easily they're understood, and what kind of language they're couched in (in the case of print) all contribute to how accessible they'll be to the target audience.
• Subliminal or subtle visual messages. Unspoken communication -- the presence or absence of people of color or of people with disabilities, for instance -- makes it possible to use visual images to send complex messages without having to use words
• Identification. Showing people just like those in the target audience engaging in particular behavior is one way to help convince the target audience to do the same.

Sound elements

If your medium depends upon sound - radio or, often, TV - that presents its own set of issues. Sound is tremendously important in our reactions to the world around us, and a social marketing message can use it, as commercial marketing messages do, as an emotional or other trigger.

• Music. Depending upon whom you're aiming at and what you're trying to get across, you might use music either as a background or as the message itself. A familiar tune or type of music can help the hearer identify with the message, or can engage him on an emotional level. A loud or unusual musical feature can draw his attention. A particularly catchy jingle or song can make your message impossible to forget.

In the science fiction novel The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester, a character uses the power of a catchy jingle to keep other telepathic characters from reading his mind. The jingle - composed in the book by a skilled marketer - takes over the character's conscious mind so thoroughly that, not only can he not stop mentally repeating it, but it blocks out his other conscious and subconscious thoughts.

• Voice quality. If you're using an announcer, a voice-over, or a spokesperson (see below), her voice can convey any number of tones - comforting, authoritative, warm and welcoming, attention-getting, concerned, panicky, superior, realistic, etc. It generally makes sense to be sure that the tone of the voice or voices in your message match the tone of the message itself, or carry the real message you want to get across.

The voice-over of a well-known TV ad depicting "your brain on drugs" as a fried egg, for instance, was very clearly meant to convey toughness and a clear-eyed understanding of the real dangers of drug abuse. Whether the ad was in fact effective or not, there was no question as to its tone or intent.

Use of spokespersons.

Many social marketing campaigns employ one or more spokespersons. They may be famous or not, but they become symbols of the campaign, and - if it penetrates their minds - people come to identify them with it. The choice of a spokesperson is one more element that can help to make a social marketing message successful.

If the spokesperson is to contribute to, rather than detract from, your message's effectiveness, she has to be chosen carefully. As with any area of social marketing, you can find out whom people will respond to by asking them. Some suggestions:

• Familiar figures. If the target audience seems to prefer to hear messages from someone they already know and trust, you can capitalize on that by employing spokespeople from the community, or who have connections to the community. Clergy, local business people, youth leaders, or respected elected officials could all be good (or bad) choices. Another possibility is simply to use members of the target population itself. They share experience with the mass of the audience, and are assumed trustworthy because their point of view is likely to be the same as that of the rest of the audience.

Your choice of spokespersons may vary depending upon which segment of your audience you're aiming at. As mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, for instance, it has long been known in the adult literacy community that authorities talking about the breadth and severity of the problem attract volunteers; current and former learners talking about their successes attract new learners.

• Celebrities. Just as Nike recruited Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to lend credibility to their products, a social marketing campaign might recruit a celebrity (usually for free as a public service, rather than for the millions paid to Jordan and Woods) to represent its message. While you'd want someone who's nationally known for a national campaign, for a local campaign, a local celebrity might serve just as well. Sports or other heroes (astronauts, for instance), musicians, actors, and elected officials (right up to Congresspersons and Senators and beyond - Barbara Bush sponsored an adult literacy campaign) are all possibilities in this category.

The celebrity should be someone who actually has some connection with and knows about the issue in question, or people will have no reason to believe him. The actor Michael J. Fox, who is himself a Parkinson's sufferer, sponsors and speaks for research into Parkinson's disease.

• Authority figures. Some audiences are more comfortable hearing from people who either embody authority (CEOs, police chiefs, the President, the mayor), or are authorities in the field the campaign covers (doctors, college professors, environmental scientists).

Links to familiar themes and values.

A final design element that can help attract people to your message is to grab them with something familiar and interesting in order to lead them into the unfamiliar territory of the message. An example is to use images or discussions about school - an interest of most parents - as an introduction to approaching parenting or youth violence issues. Starting out with a familiar scenario, or with an appeal to a strongly held value of the target population ("We all want our kids to grow up safe... ") can attract attention where a direct reference to an unfamiliar issue ("Are your walls covered with lead paint?") may not.

How to approach common barriers to effective social marketing communication

In addition to the obvious - you ignore the basic rules of good communication; your message is badly presented or just plain wrong - there are a number of reasons why messages can go astray or not be heard. It's important to be aware of these before you create a communications strategy and individual messages, so that you can plan for getting around them.

Ignorance. If people in the target audience have no awareness of the issue, it may be hard to get their attention. To counter this potential problem, you can focus both on making sure the target audience gets information about the issue and on seeing to it that they are aware of your message.

• Work up to awareness. You don't have to beat people over the head with the issue for them to become aware of it. There's a difference between "You are going to die of AIDS if you don´t read this!!!" and "Did you know that women get AIDS, too?" Starting with awareness may make the ultimate message ("Always use a condom") easier for people to hear and act on.
• Place your message carefully. We've already discussed the importance of channels. Using channels where people will see the message repeatedly and without effort (the Mexican soap opera, e.g.), or making sure your message is everywhere in the local area, will make the audience aware at least that the issue exists.
• Enlist trusted informants first. Doctors, pharmacists, therapists, bartenders, beauticians, and teachers are all in positions where they can pass on information. Natural helpers - those people to whom others in a neighborhood turn when they need help or advice - can also be enlisted. In some cases, it may make sense to train members of the target audience to spread the word.

In Boston, groups of teens were trained as AIDS prevention workers. They roamed their neighborhoods equipped with information and supplies of condoms, and were very successful in convincing their peers to practice safe sex and to get tested if they had any question about their HIV status.

Selective inattention. All of us are bombarded with thousands of messages every day. Commercial and social marketers, the government, individual merchants, institutions, performing arts organizations, and municipal services, among others, all vie for our attention. As a matter of pure survival, we learn to screen out anything that isn't directly or immediately relevant: it becomes background noise.

Especially if your target audience is ill-informed about your issue, they are likely to screen out your message. It is, after all, only one of many telling them that a behavior change will, in some way improve their lives. How can you convince them to notice and listen to your message amidst all the others to which they're subjected?

There is no one answer to this question, but using the four aspects of the message discussed previously - channels, design, spokespersons, and familiar themes - can help to bring your message to people's consciousness.

• Channels. Obviously, you need to get your audience's attention. Put your message where they can't miss it. Smaller organizations with fewer resources might try, in addition to normal postings everywhere in target areas, looking for places where there aren't a lot of competing messages. The community bulletin board at the supermarket is probably overflowing: there may be far fewer postings in the pharmacy or the kids' clothing store. In addition, speaking at community events and on local radio or cable TV talk shows can also help you highlight your message and set it apart.
• Design. Besides the obvious - bright colors, catchy music - the design elements that might be most important here are those which will convince your audience that the message is one that's relevant specifically to them. The use of images that mirror the target population, for instance, and of situations that reflect those in their own lives, might help to catch their attention. A message in their native language, if they belong to a language minority, or one that approaches the issue through concerns prominent in their culture might also serve to draw them in.
• Spokespersons. Just as the images in the ad should mirror the target audience and their experiences, the spokespersons you choose should do the same. They should either be people who are part of, or could be part of, the audience itself, or celebrities who come out of the same experience as the target audience.

Kobe Bryant is certainly a legitimate black sports hero, but he grew up in relative affluence, lived in Europe for many years in his childhood, and speaks three languages fluently. His experience is obviously not similar to that of a black youth growing up in poverty on the streets of Chicago or Los Angeles. A better spokesperson would be a player who's come out of those same streets and knows what his audience's lives are like.

• Familiar themes. Another way to catch the attention of your target audience is to introduce the unfamiliar with the familiar, as discussed above.

Selective inexposure. Not only do we screen messages to keep things manageable: we actively avoid messages that we think of as "not for us" or frightening or annoying or uncomfortable. People who dislike or are intimidated by classical music don't tend to listen to public radio, for instance, or to look at newspaper ads for symphony concerts.

• Use channels that "belong" to the target audience. Place messages in venues that the target audience sees as their own - local sports clubs and churches, for instance, stores and other places that they frequent, or non-English-language radio stations.
• Help the target audience identify with the message. Employ images, spokespeople, or vignettes that clearly show other members of the target population engaging in or concerned with the activity or issue in question.
• Demonstrate how the issue is relevant to the target audience. Through the content or other facets of your message, show how the issue affects members of the audience directly, and exactly how the proposed change can serve them.

Studies have shown that too frightening a message will cause people to tune out. They either ignore it entirely, or externalize it ("That won't happen to me - it only happens to others.")

Principles. Often, social marketing campaigns concern issues that people see through the filter of moral, religious, or cultural values. (Many people object to homosexuality on religious or cultural grounds, and so may object to the defense of the basic rights of gay citizens.) This is a particularly difficult barrier to overcome. There are really only two approaches that you can take:

• Show the target population that they've misunderstood the principle involved. In some cases, people may simply misinterpret the meaning of the principle they're following. In that situation, it may be relatively easy to present the right interpretation, perhaps through a clergyman or other trusted informant. Once the misunderstanding has been cleared up, the problem is solved.
• Convince the target population that, even though they've understood the principle correctly, another, more important, principle takes precedence in this case. This may mean either that the second principle is more important within the same tradition (in most religions, the sanctity of life outweighs the sanctity of property, for example), or that you need to elevate the standing of a principle that the audience doesn't currently consider as important as the one that presents a barrier. It may be possible to convince some people who favor the death penalty that upholding the principle of the sanctity of life is more important than punishment or revenge.

How to develop effective messages: eight steps from Alan Andreasen

In Marketing Social Change, Alan Andreasen suggests an eight-step process for effective communication:

• Set up outcome-linked, measurable objectives for your communication strategy. What exactly does your message aim to accomplish? Increased awareness? Actual behavior change? Maintenance of a particular behavior? A certain amount more or less of a particular behavior?

You need to set your objective in terms that can be measured in some way. Some examples are the decrease in the number of packs of cigarettes bought in your area over a particular period of time; the number of students using a new peer mediation program. By setting measurable objectives, you'll be able to gauge whether your message is having an effect.

• Develop messages that emerge from the target audience, recognizing message competition. This step is about listening to the target audience.
  • The message should be one that the target audience has already indicated it will listen to. From focus groups, interviews, and other market research, you can find out and act on what members of the target audience think will get their attention.
  • Recognize message competition. If you're conducting an anti-smoking effort, for instance, your audience will encounter several kinds of messages different from yours: tobacco ads; the pleasure of smoking itself; fear of weight gain; peer pressure to smoke; and the fear that if they admit smoking is dangerous, they might actually suffer its consequences. Your communication strategy needs to acknowledge the existence of these messages, and try to counter them with arguments or messages that engage the target audience. (Some counters might be the fact that tobacco companies have been lying to the public for years about smoking's ill effects; the cost of smoking; the advantages to overall health of a good diet and exercise; the need to think independently; and the dangers to loved ones of secondhand smoke.)
• Select appropriate channels. See the discussion of channels earlier in this section.
• Develop different communications for different segments. Use market research to create a specific message for each segment of the target audience.
• Pretest every message. Once you've developed messages, go back to the target population - in the form of focus groups and interviews, or even informally - and get their feedback. If the messages aren't effective, change them in the ways the feedback tells you to. Don't be tied to something you think is great if the target audience doesn't respond to it.
• Integrate your communications program internally. Make sure that each communication sends the same message: don't confuse people with a barrage of issues, or with messages that might be seen as contradictory.
• Integrate your communications program with everything else in the marketing mix. Personal presentations, ads, news stories, lobbying, and anything else that you do should carry the same message. Again, don't confuse people: be clear and consistent.
• Evaluate outcomes by your original criteria. How effective did your communication seem to be? If the answer seems to be very little or not at all, get back to the drawing board.

A ninth step from the Community Tool Box

In addition to Andreasen's eight steps, there's really a ninth: after you've made whatever changes were indicated by your evaluation,

• Start the whole process over again. Even effective communications need to be changed to keep your message fresh (How long, after all, does it take for your reaction to a TV commercial to turn from "That's really clever!" to "Oh, no... not this again"?), or to respond to changes in conditions or in the target audience. If your campaign has been successful in changing people's behavior, for instance, your message needs to change from "Why don't you try this?" to "Look at what you've accomplished ! Keep up the good work!"

In Summary

Communication is really the core of any social marketing campaign. Your communication has to convey your ideas and message clearly; has to be accessible by the people it's aimed at; and has to be noticeable. If people don't understand, aren't exposed to, or don't pay any attention to your message, they won't respond by changing their behavior.

Therefore, you have to pay attention to four aspects of the message in order to make sure it will be effective:

• The channels through which the communication is delivered. The message has to be delivered in language that assures that the target audience can understand it, and has to be available in places where the target audience will come in contact with it.
• The design of the message. How the communication looks, sounds, and reads will do much to determine whether the target audience will notice and pay attention to it.
• The use and choice of spokespersons. Choosing a credible spokesperson - someone whom the target audience respects and believes - can contribute hugely to the effectiveness of your message. Choosing the wrong spokesperson - someone the target audience has no reason to pay attention to, or whom they view as actively hostile - can assure that your communication will fall flat.
• The use of familiar themes and values. Using a familiar situation or idea or appealing to the values of the target audience can help to smooth the way for a new concept or a suggestion for a behavior change they hadn't considered.

You can use these four aspects of the message individually and in combination to over come the most common barriers to social marketing communication:

• Ignorance. Often, members of the target population know little or nothing about the issue, and therefore don't see it as relevant.
• Selective inattention. Your issue is just one of the thousands of messages to which the target audience is subjected every day. If it doesn't have a "hook" to draw them in, they'll screen it out.
• Selective inexposure. People make it their business to stay out of the way of messages that they see as meant for groups other than theirs, or that they find frightening, discomfiting, or annoying.
• Principle. If your message contradicts the religious, moral, or cultural values of the target audience, they'll see it as hostile and wrong unless you can either convince them that another principle takes precedence in this case.

Alan Andreasen, one of the gurus of social marketing, suggests eight steps to effective social marketing communication:

• Set up outcome-linked, measurable objectives for your communication strategy.
• Develop messages that emerge from the target population, recognizing message competition.
• Select appropriate channels.
• Develop different communications for different market segments.
• Pretest every message.
• Integrate your communications program internally (make sure that your communications all say the same thing).
• Integrate your communications program with everything in the marketing mix.
• Evaluate outcomes by your original criteria.

The Tool Box adds a ninth step: Make adjustments guided by your evaluation, then go through the process again, for as long as your campaign lasts.

What is effective social marketing communication?

___Your communication is two-way: your audience understands your message as you meant it.

___Your communication is accessible.

___Your communication is noticeable.

What are tools for reaching the target audience?

___You carefully choose and mix the channels for your message.

___You carefully consider visual and/or sound elements and the overall design of your message.

___You choose appropriate spokespersons.

___You link your message to themes and values familiar to the target audience.

How do you approach common barriers to effective social marketing communication ?

___You recognize and know how to address each of the common barriers to effective social marketing communication:

___Ignorance

___Selective inattention

___Selective inexposure

___Principle

How do you develop effective messages?

___You set up outcome-linked, measurable objectives for your communication strategy.

___You develop messages that emerge from the target audience, recognizing message competition.

___You select appropriate channels.

___You develop different communications for different segments.

___You pretest every message.

___You integrate your communications program internally.

___You integrate your communications program with everything else in the marketing mix.

___You evaluate outcomes by your original criteria.

___You repeat the process.

Example #1: The Fifth Guy

This video is part of a social marketing campaign implemented by the Florida Department of Health in May 2007 to increase awareness of the importance of hand-washing to prevent the spread of illness.

Example #2: Film from SOS Children's Villages Norway

If you saw a boy without a coat shivering alone at a bus stop, what would you do? SOS Children's Villages Norway, seeking to raise awareness and funds to help Syrian children in need, created this moving film. They set up a hidden camera and placed Johannes at a bus stop, in Oslo, Norway, and it's moving to see how people respond. An SOS rep shared, "The goal was to touch upon the fear of becoming numb to crises that don't affect you directly."

(To view in English, choose English on the captions icon in media player in YouTube.)

Read more on Adweek

 

Example 3: Metro Trains: Dumb Ways to Die

Public service announcements are known for being boring, so back in 2012, Melbourne Metro Trains decided to liven things up a bit with their visual marketing campaign, and came up with the perfect way. How do you convey a message to avoid deaths caused by train accidents? You add cute cartoons, a catchy tune, and some dark humor, of course! And so they came up with some catchy lyrics about several dumb ways to die – getting your toast out with a fork, doing your own electrical work, keeping a rattlesnake as a pet, selling both your kidneys on the Internet, to name a few.

As expected, the campaign went viral. Within 24 hours, the song reached iTunes Top 10 Charts, and has 140 million views on YouTube as of this date!

Read more about this example from The Yellow Sparrow.

 

Example 4: ALS: Ice Bucket Challenge

This one, you know it just had to be on the list. These challenges were all the rage back in 2013, and your Facebook newsfeeds were flooded with people pouring ice cold water on themselves, nominating people to do the same, and then donating some amount for the ALS Association. But here’s the best part: ALS never planned this campaign!

Wait, what?!

Yup, a golfer from Florida, Chris Kennedy, nominated a friend to participate in the Ice Bucket Challenge, which had nothing to do with ALS at the time.

Read more about this example from The Yellow Sparrow.

 

• What do we mean by making behavior change easier and more rewarding?

• Why should you try to make behavior change easier and more rewarding?

• When is the best time to address benefits and costs?

• What are some ways to look at the benefits of behavior change?

• What are some ways to look at the costs of behavior change?

• How do you make behavior change easier and more rewarding?

Marge was a single mother on welfare. When welfare reform hit, she was actually glad it was happening: she wanted to go to work, and hoped that this would give her the opportunity to get off welfare once and for all. Her case worker saw her as a prime candidate for job training, and helped her enroll in a Certified Nurse's Aide program.

Although she was unsure of her ability, Marge was really excited. She had always been interested in health care, and saw this as not only a way of finding a decent job, but the first step on a long climb to becoming a nurse. She eagerly waited for classes to start.

Then reality hit. First, Marge found out that the classes were held way across town, two long bus rides away - as much as two hours. She had to find child care for her two young children, and worried about being away from them. Her case worker got her on the waiting list for an approved day care center, where child care would be free, but even one opening, let alone two, might be months away. And there was no way Marge could afford to pay a baby sitter for the 30 or more hours a week that she'd be away.

Marge was also discouraged by her intake interview for the program. The interviewer told her she'd be one of the oldest people in the class, and that, since she hadn't been in school for several years, she'd have to study hard. He didn't seem to be very encouraging, or to care much whether she succeeded or not. Marge was already worried about her ability to pass the course: the interview only increased her self -doubt.

After the interview, Marge gave up. If the training program had been closer to home, if there had been reliable child care, if the interviewer had taken an interest, Marge might have found it easier to go through with the training. The costs to her of the training program - the travel time, the child-care hassles, her anxiety about her children, her feelings of incompetence and self-doubt - simply outweighed the potential of benefits that were still vague and several months or years in the future.

When people are being asked to change their behavior, they pay attention to the benefits and costs of that change. This section will help you, as a social marketer, find ways to make the benefits of change attractive enough, and the costs of change low enough, that people will be willing to try something new.

What do we mean by making behavior change easier and more rewarding?

To make behavior change easier and more rewarding, you have to do your best to arrange things so that people perceive that they're getting the greatest benefits with the least cost possible. Alan Andreasen, in Marketing Social Change, proposes a three-pronged approach, summarized as SESDED: Superior Exchange; Socially Desirable; Easily Done.

• Superior Exchange: This means, very simply, you have to offer the best deal for the price. If people feel they're getting large benefits at a small cost, it's clearly worth it to them to change. By the same token, if the new behavior will clearly bring benefits greater than those of the current behavior - whether actual or perceived - then change is likely to occur.

There are three ways to try to create a superior exchange, all of which will be discussed in greater detail later in this section:

• Increase benefits. This could mean literally adding benefits to those already anticipated; providing information about benefits which people didn't know about previously; or changing people's perceptions about the importance of the benefits they know about.
• Decrease costs. Decreasing costs could involve subsidizing actual financial costs; changing conditions to make other kinds of costs less of an issue; or, once again, changing people's perceptions about the importance of particular costs.
• Decrease the desirability of competing alternatives. Badmouthing the competition is a standard commercial (and political) marketing technique. For social marketers, it is useful only in situations where the competition is a behavior detrimental to the health or well-being of the individual or society. If the goal is to eliminate the other behavior and substitute the changed behavior for it, then making the detrimental behavior less desirable makes sense. If the competition is a different program or treatment, then trying to discredit it may be unethical, and may easily backfire.
• Socially Desirable. People are much more likely to adopt a new behavior if friends, family, and/or their social group approve of it or practice it themselves. In that case, there is actually social pressure to make the change.
• Easily Done. The more easily the new behavior can be practiced, the more people are apt to adopt it. Removing barriers to participation in services, helping people gain the relevant skills to make a particular change, and providing material and psychological support are all ways to make behavior change easier to accomplish.

Why should you try to make behavior change easier and more rewarding?

There are really two simple reasons for you to try to make behavior change easier and more rewarding: it's possible, and it's important.

It's possible on two fronts:

• Through market research, you can find out a great deal about how your target audience views behavior change. This information can help you decide just how to market it, and increase the chances that your campaign will be successful.
• The benefits, costs, and conditions of behavior change are under your control, to at least some extent. You can change benefits, for instance, by increasing them; by altering the tone or target of an advocacy message; by attaching benefits to the behavior change itself, rather than just to its consequences; or by changing people's perceptions of their importance. By the same token, you can reduce costs by removing barriers, by providing more support for behavior change, by removing actual material costs (reducing or eliminating a fee, for instance), or by altering the circumstances or attributes of the desired behavior.

Making change easier and more rewarding is important because those can be the factors that determine whether or not people will actually make a behavior change. If they see the task as too hard, the costs as too great or the benefits as not great enough, they probably won't do what you hope they will. As a social marketer, therefore, you need to try to tip the scales on the side of change.

When is the best time to address benefits and costs?

As we've discussed throughout this chapter on social marketing, timing is important. In this case, we're not talking about time of day or time of year, but rather where in the process of change the target audience is. Here's a brief description of it, abridged from Segmenting the Market to Reach the Targeted Population:

Knowledge about the problem. The first step is knowing that the problem exists. There has to be awareness before there can be any movement toward change.
Belief in the problem's importance. Once people know about the problem, they have to believe there is a reason they should be concerned about it. That often means understanding how it applies to them personally.
Desire to change. People have to decide that there's a reason that they or the situation have to change. Many people, for instance, know that smoking is a health issue, and that it is important to individuals and society, but still aren't ready to quit themselves.
Belief in one's ability to change. Those reluctant smokers in the paragraph above have to believe they can quit before they'll make an effort to do so.
Action. At this point, individuals have resolved the previous four issues, and are ready and able to do something about the problem.
Ability to maintain the change. Once someone's taken the appropriate action, it's still not all over. Quitting smoking for a week isn't enough: quitting for a lifetime is the goal.

People are most concerned with benefits and costs - and most important to reach - when they're contemplating change. They've gotten to the point where they want to change, or even where they believe they can, but they haven't gotten to the point of taking action yet. It is at these points in the cycle when addressing benefits and costs is most effective.

Research has shown that early in their contemplation of change - when they've decided that change is really desirable - people are particularly concerned with the benefits of change, but often don't yet have a clear idea of what all those benefits are. Later in the cycle - when they've decided they actually have the ability to make the change, and it therefore becomes a real possibility - they pay more attention to potential costs. These are the times, then, when addressing benefits and costs could make the difference.

What are some ways to look at the benefits of behavior change?

It may seem that the benefits of behavior change, though dependent on the change in question, would be clear to all concerned. However, the way you view those benefits and the way your target audience views them may differ drastically. What you see as the obvious benefits of a behavior may be unimportant to others: they may be far more interested in something you regard as incidental.

A change may bring short-term or long-term benefits, or both. Sometimes the benefits don't go to the person making the change at all, but to others: her family, a particular group of people, or the society as a whole. Health and community activists most often focus on long-term benefits, and often on those that benefit larger groups. Individuals may be more interested in immediate benefits to themselves or those close to them. Market research can bring out these differences, and make it easier to couch benefits in ways that the target audience will respond to.

Some examples of various kinds of benefits

Short-term individual benefits.

• Improvement in physical appearance and well-being.
• Incidental improvements specific to the new behavior. (If you stop smoking, your clothes and breath no longer smell of cigarettes, for instance.)
• Pleasure in learning a new skill
• Enjoyment of the new behavior. (Regular exercise may take the form of a daily racquetball game, or hikes in the mountains.)
• Economic benefits.
• New friends.
• Chance to meet powerful or famous people (as an advocate or spokesperson).

Short-term benefits to others.

• Others may experience the immediate benefits of behavior change: relief from secondhand smoke, for instance, or children's benefits from new parenting or teaching skills on the part of adults.
• Disenfranchised groups (welfare recipients, for instance, or migrant workers) may feel that someone cares about their issues, and may win at least temporary political victories (increased funding, recognition of issues, etc.).

Long-term individual benefits.

• Better overall and lifelong health, leading to improved quality of life.
• More skills, and a broader skill base to build on.
• Improved economic status and/or employment and career satisfaction.
• Better relationships.
• Increased confidence and self-esteem.
• Feeling of virtuousness, satisfaction of "doing good."

Long-term benefits for others.

• A better life for children and future generations.
• A better environment - whether physical, social, or psychological - for everyone.
• More opportunity for others in the long term.
• A more just world.

What are some ways to look at the costs of behavior change?

As with benefits, the target audience may view costs in a different light than the social marketer does. What might seem insignificant to one person - speaking in public or getting a shot - might represent a huge cost to another. The costs of behavior change can sometimes be measured in money, but are more often measured in other ways, as we saw with Marge, the potential Certified Nurse's Aide trainee.

Unlike benefits, most costs are direct costs to the individual making the change. In order to address them, you have to find out what costs are in fact important to the target audience, and what would constitute minimizing them. Once again, market research can help here, but you have to ask the right questions. It may take a lot of probing to find out what people see as the real costs.

Potential adult literacy learners often find many reasons not to enroll in a program. Lack of transportation and child care are two of the most common. The costs associated with these are money, time, and anxiety about their children. Another important cost is to self-esteem. Many learners find unbearable the feeling of failure that goes with admitting that they need help in this fundamental area. Even this, however, may not be at the root of their reluctance to enroll.

The real cost may be associated with upsetting the balance in a relationship with a spouse or significant other. That person may have responsibilities important to him or her as a result of the learner's lack of skills. If the learner gains those skills, then the dynamic of the relationship must change, and that's often difficult and terrifying for both partners. The situation gets even more complex if the relationship is abusive in some way, or tremendously one-sided. The possible costs to a learner and partner could be immense.

Some examples of various kinds of costs of behavior change

Economic. Sometimes costs really do involve money.

• Members of the target audience might have to pay directly for their changes - recycling, for instance, or regular dental care - or there might be costs to taking advantage of new services or a new behavior - transportation or child care, e.g.
• Their taxes might go up if they vote for land conservation or a new school or pollution clean-up.
• Their behavior change might increase their consumer costs - if they lobby a power company to switch to a cleaner and more expensive fuel, for example.
• They could put their financial security in jeopardy. A whistle blower or striker could be fired; a woman leaving an abusive partner might be giving up financial support.
• They might affect their personal finances by voting against a tax cut, or by protesting, as shareholders, an unethical corporate action that would actually make them money.

Physical.

• Behavior change might require physical effort - cleaning up a vacant lot, exercising regularly, hanging out clothes instead of using the dryer, sorting recyclables.
• Behavior change might cause physical pain or discomfort - substance withdrawal, inoculations and other medical tests and procedures, turning the thermostat down in winter and up in summer to conserve energy.

Time and logistics.

• The necessity of arranging and spending travel time to and from services, volunteering, recycling, etc.
• The necessity of arranging other support (child care, joining a support group) for new behavior.
• Rearrangement of schedules to make time for new behaviors - volunteering, exercise, or participation in services, for instance.
• Sacrifice of family or leisure time in order to accommodate the new behavior.
• Behavior change may result in less sleep time.

Psychological.

• The fear that a medical procedure will be painful or reveal a serious condition.
• Anxiety about competency in the new behavior.
• Stress over time management and responsibilities.
• Guilt about neglecting family or other responsibilities, or about doing something your culture disapproves of.
• The anxiety and pain caused by having to confront issues you've been avoiding.
• The psychological discomfort caused by stopping the use of an addictive substance
• Anxiety about change - new experiences, new people, and new ideas.

Social.

• Loss of friendships or associations based on shared behavior (not smoking with other smokers on your break, for instance).
• Loss of intimate relationships (leaving an abusive spouse or a gang).
• Disapproval of or disagreement with friends and others.
• Social pressure. (The social pressure on whites to remain segregationist in the mid-20th -century South was overwhelming, for example.)

How do you make behavior change easier and more rewarding?

Good commercial marketers don't rely solely on clever or original promotion to convince consumers to buy their products. In addition, they use their research to change the attributes, placement, and prices of the products to make them more attractive.  You can do the same, presenting change as a desirable prospect while increasing benefits and decreasing costs in order to make its accomplishment easier.

The first step is to research what your target audience wants, and what costs they're willing to bear. The next is to develop a plan for using your research, combining a promotion strategy with actions to address the benefit and cost issues your research has raised. Finally, you have to pretest what you've come up with to make sure that it does in fact satisfy the concerns of your target audience.

Find out the real reasons why people are willing to contemplate changing their behavior, and focus your campaign on those reasons. This means probing until you get to the core values or principles or issues associated with the change in question. For example, someone considering taking action in favor of environmental preservation might say she's doing it because "I love the outdoors." In fact, underlying that statement could be any - or all - of a number of basic principles:

• Love of outdoor activity (hiking; outdoor sports such as skiing; hunting and fishing; camping; etc.)
• Concern with aesthetics and the beauty of natural surroundings.
• Desire to preserve natural beauty and recreational possibilities for future generations.
• Religious or moral scruples about defacing the earth.
• Concern about upsetting the ecological balance of an area.
• Fairness and social justice (Why should someone have the right to destroy natural beauty simply because he has the money to do so?)
• The need to be politically consistent, and take positions on the environment that conform, at least in the person's mind, with her positions on other issues.
• Self-image (I want to see myself as someone who cares about the earth.)

Understanding the real value behind people's opinion on this issue makes it possible to gear both your message and your other strategies to that value. If the real value is love of outdoor activity, for instance, then a campaign emphasizing the preservation of natural beauty won't necessarily be very successful, even though it might be asking people to make exactly the same behavior change as one emphasizing outdoor activity.

Alan Andreasen stresses that you have to ask the target audience about benefits, not attributes. If you just ask people what kind of service they want, you won't know why they want it. If the research shows that people want small groups in a job training program, that still doesn't explain what it is about small groups that's attractive, or how to provide or market that concept. If what they want is a chance for more individual attention, and you emphasize that small groups make it easy to make new friends, they may not be interested.

Find out how people would prefer to accomplish behavior change. If the change involves services - e.g. taking part in a job training or literacy program, or undergoing a mammogram - it's important to know what characteristics people want in that service, and why. In many cases, the service itself, or the way it is delivered -rather than its eventual outcome - may be seen as the real benefit of behavior change.

If the behavior change in question doesn't require direct services, what form does the target audience think would give it the greatest chance for being successful? Suppose you're trying to convince people to take part in a community recycling program.

Some of the many variations this program might take:

• Curbside pickup vs. drop-off at a collection point or at the recycling center itself.
• Recycling of all recyclable materials, or just some.
• Residents sorting recyclables before pickup or at the recycling center, as opposed to recycling center employees doing the sorting.
• The program being paid for completely by taxes and/or fees; being paid for by selling the recyclables (meaning that only those materials that found a buyer would be recycled); or a combination of the two, in order to recycle everything possible.

Finding out which - or what combination - of these and other possibilities people would prefer and why would allow you to adjust the program accordingly, and raise the chances that you could successfully market it.

Find out whether others' opinions would sway the target audience's decision, and, if so, whose. Who are the people whose approval or disapproval would determine what members of the target audience do? They may be family and friends, members of the same culture, clergy, or simply society at large. Some groups of people are swayed by others' opinions very little or not at all, and that's equally important to know.

Research shows that, by and large, people who are members of tightly knit groups, and have less education and personal autonomy, are influenced by the behavior and approval of others; those with more education pay more attention to arguments that contrast costs and benefits.

Find out what benefits or costs would actually push people to make or not to make the change desired. This requires some probing. It may, for example, involve asking members of the target audience about their responses to a series of choices, on the order of "Would you take part in this program if it involved travel out of the neighborhood?" or "Would you pay up to $10 a year in increased taxes for this service? $50?" By careful questioning and eliminating of alternatives, you can determine what benefits people find compelling, and what costs they see as reasonable, or as too high.

Find out what kinds of support would make it easier for people to change. Marge might well have accomplished her change if she'd had even one of the supports she needed: some solution for the transportation problem; easily accessible and affordable child care; or emotional support and encouragement for what she saw as a difficult and potentially embarrassing task.

Develop a strategy

Start with SESDED. If you've done your research well, you have the information to tell you what constitutes a superior exchange for your target group, what defines socially desirable for them, and what would help to make the change easily done. Now you have to create a situation where

• The benefits of the change outweigh the costs in the target audience's minds.
• The new behavior is seen as socially acceptable and supported by those whose opinion matters to the target audience.
• The target audience has the skills to adopt the new behavior, and can accomplish it with a minimum of hassle, logistical problems, or unnecessary extra steps.

Think about what the target audience needs to make change possible. There are three essentials for people involved in a change process.

• Information. The more, and more accurate, information people have, the more likely they are to make good decisions.
• Market conditions. The conditions around the change - how easy it is to achieve, how many of the barriers to it have been eliminated, how convenient it is, etc. - go a long way toward determining whether people are going to adopt it. Here's where providing material, psychological, and logistical support - offering a bonus, providing or subsidizing transportation and/or child care, arranging convenient times and places for services or activities, providing those services or activities in ways the target population desires - can really pay off.
• Skills. People have to believe they're capable of making a change before they'll attempt it. If you can provide the necessary skills, or convince people that they already have them, the change is much more probable. That may mean conducting courses, providing group support, going door-to-door in neighborhoods and communities, or simply conducting an information campaign.

You can focus on either benefits or costs in any or all of these areas, depending upon where most of your target audience is starting from.

Decide how to maximize benefits. Earlier, we mentioned three ways to increase benefits: literally increasing them, by adding something the target audience wants; informing the target audience of benefits they may not have known about; or changing the target audience's perception of the importance of benefits.

Add other benefits.

• This may involve:
  • Adding on an actual service or product (adding a job placement service to a job training program, for instance, or increasing the range of free food items available through a child nutrition program, or providing paraprofessional or professional training for volunteers).
  • Adding a benefit that makes the new behavior itself more pleasant, such as a movie to watch in a clinic waiting room, or coffee and snacks for job training participants.
  • Treating people well (being welcoming, supportive, respectful, encouraging, etc.)
  • Giving the target audience something extra - a certificate, for instance, a tax write-off, a social opportunity, or even, as in some job training programs, paying participants to attend.
  • Making the behavior change something that people will like for its own sake - cleaning a vacant lot or building affordable homes can be fun as well as work, if it's structured as a social occasion or a block party.

Provide new information about benefits. People may simply not know all the possible benefits of changing their behavior. Teen smokers may be aware, for example, that they'll reduce their risk of lung cancer if they quit, but they may not have realized that they'll improve their skin tone, be able to taste food better, improve their aerobic fitness, have more disposable income, and reduce their loved ones' risk of cancer and other smoking-related illnesses as well. These or other benefits of quitting may be more persuasive than the chance that they'll be staving off illness in the (for them) unimaginably distant future.

Change the perception of the importance of benefits. Those same teenage smokers might see quitting as more important if it's related to increased romantic possibilities (all those non-smokers who'll now go out with you) or athletic success. People may be more willing to contribute to a non-profit organization if they can understand that its services affect them and those they know, or that its work promotes a better society overall, rather than being narrowly focused.

Decide how to minimize costs. As with benefits, there are three possibilities here: reducing or subsidizing actual financial costs; changing conditions to reduce other types of costs; or changing the target audience's perception of the importance of costs.

• Reduce or subsidize actual financial costs. This might entail offering services free; paying for all or part of child care, transportation, or materials; providing the opportunity to list a contribution as a tax write-off; or even simply providing a pre-stamped envelope in which to send a contribution.
• Change conditions to reduce other types of costs. Here, in addition to providing, rather than subsidizing, such extra services as child care or transportation, you could adjust times to make participation easier (for either program beneficiaries or volunteers); change the location to reduce travel time; and set up conditions to reduce psychological and social costs (you could arrange support groups to counter social pressure; provide counseling, mentoring, or in-service training to help with skills for change; suggest getting regular exercise by playing tennis or volleyball with friends, or hiking with friends in a beautiful area; etc.)
• Decrease the perception of the importance of costs. This is largely a matter of putting things in perspective. Some examples:
  • The comparison of what a contribution will do as opposed to what the same amount of money will buy for you ("For the cost of a meal in a good restaurant, you can feed a whole family for a month.").
  • A demonstration of how much more it costs not to change. (Most researchers estimate that every dollar spent on human services saves four dollars in the long run, by increasing employment and taxpaying, and decreasing the costs of homelessness, hunger, crime, and other social ills.)
  • An explanation that what is perceived as a cost may not be. ("There's no need to feel embarrassed in this group because you didn't graduate from high school - everyone here is in the same situation, and has similar experiences.")

Learn about and counter the competition.

The competition here can consist of anything in the internal or external environment of members of the target population (feelings, cravings, messages, social pressure, etc.) that works against the desired change. Andreasen sees competition as being of four types:

• Desire competition. This encompasses desires that can be satisfied by not adopting the desired behavior. The simplest form of desire competition can be seen in the desire of a recovering alcoholic for a drink, but desire can take more complex forms as well. The desire to please a spouse, for instance, or to fit into a cultural role, could be equally strong. Addressing desires is difficult, and may involve group support, some medical or chemical help (methadone, e.g.), or help with alternative methods to accomplish the same purpose.
• Generic competition. Generic competition consists of other ways that the desire that leads to behavior change can be satisfied. It may mean resorting to prayer instead of medication, or being submissive in the hope of pacifying a domestic abuser. Here, you may have to convince the target population of the effectiveness of your alternative, or offer it as something that can be used in addition to what they're already doing.
• Service form competition. This means that the target population sees and tries to address the particular issue, but by using (ineffective) avenues other than the way you're suggesting. People who are taken in by "cancer cures," and therefore reject what might be life-saving, if unpleasant, chemotherapy, for example, may be responding to service form competition. Again, you may offer the desired change as a better option, or may offer it in addition to whatever other alternative members of the target population are pursuing.
• Enterprise competition. In this situation, another organization or initiative is offering the same results as yours. This may mean it's offering similar services to the target population, or asking them to volunteer for or contribute to a project other than yours. Joining forces might be one possibility here (United Way is really an example of this); another would be promoting your service over others, if there's good reason to do so.

Make the new behavior socially desirable.

Another way of reducing social and psychological costs is to make people feel that the change they're making is supported by those whose opinions they value, by their culture, and/or by the society as a whole. Thus, they can make the change without risking disapproval or, even worse, being cut off from their normal relationships and interactions.

Some ways of making new behavior socially acceptable:

• Blanket the target population and/or the community as a whole with messages showing the desired change as an accepted and normal behavior.
• Choose respected community leaders and members as spokespersons. People are more likely to listen to those they know and respect. If those people are supporting change, they will at least be willing to listen.
• Identify and convince opinion leaders. Everett Rogers, in Diffusion of Innovations, explains how some people are influential in spreading new ideas and behaviors. If you can identify those people in your community and get them practicing the desired behavior, they'll pull others with them.

At the beginning of the annual fundraising campaign, local United Ways recruit members of their boards and other community leaders - usually business people and professionals - to contribute large sums and serve as "pacesetters." They in turn recruit others, and convince them to contribute by pointing out how much they've contributed, that they do it every year, etc. University fund-raising efforts often proceed in this fashion as well.

• Aim messages at those who may influence the thinking of the target population. Sometimes, it's easier and more effective to focus on those who may influence change, rather than those who may actually make the change. Convincing doctors to urge their patients to start exercising regularly may be more effective than trying to convince patients directly.
• Get laws or regulations passed that support the desired change. Much of the reduction in smoking in recent years came about because of federal and state laws that put health warnings on cigarette packs, ended smoking in government buildings, and increased taxes on tobacco products. These laws encouraged many communities to pass their own laws and regulations outlawing smoking in restaurants, enforcing bans on tobacco sales to minors, and otherwise restricting tobacco sales and use. The laws themselves had an effect, but they also helped the public view smoking as less acceptable than in the past, and quitting as a socially acceptable and responsible act.

Make the change easily done: find ways to help the target population gain the necessary skills to make the change, and determine how to remove as many logistical and other barriers as you can.

• Help the target population gain skills. The skills in question might be, among others:
• Interpersonal (talking to children about drugs, participating in or leading meetings, talking to legislators)
• Informational (understanding what particular substances do to your body, learning the history of racism in the U.S., understanding the work of an organization you might contribute to)
• Internal (resisting the temptation to use an addictive substance, pushing yourself to exercise even if you don't want to, acting against what had been deeply-held values) Practical (learning how to tutor a student, how to take your blood pressure, or how to build a house)
• Physical (learning to practice deep relaxation, or to perform CPR)

Your campaign might emphasize support groups or training, might provide information, might show people where and how to gain the skills they need, or might provide a product or process that will help them do what they need to (nicotine patches to help them stop smoking, for instance, as well as the group support they need to be successful in using them).

• Remove barriers to change. Many of the most common barriers - money, transportation, child care, location, time - have been addressed above. There are also issues of safety (locating services for youth in places where they don't have to cross gang turf, for example), accessibility (physical and otherwise), comfort (adult literacy learners are often reluctant to attend classes in a high school, especially if it's the same one in which they experienced embarrassment and failure), and availability of services (many potential participants drop off waiting lists for services, volunteer positions, medical help, etc.) The more of these you can address, the more likely your campaign is to be effective.

Pretest.

Finally, when you have developed a strategy, you have to go back and pretest it with members of the target population. If it looks like you have everything in line, you're ready to go with your campaign. If people still find benefits unsatisfactory, or costs too high, or are still worried about what their friends and neighbors will think, then it's time to readjust until you have it right.

Once you've passed your pretest, you should be ready to run a successful social marketing campaign that results in the changes you hope for.

In Summary

When they're thinking about changing their behavior, people are concerned with the benefits and costs of the change, and you have to be concerned with them, too. The key here is SESDED: if people are to change, they need a Superior Exchange, where the benefits outweigh the costs; the change needs to be S ocially Desirable, so that friends and neighbors approve; and it has to be Easily Done, with as little hassle and as much convenience as possible.

Benefits can be short- or long-term, and may fall on the person making the change or on others. Costs can be economic, physical, logistical, psychological, or social. It's important to find out what kinds of benefits and costs people think would come from a particular change, and what they find acceptable. This can be accomplished through market research - asking members of the target population what they want and what they think.

Engaging in market research is the first step in making change easier and more rewarding for people. The next step is to devise a strategy, starting with SESDED, and understanding that what you can offer are information, market conditions (how services are delivered, for instance, or how you ask for money), and skills that will help people through the change you're asking them to make.

Your strategy should encompass maximizing benefits (by adding on to them, explaining as-yet unrecognized benefits, or changing the target population's perception of the importance of available benefits); minimizing costs (by reducing financial costs, changing circumstances to reduce other costs, or decreasing the perception of their importance); helping to make the change socially acceptable; and addressing barriers to make it as easy and trouble-free as possible.

Finally, you should pretest what you've come up with to make sure that you've understood your research correctly, and that your target audience will respond to your plans. Once you've confirmed your plan, or made the necessary changes to make it work, your social marketing campaign is ready to roll.

What do we mean by making behavior change easier and more rewarding?

___You apply SESDED to your campaign.

Why should you address benefits and costs in social marketing?

___You're prepared to gain information through market research.

___You're willing to make changes to control benefits and costs.

___You know that the balance of benefits and costs is crucial to the process of change.

When is the best time to address benefits and costs?

___You address benefits and costs when you know people are contemplating change.

___You address benefits in the early stages of contemplation.

___You address costs in the later stages of contemplation.

What are some ways to look at the benefits of behavior change?

___You find out what the real benefits are that people are seeking.

___You look at benefits over both the short and the long term.

___You consider both benefits that affect the target population itself, and those that affect others.

What are some ways to look at the costs of behavior change?

___You determine what members of the target population consider the real costs of the desired change.

___You look at:

• Economic costs
• Physical costs
• Logistical costs
• Psychological costs
• Social costs

How do you make behavior change easier and more rewarding?

You conduct market research to find out:

___The real reasons people are contemplating change.

___How they would prefer to accomplish that change.

___Whether others' opinions would influence that change, and, if so, whose.

___What benefits or costs could make the difference.

___What kind of support people need to make the change.

You develop a strategy by:

___Starting with SESDED

___Thinking about what the target population needs to make the change possible : information, market conditions, and/or skills.

___Maximizing benefits.

___Minimizing costs.

___Addressing the competition.

___Making the change socially desirable.

___Making the change easily done.

___You pretest your strategy before putting it into practice.

Many smokers looking for an easy way to quit have tried the patch, an adhesive pad that allows them to absorb nicotine through the skin. In theory, the nicotine in the patch initially acts as a substitute for cigarettes, to help them stop smoking. As their craving for cigarettes themselves diminishes, they use patches with diminishing amounts of nicotine until, eventually, they don't need either cigarettes or the patch: they've quit!

It sounds easy, and that's why many people try it. Unfortunately, relatively few of them successfully stop smoking, unless they're part of a structured program that includes education and group and individual support. It's hard to take that first step to stop smoking; it's a great deal harder to stick to it without support.

Just about everyone either knows or is a person who's concerned about his weight. The cycle of dieting, losing weight, starting to eat "normally," regaining what was lost, and dieting again has become totally familiar, the subject of sitcom jokes and conversation among friends. Perhaps a majority of Americans have been on diets at some point in their lives, and many or most have lost weight. But most gain the weight back within a year, and the U.S. remains the home of the most overweight population of any developed country in the world.

As these examples make clear, behavior change isn't just a matter of decision. All those smokers really do want to quit permanently, and all those dieters really do want to lose weight and keep it off. In most cases, however, they need help. If you want to make sure that your social marketing campaign is effective, you not only have to convince people to take action, but you have to support them as they do, and then you have to help them maintain the change once they've made it.

Note: This section, like the others in this chapter, assumes that you have done your market research. Listening to what your target audience has to say and responding to it is a cornerstone of social marketing. In this circumstance, it will tell you what makes it difficult for your target audience to take action or maintain behavior change

What do we mean by supporting and maintaining behavior changes?

Supporting behavior change, in simplest terms, involves helping to create or provide the environment, circumstances, equipment, information, and the logistical and psychological assistance that make it possible for people to take action to change their behavior. As we'll discuss later in this section, that support can take many forms, but they're all aimed at making it easier for people to take action.

Maintaining behavior change, on the other hand, goes on after the initial action has been taken. Often, that action is only the first step. Going on a diet, for instance, doesn't mean the dieter has accomplished the change he wants. That has only happened when he has reached his ideal weight and can stay at that point indefinitely. In order for that to happen, he may have to change a number of behaviors permanently: eating habits, exercise patterns, alcohol consumption, perhaps even where and with whom he eats lunch, or where he takes vacations.

Your social marketing campaign can't be successful unless it can help people maintain their changes over time. That may require some of the same kinds of support that action does, as well as helping people learn new skills and acquire other attributes that contribute to their ability to sustain the changes they've made.

What types of behavior changes need to be supported and maintained?

There are essentially four types of behavior change, each requiring a different approach to support and maintenance. Recognizing which type you're hoping to encourage will help you choose a strategy to make that change more probable.

One-time changes. The change may be permanent, but it requires only a single action to accomplish it. With one-time changes, you may have to provide support, but once the action has been taken, maintenance isn't an issue (although follow -up psychological support may be). Some one-time changes:

• Getting a vasectomy
• Donating a kidney
• Making an emergency donation for disaster relief
• Registering to vote

Repeated, but finite changes. This type of change requires more than one action, but has a definite end point, when the actions can cease. In this circumstance, support for the change itself is important, but help with maintaining the change until the goal is reached is even more so. Because the goal is defined and limited, it is relatively easy to find out what people need to keep moving, and to try to provide it. Examples of this kind of change include:

• Getting a child the appropriate immunizations
• Undergoing cancer treatment
• Earning a certificate in a job training program

Permanent lifestyle changes. These changes need to be sustained forever if they're to be effective. Here, obviously, support for both action and maintenance are crucial. The action may be hard to take just because it looks so daunting; changing a whole lifestyle is not the same as sending one check or signing a voter registration card. By the same token, once the action has been taken, the idea of having to keep at it forever - especially at a time when it still seems unfamiliar and difficult - can be overwhelming. Your campaign should be providing as much help as possible to keep people focused. Permanent lifestyle changes might entail:

• Adjusting eating and exercise habits to maintain ideal weight and fitness
• Keeping abreast of political issues and casting an informed vote in every election
• Recycling, composting, conserving electricity, and other environmentally-conscious practices
• Quitting smoking

Situational changes. Changes that need to maintained over the long term, but only require action in certain situations. Although these actions don't need to be performed constantly, they really need to be treated as a combination of all three other types. They are new, one-time actions each time they come up; they must be repeated each time a member of the target audience is in the appropriate situation; and they have to be continued indefinitely if they are to have the desired effect. Thus, they require both continuing support for specific action and ongoing encouragement and facilitation for maintenance. Some examples:

• Appointing a designated driver
• Practicing safe sex
• Using car seat belts

What are barriers to taking action and changing behavior?

There are specific barriers to every kind of socially desirable behavior change; if there weren't, you wouldn't need social marketing at all. Most of those barriers fall into one of six types:

The change is impossible, as the situation stands. Some of the reasons for this may be:

• Geography. In rural areas, in places where there are physical barriers, in cities where some neighborhoods or areas are unsafe, it may simply be impossible for people to get to where they need to be in order to implement the desired change.
• Economics. The change may simply cost more money than most or all of the target population can afford or is willing to pay.
• The tools for change are unavailable. Sometimes, making the desired change means using a device (an asthma inhaler, for instance), gaining a skill, getting treatment, joining a support group, or doing something else that requires a product, program or service. If that product, program, or service doesn't exist, either literally (i.e. there's none in the area) or because it's not accessible to the target population, then change is unlikely.

A Boston English-as-a-Second-or-Other-Language (ESOL) program, the only one in the city designed specifically for Cantonese speakers, had a waiting list of three years. For the thousand or so people on that waiting list - and others who didn't bother to sign up because the list was so long - there might as well have been no program at all.

• Circumstances. Before they can make the desired change, people may first need child care, handicap accessibility, information, or some other foundation or form of support. If this isn't obtainable, change may not be obtainable, either.

The change is too complex. This may mean that it requires too many steps, and is therefore difficult to learn; that it is too detailed for the education level of the people expected to do it; or that it requires physical or other skills beyond the reach of many members of the target population.

A young American worked with a West African non-governmental organization (NGO) on a project to teach villagers to use e-mail and the Internet. The project was meant to link rural people to one another, and to make possible large-scale cooperation among them. The American started out to train a few carefully chosen young people, who would then become the trainers for their villages.

He found out quickly that, although the trainees were bright and willing, they started with no knowledge of what the Internet was, or what computers did. The project's organizers were so eager, however, that they ignored the American's suggestions to lengthen the training course in order to provide some background knowledge. As a result, the project fell far short of its goals, with only one of the trainees absorbing enough to pass on what he had learned. The process as it was designed was simply too complex for the experience of the trainees.

The change is too hard to expect people to be able to accomplish on their own. Some of the behavior changes that people are often asked to undertake - stopping substance use, or changing eating habits, or exercising regularly - require an amount of drive and self-discipline that many people may not have. Some people can do it on their own, but most need help in order to make the change and to learn how to call up the resolve that will make them successful over the long run.

The change takes too much time. "Time" here can mean a number of things.

• The change can take too much of a block of time. People may not be willing to commit to a neighborhood clean-up or fixing up dilapidated housing if they have to commit to several days or weekends in a row, whereas they may be more than willing to commit to one or two.
• The change can take too much time on a regular basis. Mentoring a youth may be seen as taking an overwhelming number of hours per week. People may not see how they can fit a regular exercise program into their schedules.
• The change can simply take too long overall. Losing a large amount of weight in a healthy way, for instance, can take many months, or even years. Many people may see that as impossibly difficult, and not worth attempting.

The change is not important enough to the target population for them to want to engage in it. They either don't understand its importance, or they don't consider its benefits important enough to convince them to take action, or they don't see it as applying to them. Whatever the reason, they don't see it as a priority.

The target population forgets to perform the action that the change requires. When repeated action is necessary - taking pills at regular intervals, doing physical therapy exercises, keeping appointments, writing in a journal - it may be difficult for people to remember to take it each time.

At least one of these barriers probably exists, at least potentially, for any desired behavior change and for any target population. Addressing the barriers so that change can take place smoothly and easily should be part of any social marketing campaign.

How do you address barriers to action and support behavior change?

While every situation has its own peculiarities and specific barriers, there are some guidelines for dealing with each of the types of barriers described above.

If change is impossible in the present situation, try to do something about the issues that make it impossible.

Geography. Some possible solutions to the geography problem:

• Arrange, provide, or subsidize transportation.
• Change services, meetings, etc. to a more convenient location.
• Bring services to the target population, where possible.

Bookmobiles and mobile clinics were instituted to reach those who couldn't or wouldn't come to libraries or health centers, often in rural areas.

• Use technology - teleconferencing, e-mail, chat groups, telephone conference calls, Internet- or TV-based courses - to get around distance issues.

Economics. Subsidize, reduce, or eliminate costs:

• Get a grant
• Find a cheaper and/or more efficient way to approach the issue
• Scale down the scope of service, on the assumption that it's better to have a lot of people participating in a reduced service than no one participating in a more comprehensive one.
• Look for used or reconditioned equipment, solicit donations of products and equipment from corporations, or join a service that can help you get free or cheap products and equipment.

NAEIR (the National Association for the Exchange of Industrial Resources) collects donations of new equipment and products from corporations and makes them available almost free (you pay annual dues - in 2001, $575.00 - and shipping and handling) to non-profit entities

The tools of change are unavailable. You can either try to provide what's unavailable, or find an alternative source.

• Try to get donations of unavailable products or services.
• Start or collaborate with a program that can help people gain the skills they need to take the desired action.
• Find an alternative way to provide services.
• Conduct an advocacy campaign to make products or services available to the target population.

The Boston ESOL program with the long waiting list employed both of the last two methods listed. It developed a tutoring component using videotapes and tutors recruited from among the ranks of advanced students and recent graduates. People on the waiting list could use the videotapes to start their study of English, going at their own pace, and working with a tutor weekly or biweekly. At the same time, the program used the size of its waiting list to advocate with the Department of Education and the state legislature for increased funding. Within a year and a half, the waiting list had been reduced to fewer than 200, and the tutoring component had become so successful that it had been made a regular part of the program.

Circumstances. Change the circumstances to make change possible. For example:

• Provide or subsidize child care.
• Move to, or provide supplementary services at, a handicapped-accessible location.
• Provide the needed information on posters or fliers, on radio, in newspapers, on local-access cable TV, door-to-door - whatever's necessary to make sure that people have what they need in order to take the action you're marketing.

If the task is too complex, simplify it as much as possible. Some ways to accomplish that:

• Teach complex skills through step-by-step mastery: people learn each step in a complex process separately, completely mastering each step before they go on to the next.
• Look for ways to eliminate steps: some may be unnecessary or repetitive.
• Find simpler ways to accomplish the same thing.
• Scale back the extent of the change to make it more reachable.
• Start your process at a lower level, in order to provide the background that will make it possible for the target audience to understand and take the sought-after action.

In the box above about the West African NGO, if the training course had allowed the time for trainees to gain enough background knowledge, it is likely that many or most of them would have successfully learned enough to become trainers in their villages.

 If the change is too hard for people to make on their own, provide support to help them accomplish it. There are a number of ways you might go about this:

• Organize and run - or refer people to - support groups. Smoking cessation programs, for instance, usually operate in this way, as do AA and most other 12-step or similar programs. Group support helps people understand they're not alone in their difficulty with change, and gives them allies in their struggle. Group members help one another to hold on to their resolve.
• Provide mentoring, the one-on-one equivalent of group support. Mentors call regularly, help with strategies to keep to the new behavior, and provide the human contact and reinforcement that many people need in order to stay with change.
• Set up a phone hotline that people can call (or even an Internet chat room that they can visit) when they're having difficulty.
• Provide classes or programs that help people gain strategies and understand the change and its implications for them and those around them.
• Set up, or encourage members of the target population to set up, groups that simply engage in the new behavior together. A group of women who walk or work out together every day is not necessarily a support group, but its members do support one another in sticking to the exercise routine. In addition, and perhaps more important, exercising with friends makes it far more pleasant, and more likely to become a welcome part of everyone's day.

If the change takes too much time, try either to cut the time down or to change the perception of what constitutes "too much time." A few ways to accomplish these ends:

• If the block of time you had in mind is too long, try shortening it or making it more flexible. Instead of two whole weekends, start with a smaller neighborhood cleanup that occupies a single day, or give people the option of coming for whatever time they have. If you can organize it so that people have a good time and feel they've accomplished something, they'll probably be willing to come back and finish the job.
• If a regular time commitment seems overwhelming, make clear what the actual time commitment is (one afternoon of mentoring a week, 40 minutes of exercise a day), and help people compare it to other types of commitments to see if it's really too great. If it is, can it be reduced?
• If the span of time is the problem, break it down into smaller, more realistic chunks. Rather than focusing on losing 100 pounds, a dieter can start by trying to lose five or ten, then five or ten more, etc. That way, a goal that's reachable within a reasonable time period is always in view.
• Suggest ways to combine new behavior with other tasks or activities. People can get part of their exercise by walking up and down stairs instead of taking elevators at work, for instance, or engage in advocacy by handing out fliers and talking to potential supporters in the course of a daily walk.
• Try to minimize the time element of a behavior change by teaching (or practicing, depending on the situation) time management, more efficient planning, creative scheduling, etc.

 If the change isn't important to members of the target population, try to change their perceptions about it.

• Find reasons for change that they'll respond to. Smokers may not be willing to quit for their own health, for instance, but may be more receptive to arguments about the effects of secondhand smoke on their children.
• Make sure that members of the target group have all the available information about the benefits of the change, and the drawbacks to its alternatives. They may need more information to understand why the change is important.
• Point out specifically how the change in question will affect the target population, and why it's relevant to them.
• Try to get community opinion leaders and other influential people to spread the word.
• Look for creative ways to present your message - street theater, for example.

If people keep forgetting to take action, institutionalize reminders, so they're more apt to remember.

• Along with medication, give out compartmented pill boxes marked for each day of the week or month, and show people how to use them.
• Give people pre-printed adhesive notes to post around the house to remind them of what it is they need to do.
• Arrange for a support group phone tree. One person calls another to remind her; that second person then calls a third, who calls a fourth, and so on until everyone in the group has been called.
• Teach people how to organize things to make remembering more probable. If you put the healthy snacks right in the front of the refrigerator or cabinet, you're less likely to forget and reach for the junk food. Better yet, if you don't have any junk food in the house, you have to make a conscious decision to go out and get some.

What are barriers to maintaining behavior change?

So the folks who are the targets of your campaign have, perhaps, embarked on an exercise program. How do you know they'll keep it up over the long term, and not revert to their former, couch-potato selves?

The key to maintaining a new behavior is the level of satisfaction that members of the target population have with the change. Here's yet another area where market research is extremely important. You have to monitor people's satisfaction, and act if it starts to dip. Both your marketing strategy and reality can be adjusted here. In other words, if people start to become dissatisfied with the results of the behavior change they've made, you can either find new ways to persuade them to keep going, change the circumstances or environment to make sticking to the change easier and more compelling, or both.

The major barriers to behavior maintenance are the possible sources of the target population's dissatisfaction with the action they've taken. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction are largely based on expectations: if their positive expectations for behavior change are fulfilled, then people tend to be satisfied; if reality falls short of expectation, or if significant negative consequences crop up, then dissatisfaction usually follows.

The behavior change has unsatisfactory consequences. The results of the change they've made isn't dramatic or visible enough to the target group, or isn't what they've expected.

• The expectations for change are too high. A dieter may have hoped to lose ten pounds a week; an alcoholic may have thought that once she stopped drinking, all craving for alcohol would go away; an activist might have expected that one campaign would lead to instant social change. If expectations are too high, they won't be met, and people can feel that the changes they made were useless.
• The outcomes of change are hard to detect. Improved cardiovascular health isn't immediately visible, and may never be detectable without an angiogram, or at least a blood pressure measurement. Contributors to organizations may see no apparent changes as a result of their donations. If there is no apparent result from the actions that people are asked to take, they can easily feel those actions are unnecessary.
• The outcomes of change may be deferred for a long period. Smokers' lungs may take as much as a year to clear after they've quit. Pollution cleanup or other environmental recovery may take decades or generations to be completed. Continuing action may seem futile in the face of such distant goals.
• The desired outcome is the absence of something. The Y2K situation is a prime example. The action that so many corporations and government agencies took to prevent a computer crisis on Jan. 1, 2000, was seen as largely unnecessary, because there was no disruption at all. It may be, however, that without that action, the disasters that many scientists predicted all would have happened. The situation is similar for immunizations: many untreated children never get the diseases that immunizations are meant to prevent, so it's hard to see whether they have done any good or not in a specific case.

The behavior change has excessive negative consequences. Negative consequences can quickly quell enthusiasm for maintaining behavior change. There are really two kinds of negative consequences: expected and unexpected.

• The (expected) negative consequences were underestimated. The side effects of that blood pressure medication were far greater than the target population was prepared to accept. The cleanup of that polluted area cost more than anticipated, and resulted in a tax increase.
• There are unexpected negative consequences. A job trainee is overwhelmed by her spouse's anger and resentment at her gaining skills and independence. Regular exercise brings on muscle strains and joint problems.

Important people provide negative feedback. The behavior change causes friction in the community, or brings on the disapproval of family, friends and neighbors, or people who are socially or culturally significant to members of the target population (clergy, business leaders, elected officials, etc.) This can range from an ex-smokers' friends expressing disappointment that he never takes breaks with them anymore, to a conservative religious or cultural group casting out one of its members who has adopted a mainstream practice.

Control over the new behavior is less than expected. This may happen either because of the system involved or because of the members of the target population themselves.

• The system. The system in this case could be an intervention that's badly planned, and therefore doesn't provide adequate services to participants; a delivery system that makes it difficult to get a needed product (condoms, medication, etc.); services that are inaccessible (a clinic or program whose hours are inappropriate for the population it serves, for instance) or inhospitable; life circumstances that make maintaining action impossible (mandatory overtime at work, or inability to find child care); or an unsympathetic social system (opposition or lack of support from family members, or sabotage of the change by friends).
• The self. Maintaining the behavior is harder than anticipated, or is tied into other unresolved psychological or personal issues.

Alan Andreasen, in Marketing Social Change, mentions an important consideration. We know a fair amount about what keeps people from acting, but very little about what spurs them to act. If we could better understand what motivates people, we could be far more effective in encouraging behavior change.

How do you address barriers to maintaining behavior change?

We will discuss some ways of addressing each of the barriers above, but first, there are some general guidelines for maintaining behavior change that should be mentioned.

General guidelines for maintaining behavior change

• Try to anticipate and plan for potential problems and issues. Use your market research, brainstorming, the literature, and talking to other individuals and organizations who've conducted similar social marketing campaigns to foresee as many possibilities as you can. If you have some idea what factors might get in the way of people's sticking to their changes, you can adjust your campaign and organize reality to neutralize those factors before they become problems.
• Honesty is not just the best policy - it's the only policy you should consider. Make sure that people have all the information they need - potential side effects of medication, possible consequences of actions they might take, etc. - so they won't be surprised by anything that happens. Help them understand whether potential consequences are unchangeable, or whether there's a Plan B to deal with them. Work with them to plan what they and you might do if particular consequences do occur. If they feel that they have been treated honestly, and if they feel they can have some control over the situation, they're much more likely to work to maintain their behavior changes.

How to deal with different types of barriers to maintaining change

Note: Initial honesty can head off all the different types of barriers listed under "unsatisfactory consequences" and "unexpected negative consequences," because it will help the target population understand the reality of what to expect. It should be understood that honesty about what to expect is the first remedy for each of these barriers. It should also be understood, however, that no matter how honest and careful you are, many people will ignore or reinterpret or not understand the information, and you'll still have to deal with their dissatisfaction.

Unsatisfactory consequences.

• Expectations are too high. In addition to trying to be realistic initially about what is possible, you can help by monitoring and calling attention to actual progress - regular weight checks, a newsletter detailing evidence of the results of social activism, etc. It might also be helpful, if the information is available, to look at the "average" amount of time it takes to accomplish a particular change - ideal weight loss per month, the amount of time it typically takes to get a bill passed, etc.
• Outcomes are hard to detect. Where possible, make hidden benefits visible. Give or lend people blood pressure cuffs, and show them how to use them, for example. Explain to contributors exactly where their money is going, and what would happen, or not happen, without it. Where there are no results - the blood pressure medication isn't working - discuss alternatives. You may need a combination of medicines before the desired outcome is achieved, or there may be another way to approach the problem.
• Outcomes are deferred. There are a number of strategies in this case.
  
  • Where possible, create interim benchmarks to track progress over time. Smokers might take monthly lung-capacity tests, for instance, and see incremental improvement, even if they were still experiencing some breathing difficulty; or they might keep a running total of the money they save by not smoking.
  • Marketing can emphasize the long-term benefits of change to members of the target audience themselves and/or to society.
  • Marketing can also use "hang-in-there" messages to try to keep people focused on maintenance.
• The outcome is the absence of something. Here, your marketing should make clear the consequences of the presence of whatever the desired change is meant to prevent.

An example of this comes out of the September 2001, headlines. In the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, airport security will be increased, leading to longer lines, longer waits at terminals, and less time advantage to flying. The consequence of all this inconvenience, if it's successful, is that nothing will happen - no hijackings, no crashes, no news. It's only a matter of time until everyone starts to complain... but if the security is reduced, the chances of further terrorism will increase. It will be important to keep reminding people of what can happen if airport security becomes lax, or it will become lax again.

Excessive negative consequences.

For both underestimated and unexpected negative consequences, the best remedy is forewarning. If people have as much control as possible over the situation, they're more likely to keep trying to maintain their behavior.

• The negative consequences were underestimated.
  
  • Provide information about what's happening and what might happen. It's particularly important to let people know if other courses of action are available, and what they are. There might be an alternative blood pressure medication to one that's causing depression, for instance, or there might be other ways to address blood pressure. The cost of not completing that environmental cleanup, on the other hand, may be greater even than the unexpected cost of completing it.
  • Provide tools - skills, training, education - and support for dealing with specific negative consequences. Teaching relaxation techniques or meditation might help people deal with the worse-than-anticipated physical and mental stress of quitting smoking, for example.
• There are unexpected negative consequences. You can't foresee every possibility, but you can forewarn people that there might be unexpected negative consequences, so they won't come as a complete shock. As above, you can provide support and tools to help the target population deal with unexpected consequences. Once again, an alternative medication might be substituted, for instance; family counseling could be made available to help spouses adapt to the changes in roles that might come with literacy or job training.

Important people provide negative feedback.

The ideal here is to use your market research to find out who the target audience's important people are, and to market the change to them as well. It's a lot easier to do this from the start of a campaign, rather than to use marketing to attempt to correct a wrong or negative impression after the fact. If you can get the support of people important to the target population from the beginning, you'll not only reduce the probability of this source of dissatisfaction, but you'll greatly increase the probability of your campaign's success.

Control over the new behavior is less than expected. The system and the self - the two sources of lack of behavior control - are strongly interconnected. If you can set up a system to support people's motivation, self-control, and abilities, they're apt to be able to maintain their behavior changes.

Support groups and mentoring, already discussed above, are among the best ways to help the target population develop the skills to maintain changes on their own. Alcoholics Anonymous, Weight Watchers, and other similar groups have their own styles, but they all essentially work because of peer support, skills training, structure, and immediate help, reinforcement, and feedback when they're needed.

Support and structure (and someone to call to help in resisting temptation) give people someone and something to lean on at the beginning, when change is often hardest. Skills training enhances personal resources and develops self-discipline. Together they address both the system and the self to create a solid foundation upon which long-term maintenance can be built.

Some programs use rewards other than the mere satisfaction of behavior maintenance and its benefits. This can sometimes be effective, but there's always a danger that the rewards themselves become the reason for maintaining behavior. If that's the case, the change is unlikely to last, because it's not internal. As soon as the rewards stop, there's no more reason to sustain the change.

In Summary

There are two steps to cementing behavior change: the first is to take the action that leads to or represents behavior change; the second is to maintain that action, or the change it brings about, over time. A social marketing campaign has to include strategies for helping people both make and maintain the desired change.

Changes usually fall into one of four categories:

• One-time changes
• Repeated, but finite changes
• Permanent lifestyle changes
• Situational changes

Each type of change requires a different type, or combination of types, of support.

Common barriers to initiating change include:

• Action is impossible because circumstances won't permit it.
• The necessary action is too complex.
• Action is too hard for people to undertake on their own.
• The action takes too much time.
• The action isn't important to the target population.
• The action keeps being forgotten.

You can remove those barriers by, in each case, doing something about the issue that creates the barrier:

• Address the issues that make action impossible (change the circumstances).
• Simplify the action, either by breaking it down into manageable pieces, or by providing the background necessary to understand it.
• Support people in taking difficult action.
• Use more efficient or more creative and flexible planning and scheduling to minimize the importance of the time element.
• Increase the target population's perception of the urgency of the action.
• Institutionalize reminders so that people can remember to act.

Barriers to maintaining change are largely based on dissatisfaction with its consequences.

• Consequences are unsatisfactory.
  
  • Unrealistic expectations aren't met.
  • Outcomes are hard to detect.
  • Outcomes are deferred.
  • The outcome is hard to see because it's the absence of something.
• Negative consequences are seen as excessive, because they were either underestimated or totally unexpected.
• Important people provide negative feedback about the change.
• Behavior control is less than expected because of either the system or people themselves.

Dealing with these barriers requires anticipation of potential problems and complete honesty with the target population from the beginning. In addition, there are some specific remedies for each of the barriers described:

• Unsatisfactory consequences:
  
  • Clarify realistic expectations.
  • Make the invisible visible, or adjust the behavior to obtain the desired results.
  • Break a long-term goal up into manageable pieces, with benchmarks.
  • Emphasize the consequences of dealing with the presence of what's being prevented.
• Help people control negative consequences with information, alternative plans, and skills.
• Market to important people as well as directly to the target population.
• Set up the system to provide support and help develop personal internal resources.

If you can, with the aid of market research, overcome these barriers, your campaign should achieve success.

___You have conducted, and will continue to conduct, market research to find out what factors are likely to get in the way of the target population's making and maintaining the desired changes, whose opinions they value, and what kinds of support they need in order to accomplish and maintain the desired behavior changes.

Providing support for action:

___You address the issues that make action impossible by providing transportation or changing location to deal with geography; reducing or subsidizing costs; making the unavailable available; or changing circumstances.

___You address actions that are too complex by simplifying them to the extent possible .

___You address actions that are too hard by providing support to people to help them through difficult behavior change.

___You minimize the importance of the time element by more efficient and more creative and flexible planning and scheduling.

___You increase the target population's perception of the urgency of the desired behavior change.

___You institutionalize reminders, so that people are less likely to forget to take action.

Providing support for maintaining change:

___You use market research to monitor the target population's satisfaction with the changes they've made.

___You try to anticipate and plan for any possible negative consequences of change .

___You are totally honest with the target population about possible negative consequences of change, and about what can be done about them.

___You address unsatisfactory consequences by helping to adjust unrealistic expectations ; making hard-to-detect outcomes visible or adjusting change to improve outcomes; making deferred outcomes easier to live with by establishing benchmarks and breaking them down into a series of reachable goals; and using your marketing message to discuss the consequences of lack of the presence of those events or circumstances the changes are meant to prevent.

___You address excessive negative consequences by trying to prepare people for them beforehand, by helping them acquire tools - skills, education, training, information - to deal with them, and by formulating alternatives to them.

___You deal with negative feedback from important people by marketing change to those people as well.

___You address behavior control that is less than expected by creating systems that provide support and help people develop their internal resources.

Tool # 1: Chart of barriers to action and strategies for removing them

Barriers to Action

Strategies for Removing Barriers

Action is impossible because circumstances won't permit it. The necessary action is too complex. The action is too hard for people to undertake on their own. The action takes too much time. The action isn't important to the target population. The action is regularly forgotten.

Address the issues that make action impossible (change the circumstances). Simplify the action, either by breaking it down into manageable pieces, or by providing the background necessary to understand it. Support people - with support groups, mentoring, etc. - in taking difficult action . Use more efficient or more creative and flexible planning and scheduling. Use marketing to increase the urgency of the action in the target population's perception. Institutionalize reminders so that people can remember to act.

 

Tool #2: Chart of barriers to maintaining change and strategies for removing them

Barriers to Maintaining Change

Strategies for Removing Barriers

The consequences are unsatisfactory: Unrealistic expectations aren't met Outcomes are hard to detect Outcomes are deferred Outcomes are hard to see because they're the absence of something There are excessive negative consequences, either greater than anticipated, or unexpected. Influential people give negative feedback about the change. Behavior control is less than expected because of the system or the self.

For unsatisfactory consequences: Clarify realistic expectations Make the invisible visible, or adjust behavior to obtain the desired results Break along-term goal up into manageable pieces, with benchmarks Emphasize the consequences of the presence of what you're trying to prevent Help people control negative consequences with information, alternative plans, and skills. Market to influential people as well as the target population from the outset. Set up the system to provide support and to help develop internal personal resources .

 

• Why should you monitor progress and make adjustments in the social marketing campaign?

• What aspects of the campaign should you monitor?

• How do you monitor and adjust a social marketing campaign?

For several years, the Peterson City AIDS Prevention and Treatment Team (PCARTT) had been distributing condoms and advocating safe sex and early HIV treatment in the Peterson gay community. Now, however, the rate of new HIV infections among gay men had dropped almost to zero, and practicing safe sex had become as much a normal part of their lives as brushing their teeth. The members of the team were beginning to realize that their efforts were only needed to maintain the status quo. PCARTT's efforts in the gay community had been so successful that a full-scale campaign was no longer needed there.

The AIDS problem in Peterson City hadn't disappeared, however. Through a number of channels, including public health data, conversations with medical workers, and their own experiences on the street, the team learned that HIV infections were soaring among IV drug users. It was clearly time for the PCARTT social marketing campaign to change its focus from the gay community to this other high-risk group.

The team understood that this meant more than sending their message through different channels and conducting outreach in different neighborhoods. It meant changing both the style and content of the message, and delivering it in very different ways. It also meant a new style of outreach, different equipment -- sterile needles as well as condoms -- and a different kind of approach. But PCARTT team members knew they had to adapt their campaign to changes in the marketplace. Their competition -- the AIDS virus -- wasn't going away anytime soon, and they had to adjust in order to meet it.

Any social marketing campaign, if it's going to remain effective, has to adjust to changing conditions, the needs of its target audience, societal and community trends, and its own resources. This last section of the Tool Box chapter on social marketing discusses how to monitor your campaign to know when you need to adjust it, and gives some suggestions about how to make the proper adjustments.

Why should you monitor progress and make adjustments in your social marketing campaign?

Successful commercial marketing campaigns will only stay successful as long as they respond to forces in the marketplace. The same is true for social marketing campaigns.

For community-based and other similar organizations, that means looking at a number of areas:

• Demographics. Neighborhoods can change, for instance, because of gentrification, immigration, or development. You need to adjust the delivery of your message and /or your service to continue to reach your target population.
• Consumer preferences. Issues seen as crucial one day may be invisible the next. If you're asking for contributions, or trying to convince people to change their behavior in some other way, you have to make sure that your issue doesn't disappear.
• Trends and social conditions. As circumstances and trends change, you have to change with them, or you'll be offering services or advocating behavior changes that are unnecessary. The introductory example of the change in the HIV problem in a community is a good illustration of this.
• Social memory. What was incredibly important and immediate to one generation may be trivial, or even unknown, to people ten or more years younger. The shock and sorrow in the gay community at the number of deaths of friends and loved ones in the 1980's, for instance, is fading history to young gay men in the 21st century. With new drugs that can keep the disease at bay, many are risking unprotected sex because they don't have the personal memory of the devastation that AIDS caused only a short time ago. (Maybe PCARTT needs to keep up its level of social marketing in the gay community, after all.)
• Communication channels. In the past several years, the number of cable TV viewers has outstripped that of the major networks. More recently, younger people often use the Internet to find information, housing, jobs, etc. Teens change their preferences in radio stations as often as they change their clothes. If social marketers aren't adjusting to these new channels, they won't reach their target audiences.

When we refer to monitoring the progress of a social marketing campaign, that means looking at not only how good the message is and how well it's reaching its intended audience, but also how well the organization is doing its job. Whether you're delivering services, advocating for an issue or for particular changes, recruiting volunteers, or raising money, part of your campaign is adjusting what you do to reflect the realities of people's needs and preferences. You may need to change your message, or change how you deliver it in order to attract your target audience's attention. You may also need to change what you do or how you do it in order to respond appropriately to their needs and to encourage the behavior change you're aiming for.

What aspects of the campaign should you monitor?

There are three essential aspects of any social marketing campaign that need to be monitored and adjusted.

Effectiveness. How well is the campaign accomplishing its goals? As explained above, this question addresses two distinct areas:

• Is the social marketing message effective, i.e. reaching those for whom it is intended, and having the desired effect?
• Is the work of the organization effective, i.e. actually bringing about and/or supporting the change it's working toward?

In some cases, where the message is the work of the organization (an initiative whose sole purpose is to develop and distribute anti-smoking messages, for instance), these areas may be the same. More often, if the organization is delivering service, engaging in advocacy, or trying to accomplish a specific purpose to forward its work (e.g. convince people to donate), the two areas need to be measured and considered in different ways.

In either case, monitoring effectiveness encompasses revisiting and reevaluating:

• Your goals themselves
• How well you've achieved those goals.
• How other people view the organization or initiative.

Efficiency. How well are you using your marketing resources? Are your efforts going in the directions that will give you the greatest return for the resources you have?

Strategy. How well do your current strategies and systems address the realities of the marketplace? Are your goals appropriate for the current situation? Are you looking ahead to understand what might happen in the future and creating new strategies, goals, and systems to address the changes you see coming?

How do you monitor and adjust your campaign?

There are two kinds of monitoring and adjustment to be made in a social marketing campaign. The first is in the campaign itself; the second is in the reality of the work of the organization. You can change your message or the targets of the campaign. You can also make real-world adjustments to convince and support people to make the change you're aiming for (providing child care, moving your operation closer to the target population, treating people with respect, etc.)

For non-profits, those real-world adjustments also involve two aspects: First, are you doing what you do well? And second, do you have enough money and other resources to sustain the work? You need to examine both as you make changes. In the ideal, they should be the same thing. In actuality, the extent to which they are connected often depends on whether you and funders define "good job" the same way. The more you can do to prove you're responding to the actual needs of the marketplace and the target audience, the better position you'll be in to find the money to support what you do.

So, how do you actually look at these areas and decide whether and how you need to change what you're doing? Depending on your budget, you can use some of the same formal tools that commercial marketers use, or you can use less formal, but nonetheless reasonably accurate measures that give you similar information.

Monitoring and adjusting effectiveness

As discussed above, you have to monitor both the results of the campaign and your work, as well as attitudes toward the campaign and your organization. There are various ways to do this.

Monitoring and adjusting results.

The three most common ways to monitor a marketing campaign are, in marketers' terms, sales analysis, market share analysis, and expense -to-sales analysis. All of these depend on hard numbers -- the number of participants you serve, the amount of money you raise, the statistical achievement of a particular goal.

It's apparently difficult for marketers -- even when they're discussing social marketing -- to think in any but commercial terms. While in some cases, sales is close to what we are really talking about in this chapter -- marketing an item connected to your work, trying to bring in contributions to your organization or initiative, trying to sell a service to third party payers -- in most cases we're referring to something slightly different.

The equivalent of sales for most health and community-based organizations is the number of people they can attract to services, the number of people they can convince to adopt healthy or socially desirable practices, the amount of community support they can muster, or the amount of influence they're able to exert over policy through their advocacy efforts. We'll continue to use the term "sales" in this section, but what we usually mean is one of those health-and-community-organization equivalents.

• Sales analysis. Sales analysis is simply an analysis of how well you're meeting your goals, whether they're attracting a certain number of participants to a service or program, convincing donors to contribute a given amount to your organization, persuading a certain percentage of the target population to undertake a specific behavior change, or to some other goal.

The numbers here are generally easy to determine, and are measured against either pre-set goals or past performance. What they mean may not be easy to determine. Attracting a lot of participants may not mean you're offering quality service, for example. You may need to know how long they stay, or how well they achieve their goals to determine that. You can compare the amount you've raised, or the number of people who've quit smoking to your goals, but not to what's possible, or to what would happen if you used another marketing method.

• Market share analysis. This type of analysis tells you how you're doing in relation to the competition. In health and community work, the competition can take many forms:
  
  • Another organization that has the same purpose and tries to attract the same target audience as yours.
  • Another issue competing with yours for community financial and political support.
  • The pull of the behavior you're hoping to change. (Dieters are constantly fighting the urge to eat; people quitting smoking are fighting the urge to smoke; it's easier to sit still and read or watch TV than to get up and run three miles; etc.)
  • Other things people could be doing. (Volunteering must compete for a spot on the schedule with time spent with family, reading for pleasure, sports, jobs around the house, and other non-work activities. Life is full of alternatives, of which yours is only one.)
  • More general comparisons to other, similar organizations or initiatives. If the statistics say that the average return on a non-profit fundraising appeal is 15%, and yours is only 5%, that's probably worth looking into. If a heart-health campaign in a nearby community resulted in the target population lowering cholesterol by an average of 20 points, and your similar campaign achieved an even better result, you're probably doing OK (assuming that either community's scores represented a significant decrease).

Measuring market share gives you a bit more information than sales analysis, because it uses the competition as a control group (i.e. a group that's not exposed to your campaign). If you're doing better than the competition -- if more people are eating heart-healthy diets in your area than they were before you started your campaign, for instance, but that isn't the case elsewhere -- you have some evidence that what you do is working.

• Expense-to-sales analysis. The question to be asked here is "What kind of return did you get on your marketing dollar?" If it costs you most of a dollar to generate a dollar's worth of donations, you're probably not using your marketing dollars well. (The dollar here includes whatever it takes to conduct a social marketing campaign -- staff time, mailing, printing, advertising fees, website development, etc.) If that's the case, you need to change the way you use your resources. (More on this can be found below, under "Efficiency.")

If your effectiveness according to these measures isn't adequate, you'll probably have to address one or more of the following if you want to change the situation:

• Your message. Your marketing research -- formal or informal -- can tell you whether people are getting and paying attention to your message. If they're not, you need to find new ways to deliver it and/or reframe it so they'll receive and listen to it. Possibilities for change here include the tone, the channels you use to reach your target audience, the language of the message, its content, and the medium in which it's presented.
• Your services. If you provide services, how effective are they? If you are a new organization, or are providing new services, it may take as much as two years to become accepted. If you've been around for a while and you're not attracting participants, however, you probably need to look at what you're doing and how. Are you meeting people's needs? Are the participants you do have meeting their goals? What's the word on the street about why people aren't enrolling? Answering these questions honestly will give you a start on making the changes you need to. You might need to rethink your methods, your goals for the service, or even the nature of the service you provide (if the needs of the target population have changed).
• Other service-related issues. How are people -- staff, participants, contributors, volunteers -- treated in your organization? As partners, equals, valued additions? Or as subordinates, ignorant and incompetent? What is your site like? Is it comfortable and pleasant, or cold and unwelcoming? How is the noise level, bathroom situation, parking facility, cleanliness, and accessibility? All of these can serve to attract or repel people, and need to be adjusted so they do the former.
• Your reputation. We'll discuss this further below, under "Attitudes," but it needs to be mentioned here. If you have a bad reputation in the community, because of a misperception, the quality of your work, or the way your organization treats people, it will obviously affect your ability to attract participants and support or convince people to act in the ways you want them to. It's important to alter whatever it is that leads people to think badly of your organization.

Monitoring and adjusting to attitudes.

The other measure of how well your campaign is doing is how it and your organization are viewed by your target population and others important to your work.

You can analyze attitudes by looking at them in simplest terms (e.g. asking people "How do you feel about our organization on a scale of 1-5?"), which gives you little useful data. You can also look at people's levels of satisfaction with your campaign and organization, which can give you more, useful information to work with. There are a number of different types of satisfaction measures, ranging from simple to fairly complex, that yield different amounts and kinds of information.

The question of whose satisfaction matters is one that needs to be asked here. Any organization has several "publics" whose good will is important -- participants or beneficiaries, the rest of the target population, contributors, funders, policy makers, the community at large -- and has to satisfy all of them to some extent. It's virtually impossible to maximize everyone's satisfaction, and maximizing satisfaction may not be the goal in any case. The best strategy is usually to try to strike a balance among the needs of the several constituencies. This often means balancing the costs to the organization (in money, good will, community support, etc.) with creating a relatively high, or high-enough, level of satisfaction among all concerned.

• Simple satisfaction/dissatisfaction scale. This is the most basic and least telling measure of satisfaction. It involves asking people to state their satisfaction with the organization on a numbered (usually 1 to 5) scale, ranging from "very dissatisfied" to "very satisfied." It will tell you whether people are favorable to the organization but will give you no information about what you need to change to affect their opinions.
• Derived dissatisfaction measure. This measure will give you a bit more information. It asks people to rate various aspects of the organization (or, more simply, the organization as a whole) on a numbered scale, and also to rate where they think it should fall on that scale. The difference between the two rankings will give you a fair idea of where people have problems with your operation.

Thus, a particular aspect of the organization -- the physical attractiveness of its space, say -- may not rank very high, but people may not think it should rank very high. In that case, there's really not a problem, and the organization doesn't need to run out and hire an interior decorator. If, however, most people rank another aspect -- the quality of the medical staff at a clinic, for example -- very low, but think it should be ranked very high, you either have an image problem, or you need to review the competency of your personnel.

• Importance/performance ratings. This measure again asks people to rank aspects of the organization twice: once for how well people think they're operating, and once for how important people think they are. The information gained here is a bit more specific and gives you more to work with.

Results of this measure are usually graphed in four quadrants:

Performance High        2    1             Importan high

Important Low             3     4            Performance Low

If an aspect of the organization -- again, let's take the quality of a clinic's medical staff -- lands in quadrant 1, everything's fine: people think an excellent medical staff is important, they find your medical staff excellent, and you just have to be sure to maintain your level of quality.

If it lands in quadrant 2 -- people still think your medical staff is excellent, but they don't really care much about the quality of the staff -- you're still OK. What you might think about here is whether you're putting too much of your resources into that area of the organization, since people don't attach much importance to it, anyway.

If the scores place staff quality in quadrant 3 -- the staff's not really very good, but that doesn't matter -- you don't really have to worry too much (except about the threat of a malpractice suit). Even though performance is low, the fact that people don't think it's important means that you don't really need to adjust anything, at least immediately. You may want to improve staff quality for any number of other reasons, but the current quality of staff won't keep the target population away.

If staff quality lands in quadrant 4, however, you have a serious problem. People think the competency of the medical staff is very important, and they don't trust your staff to remove a splinter. Here's the area where you have to make major adjustments, both in your campaign and in your operation. If, in fact, your staff is very good, and people just don't realize that, then you have to get that message out, and quickly. If, as is more likely, at least some of your staff isn't up to standard, then you need to think about how to either improve their skills or replace them, and to publicize the fact that you're doing it.

In other words, if you use an importance/performance measure, you need to put the most effort into changing anything that falls in quadrant 4, where its importance is seen as high and its performance is seen as low. You may have other reasons for improving or changing areas of the organization that fall into other quadrants, but they don't need to be changed immediately to respond to customer satisfaction.

• Consumer panels. Another way to find out what people think about your organization is to ask them in person. A consumer panel -- a group composed of members of your organization's target population(s) and/or its various publics -- is assembled to give feedback on the operation of the organization. This group is similar to a focus group, except that it meets on a regular or semi-regular basis, rather than only once. If you want honest feedback, you have to be careful to include people who are critical of, or at least not totally loyal to, your organization, and to rotate group membership from time to time.

Once you've found out what people see as the negatives of your organization, it's up to you to fix them, starting with those seen as most important.

If a negative attitude about some aspect of your organization or campaign is the result of a misperception, try to correct it through public information, media stories, support from members of the target population or from influential individuals -- whatever you have to do in order to make it clear that people have been mistaken in their beliefs about your organization.

If the negative perception is accurate -- your organization's staff is condescending to participants, your anti-smoking campaign is too strident and plays on people's fears, your request for contributions tries to make people feel guilty -- then you need to acknowledge the problem and change whatever is causing it. That may mean retraining or firing staff members, or changing the tone of your campaign entirely.

Monitoring and adjusting efficiency

Monitoring efficiency means looking at how well you're using your marketing resources, and whether they're giving you an appropriate return. In commercial marketing, this is known as profitability.

In health and community work, your profit is usually not measured in dollars, but in the number of people you can reach and serve, the number of people who change their behavior in a personally or socially desirable way, the number of policy decisions you affect, etc. On the other hand, nonprofit organizations also need actual money in order to survive; dollars are not totally irrelevant. If your social marketing effort is a fundraising campaign, then your return will be measured in dollars (or pesos or Euros or rupees).

Sometimes, both funding and other kinds of profitability are at stake. Many job -training programs are outcome-based, for instance: the job-training organization gets a certain amount of money for each person it recruits, further payments as trainees complete benchmarks in their training, and a final payment when the trainee actually gets a job at or above a specified level of pay. So by doing a good job at recruiting, training, and placing trainees, the training organization also does well financially.

A situation like that just described can work for financial profitability at the expense of community profitability. Outcome-based payment encourages organizations to recruit only those most likely to complete the process -- people who already have some skills and job experience -- rather than those with the lowest levels of skills and experience, who most need the service. The organization is certainly more efficient if it "creams," i.e. recruits only from the top level of the potential pool of trainees -- but is it, in fact, fulfilling its mission? In this case, it's presented with a situation where it may have to choose between efficiency and effectiveness.

As we have discussed elsewhere in the Tool Box, it seldom benefits an organization to ignore its mission in favor of other considerations, particularly financial ones. There are almost always alternatives, including negotiating arrangements with funders for working with high-risk populations, and setting up pre-training programs for high-risk participants to increase their chances of success. Efficiency can be achieved in a number of ways. If you ignore your mission, you risk becoming less effective as you become more efficient.

In examining your organization's efficiency, there are four areas to pay attention to:

Territory. Are you working in the right area? If you're only addressing youth violence in affluent neighborhoods, for instance, you're probably putting a lot of your resources in the wrong place. Has the neighborhood or area you're aiming at changed because of immigration, gentrification, or other social factors, so that it's no longer home to your target population? You may need to shift your focus, or even your whole operation, to another locale. Especially if your marketing resources are scarce, you should be concentrating them in the area where they'll have the most effect.

Market Segment. Are you concentrating on the right segments of the target population? Perhaps you're not trying to reach those who are most ready to change. Perhaps the people whose behavior you want to change are influenced, not by your message, but by the opinions of particular others -- their doctors, their pharmacists, their parents, etc. If that's the case, then it's far more efficient for you to reach those others than to try to convince members of the target population themselves.

Distribution channels. Are you getting your message out through channels that the target audience pays attention to? As mentioned above, if you're not using the channels that the people you're trying to reach use, you might as well be shouting your message to the winds. You have to be in the right media outlets and the right geographic areas, and you have to use the right language and images and the right form of communication (text, audio-visual, personal contact, etc.) if you're going to reach the largest possible number of those at which you're aiming.

Competition. You have to be aware of what the real competition is and work to counter it. If you spend your resources trying to neutralize the wrong competitor, the target audience will ignore you.

Before welfare reform, job-training and employment programs often tried to sell themselves by praising the benefits of self-sufficiency and the satisfaction of bringing home a paycheck. Virtually all of the welfare recipients the programs targeted were already aware of those benefits, and were, in fact, eager to work. They knew, however -- or quickly found out if they went to work -- that if they took a typical low-wage job, they'd lose all their health benefits. As soon as they or one of their children needed medical treatment more complicated than aspirin, they either had to go back on welfare or remain untreated. The job-training programs would have been flooded with applicants if they had found and advertised a way for trainees to keep their health insurance after they became employed. The competition here was not unemployment, but health insurance.

Questioning the target audience to find out what is actually at the root of their undesirable behavior -- continuing to smoke, not contributing to your organization, leaving their children unvaccinated -- will help you understand just what, in your campaign and in your organization, you need to adjust to respond to competition.

Monitoring and adjusting strategy

Like any for-profit organization, non-profit organizations have to monitor and adjust their short- and long-term strategies regularly to make sure that they're continuing to go in the appropriate direction. We're really talking about two kinds of strategy here: organizational strategy and marketing strategy. The two are inseparable: good marketing strategy has to reflect organizational strategy, and the best marketing strategy in the world won't help if organizational strategy is wrongheaded or non-existent

Organizational strategy relates to the mission of the organization. How are you going to fulfill your mission and reach your goals? If you've gone through a strategic planning process fairly recently, you should have an outline of current and long-term strategy. If you've just followed the path of least resistance to get to where you are, it's definitely time to develop an organizational strategy that takes into account where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to get there.

Marketing strategy is the strategy of your social marketing campaign. How can you best influence the behavior change you're aiming at? Whether your campaign involves advertising, providing support, direct solicitation, advocacy, or all of these and more, you need a strategy to keep it moving consistently in the right direction.

Monitoring strategy means paying attention to:

• Current conditions. What's going on in the world, in your field, in the target community, etc. that you need to respond to? Does your current strategy take these things into account? If not, you have to adjust your strategy to encompass the best methods available; the latest statistics; the current needs, location, and preferences of the target population; and new developments in your field.
• Long-range trends. Businesses that computerized early and continually upgraded their equipment had a huge advantage when the computer revolution hit in earnest. By the same token, you can analyze trends in the larger world, in your field, and in the target community to make strategic decisions about where you should go in the future. Where is your issue heading in the next two, five, or ten years? Will you still be doing the same thing, or will the issue be at the next stage of development? You need to think ahead and start preparing now for new directions in your organization or in your social marketing campaign. Keep monitoring what you're doing, so you're always riding the crest of the wave, rather than struggling to catch up to it.

Think of the fact that polls show that a vast majority of Americans realize the importance of clean air and water, and are eager to safeguard them. In the mid-twentieth century, that was not yet the case, and environmental social marketers concentrated on making people aware that air and water quality were far too low. Once that goal was accomplished, they shifted to other issues - energy conservation and acid rain, for instance - that were somewhat more specific. As the public in general has become more environmentally conscious, social marketers have changed their messages and approaches to reflect public knowledge and attitudes.

Adjusting strategy relies on an accurate and clear-headed analysis of trends and issues. If times have changed, and your current campaign doesn't acknowledge that, you're operating at a disadvantage. You have to be aware of what the change is, and of how you can alter direction to respond to it.

Some adult literacy and employment training programs, for instance, recognized in the early '90s that computers would play a larger and larger role in jobs and as sources of information. They began to strategize about how to fund computers and computer labs, and to develop computer literacy curricula. Their participants were able to gain skills and confidence in what was still at the time a new area and, as a result, were able to compete successfully in the post-program worlds of academics and employment. The programs, by the same token, found themselves on the cutting edge. They already had the equipment and expertise to take advantage of funding and other opportunities, while most other organizations were trying to play catch-up.

A comprehensive way to examine and adjust your strategy is to do a marketing audit. This is a systematic look at the context of your issue and your organization, your organization itself, and its response to its environment.

Some of the questions that a thorough market audit asks are:

• What are the current and future issues and trends (demographic, economic, technological, ecological, political) in the larger environment that are likely to affect the organization now and later?
• What are the current and future issues and trends (markets, customers, competitors, distribution, suppliers, marketing firms, publics) in the field that are likely to affect the organization now and later?
• What are current organizational and marketing objectives and strategy, and do they address the current and future reality effectively?
• What are current marketing systems, and how are they functioning?
• Are profitability and cost-effectiveness satisfactory?
• How are you handling the Four P's: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion?

For an outline of a formal market audit, please see Tool #1, A Sample Market Audit. Although this outline is extremely thorough and calls for an outside auditor to take a comprehensive look at your organizational and marketing practices, it can also serve as a source of ideas for a much less formal and comprehensive audit. If you're a small organization with limited resources, you can still take a good look at what you're doing. You may be able to get help from an organization such as SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) or from a university marketing department. Or you may be able to set up an internal committee or group - perhaps even the same group that created your strategic plan, if you have one -- to monitor your strategy and do a limited marketing audit. In any case, you don't have to address every issue in the sample audit in order to make some judgments about what you're doing, and adjust it to present or future reality.

In Summary

A crucial part of any social marketing campaign is follow-up: monitoring and adjusting your campaign and your actual operation to make sure that they continue to respond to the needs and circumstances of the target population and the issue you're addressing. That means looking at your campaign's and your organization's effectiveness, efficiency, and strategy on a regular basis, and changing whatever needs to be changed to keep both the campaign and the organization successful.

Monitoring and effectiveness involves looking at how well you're meeting both your marketing and your overall goals (sales analysis); how you're doing in relation to the competition (market share); how effectively you're using your resources, and whether you're getting the most out of them; and how the rest of the world views your campaign and your organization.

Monitoring efficiency means examining how well your campaign is using the various aspects of actual marketing: territory, market segment, distribution channels, and competition.

Monitoring strategy entails exploring current and long-term trends and issues and their impact on your campaign and your organization.

In all these instances, you have to consider the results of your monitoring objectively, acknowledge realities or problems, and work to adjust your campaign and your organization to respond to them. As long as you can continue to revisit and readjust your campaign and your work to address the realities of the social marketplace, your social marketing campaign -- and your organization -- should enjoy continued success

Why should you monitor progress and make adjustments in the social marketing campaign?

___You understand that social and other conditions change over time, and that a social marketing campaign has to change with them to remain successful.

You pay careful attention to:

___Demographics

___Consumer preferences

___Trends and social conditions

___Social memory

___Communication channels

What aspects of the campaign should you monitor?

You know that you have to monitor both your campaign and your organization for:

___Effectiveness

___Efficiency

___Strategy

How do you monitor and adjust a social marketing campaign?

___You measure campaign and organizational effectiveness by using one or more of the following:

• Sales analysis
• Market share analysis
• Expense-to-sales ratio
• A basic attitude measure
• A simple satisfaction/dissatisfaction scale
• A derived dissatisfaction measure
• Importance/performance ratings

You monitor efficiency by examining how well you're using and responding to:

___Territory

___Market segment

___Distribution channels

___Competition

You monitor strategy by looking at:

___Current social, political, economic, and other conditions, issues and trends in the larger world.

___Current issues and trends in your field.

___Current issues and trends in the community and among the target population.

___Long-term issues and trends in the larger world.

___Long-term issues and trends in your field.

___Long-term issues and trends in the community and among the target population.

___Depending upon the results of your monitoring, you make changes in the message, distribution, tone, or direction of your campaign or in the methods, systems, personnel, or general operation of your organization in order to continue to reach and meet the needs of the target population and to continue to conduct a successful social marketing effort.

Tool #1: A Sample Market Audit

(From Strategic Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations, by Philip Kotler and Alan Andreasen.)

This tool is meant as a guide for conducting a formal marketing audit. You can use it to help you think about what areas you need to look at as you review your social marketing effort; you can use pieces of it as they stand here; or you can actually try to carry part or all of it out in a formal way. A lot depends on your resources, the size of your marketing effort (and of your organization), and the overall importance of your social marketing effort to the work you do.

Part I. Marketing Environment Audit

Macroenvironment

• Demographic
  • What major demographic developments and trends pose opportunities or threats for this organization?
  • What actions has the organization taken in response to these developments?
• Economic
  • What major developments and trends in income, prices, savings, and credit have an impact on the organization?
  • What action has the organization taken in response to these developments and trends?
• Ecological
  • What is the outlook for the cost and availability of natural resources and energy needed by the organization?
  • What concerns have been expressed about the organization's role in conservation, and what steps has the organization taken?
• Technological
  • What changes are occurring in the relevant product, service, and process technology? What is the organization substitute that might replace this product or service?
• Political
  • What new legislation could affect this organization? What federal, state, and local agency actions should be watched?
  • What action has the organization taken in response to these developments?
• Cultural
  • What changes are occurring in consumer life-styles and values that might affect this organization?
  • What actions has the organization taken in response to these developments?

Task Environment

• Markets
  • What is happening to market size, growth, and geographical distribution?
  • What are the major market segments? What are their expected rates of growth? Which are high-opportunity and low-opportunity segments?
• Customers
  • How do current customers and prospects rate the organization and its competitors, particularly with respect to reputation, product quality, service, sales force, and price?
  • How do different classes of customers make their buying decisions?
  • What are the evolving needs and satisfactions being sought by consumers in this market?
• Competitors
  • Who are the major competitors? What are the objectives and strategies of each major competitor? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are the sizes and trends in market shares?
  • What trends can be seen in future competition and substitutes for this product?
• Distribution and Dealers
  • What are the main distribution channels bringing products to customers?
  • What are the efficiency levels and growth potentials of the different distribution channels?
• Suppliers
  • What is the outlook for the availability of different key resources used in production?
  • What trends are occurring among suppliers in their pattern of selling?
• Facilitators and Marketing Firms
  • What is the outlook for the cost and availability of transportation services?
  • What is the outlook for the cost and availability of warehousing facilities?
  • What is the outlook for the cost and availability of financial resources?
  • How effectively is the advertising agency performing?
• Publics
  • What publics (financial, media, government, citizen, local, general, and internal) represent particular opportunities or problems for the company?
  • What steps has the company taken to deal effectively with its key publics?

Part II. Marketing Objectives and Strategy Audit

• Organization's Objectives
  • Is the mission of the organization clearly stated in market-oriented terms? Is the mission feasible in terms of the organization's opportunities and resources?
  • Are the organization's various objectives clearly stated so that they lead logically to the marketing objectives?
  • Are the marketing objectives appropriate, given the organization's competitive position, resources, and opportunities?
• Marketing Strategy
  • What is the core marketing strategy for achieving the objectives? Is it a sound marketing strategy?
  • Are enough resources (or too many resources) budgeted to accomplish the marketing objectives?
  • Are the marketing resources allocated optimally to prime market segments, territories, and products of the organization?
  • Are the marketing resources allocated optimally to the major elements of the marketing mix, that is, offer quality, service, sales force, advertising, promotion, and distribution?

Part III. Marketing Organization Audit

• Formal Structure
  • Is there a high-level marketing officer with adequate authority and responsibility over those organizational activities that affect the customer's satisfaction?
  • Are the marketing responsibilities optimally structured along functional, product, end user, and territorial lines?
• Functional Efficiency
  • Are there good communication and working relations between marketing and sales?
  • Is the product management system working effectively? Are the product managers able to plan profits or only sales volume?
  • Are there any groups in marketing that need more training, motivation, supervision, or evaluation?
• Interface Efficiency
  • Are there any problems between marketing and operations that need attention?
  • What about marketing and R & D?
  • What about marketing and financial management?
  • What about marketing and purchasing?

Part IV. Marketing Systems Audit

• Marketing Information System
  • Is the marketing intelligence system producing accurate, sufficient, and timely information about developments in the marketplace?
  • Is marketing research being adequately used by managers?
• Marketing Planning System
  • Is the marketing planning system well-conceived and effective?
  • Are sales forecasting and market potential measurement soundly carried out?
  • Are sales quotas set on a proper basis?
• Marketing Control System
  • Are the control procedures (monthly, quarterly, etc.) adequate to ensure that the annual plan objectives are being achieved?
  • Is provision made to analyze periodically the profitability of different products, markets, territories, and channels of distribution?
  • Is provision made to periodically examine and validate various marketing costs?
• New Product Development System
  • Is the organization well organized to gather, generate, and screen new product ideas?
  • Does the organization do adequate concept research and business analysis before investing heavily in a new idea?
  • Does the organization carry out adequate product and market testing before launching a new product?

Part V. Marketing Productivity Audit

• Profitability Analysis
  • What is the profitability of the organization's different products, customer markets, territories, and channels of distribution?
  • Should the organization enter, expand, contract, or withdraw from any market segments, and what would be the short- and long-run profit consequences?
• Cost-Effective Analysis
  • Do any marketing activities seem to have excessive costs? Are these costs valid? Can cost-reducing steps be taken?

Part VI. Marketing Function Audits

• Products
  • What are the product line objectives? Are these objectives sound? Is the current product line meeting these objectives?
  • Are there particular products that should be phased out?
  • Are there new products that are worth adding?
  • Are any products able to benefit from quality, feature, or style improvements?
• Price
  • What are the pricing objectives, policies, strategies, and procedures? To what extent are prices set on sound cost, demand, and competitive criteria?
  • Do the customers see the organization's prices as being in line or out of line with the value of its offer?
  • Does the organization use promotional pricing effectively?
• Distribution
  • What are the distribution objectives and strategies?
  • Is there adequate market coverage and service?
  • Should the organization consider changing its degree of reliance on distributors, sales reps, and direct selling?
• Advertising, Sales Promotion, and Public Relations
  • What are the organization's advertising objectives? Are they sound?
  • Is the right amount being spent on advertising? How is the budget determined?
  • Are the ad themes and copy effective? What do customers and the public think about the advertising?
  • Are the advertising media well chosen?
  • Is sales promotion used effectively?
  • Is there a well-conceived public relations program?
• Sales Force
  • What are the organization's sales force objectives?
  • Is the sales force large enough to accomplish the organization's objectives?
  • Is the sales force organized along the proper principle(s) of specialization (territory, market, product)?
  • Does the sales force show high morale, ability, and effort? Are they sufficiently trained and incentivized?
  • Are the procedures adequate for setting quotas and evaluating performances?
  • How is the organization's sales force perceived in relation to competitors ' sales forces?