Alan R. Andreasen on "Introduction to Social Marketing"

…social marketing is any program designed to influence what I call a problematic social behavior, using ideas from the commercial sector, commercial marketing activity.

Well, a lot of people come to social marketing at first blush thinking it's just communications. Their background or their interest is in developing some sort of message strategy as they think of it -- the idea being that if you tell people to do the right thing or you give them some sort of incentives verbally or visually, they'll take on the behavior that you want. That's some of what social marketing is all about, but it really gets them off on the wrong tack.

It involves, in lots of cases, making a particular behavior just plain easy to do. That's what often keeps people from doing a lot of things, such as exercise. A lot of people certainly know -- they've gotten the message -- that they need to exercise more, and the problem is that they can't find easy ways to fit it into their lives. And so our challenge as social marketers is to figure out ways to help them do that, which may or may not involve communications in a strict sense.

I'm a great believer in thinking about target audiences being at sort of different stages towards doing the behavior that you want. In an early stage there they're really in what often is called “precontemplation,” they don't really know about the behavior. They don't really know that they ought to, for example, place a baby on its back in a crib; and some communication at that stage just to alert them to the problem. I think a lot of the work that the CDC and others is doing to get people just award of the prevalence of obesity and what is obesity is very important just to get people's attention. But moving them then onto other stages where they think deeply about it and then they begin to act, communications becomes in a sense less important. It's certainly important in communicating the benefits in what's called the “contemplation” stage, where people are really thinking about it. You've got to get the benefits across. The problem is that that's something you do relatively early; whereas, as people move closer and closer to the behavior, other things become more important like what's often called the “barriers,” some of the negatives of doing this kind of thing. And those things are not always so susceptible to communications, so you need to think about other things you can do to get the behavior you want and then maintain the behavior. Maintaining behavior very often is just finding out creative ways to reward people for doing the right things. And sometimes that's communications, and sometimes it isn't.

…a lot of people are trained in communications and it's very glamorous to do communications. You've got lots of things to show people. It's very creative. And it's sometimes easy to measure your communications objectives. Did people learn this? Did they change their attitudes? And very often you can do that. The trouble is, it may not lead to behavior. I mean, again, go back to the exercise example. People know they ought to exercise. A lot of people know they ought to exercise, and they've got a positive attitude towards it, but they ain't doing it!

…sometimes policies present barriers. A good example is a community's policy with respect to street lighting or with providing bicycle paths and so on. These are simply, in lots of places, not available, so that policy or public spending has to be changed. Now the way I look at it is to say, what marketers do is try to influence behavior; and to get a policy changed, somebody has to do something. So that's another place where folks with our kind of training can be very helpful because we can get people to do things. I think in lots of cases helping people do behaviors involves creating services: making it easy to exercise, making it that there are many more places where you can do it in the workplace, programs to get people to walk upstairs is an easy way. And you can think of that as somebody being in charge and developing an in-office or in-factory kind of program to get people to exercise as a daily routine, not as a go-to-the-gym, make-a-big-deal-out-of-it kind of activity. And with respect to products, in lots of cases sometimes there are products that need to be created and branded to get a behavior to happen. A lot of things around the developing world with respect to family planning have been successful because of the ability to brand various kinds of contraceptive products.

Well, I guess, one of the ways I would think about it is that you would try to develop interventions that respond to people's needs and wants. I mean, that's a cliché, but very often a lot of programs that I've been called in to advise on think they know what's good for the target audience and they think their challenge is to convince those poor sorry individuals about the virtue and rightness of whatever it is they're recommending -- whether it's eating fruits and vegetables or exercising or practicing family planning or other kinds of activities -- that will make them a better person. And that's probably not a very good way to go about an intervention. A better approach is one that tries to start with some understanding of the target audience and tries to figure out what they want in their lives and try to find out ways to relate what you're recommending to where they're coming from. And that's a fairly generic recommendation, but it gets people off on the right foot in developing an intervention.