Social Marketing of Successful Components of the Initiative: Listening to Those Whose Behavior Matters
Learn how to prepare an effective social marketing effort by enlisting the help of those to whom you're marketing.
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WHY LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE WHOSE BEHAVIOR YOU'RE TRYING TO CHANGE?
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WHO ARE THE PEOPLE TO WHOM YOU NEED TO LISTEN?
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HOW DO YOU CONTACT THOSE WHOSE BEHAVIOR MATTERS?
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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?
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