A 7 Step Social Marketing Approach

Author

Les Robinson

Publication Date

September 12, 2007

Summary

Education as a universal panacea

'Education', like grief counselling, has become the universal panacea of public policy. If there is a problem of domestic violence, we will solve it with an education campaign. The same applies to drink driving, lack of civic participation, gun ownership, brain injuries, and so on.

But what is this thing called education? You can't buy it off a shelf. There's no recipe book. You can't do a course in it.

We are not even sure that it works...a few years ago Social Change Media carried out a consultancy for the Roads and Traffic Authority. We were asked to evaluate 20-odd evaluations of road safety campaigns. Every one of these campaigns had been evaluated to be a success. But, funnily enough, the proof of 'success' was whatever attitudinal change the campaign happened to achieve, even if it was marginal.

Whatever 'education' is, it's not going to be easy. After all, 'education' is really a misnomer - our aim is not to get people to KNOW MORE THINGS. We are trying to get people to CHANGE WHAT THEY DO. Changing people's behaviour has always been the most problematic enterprise in human affairs.

It's worth noting that many of the techniques and tools of 'education' have been developed in the advertising and public relations industries. But these fields have quite different goals to 'education'. Advertising, for instance, is mostly NOT about changing behaviour. It's about changing brands. We still drink beer...We still buy the car...We just buy a different brand of beer or car.

PR, on the other hand, has nothing to do with behaviour at all, it's is about manipulating the media to project your interests into the public realm.

Social change marketing, however, looks beyond advertising and PR techniques. It extends to things like community development, recruitment, training, infrastructure planning and more.

So...as a panacea 'education' is not only elusive, it's always going to be a demanding and tough discipline.

Received wisdom

The best guide to social marketing I know is Making Health Communication Programs Work - a planners guide, a 131-page guide written by the US Department of Health and Human Services in 1992, and reprinted endlessly.

By the way, click here it's finally on the net.

It's a crash course in how to plan and execute a social marketing campaign.

This publication begins with a useful warning about what education cannot achieve -

Health communication programs cannot:

compensate for a lack of health care services
produce behaviour change without supportive program components
be equally effective in addressing all issues or relaying all messages.

In fact, much of Making Health Communications Work would be quite familiar to any communication professional. For instance, it proposes a 6-step cyclic process which relies strongly on pre-testing and evaluation of communication messages and materials.

Now, I don't want to go on about 'best practice'...I'll talk for a moment about common practice.

A lot of people who are not educators, especially (and I hope I'm not insulting too many potential clients here) engineers and professional managers, imagine that behaviour change is like any other constructed thing.

You decide what behaviour change you want to make. You draw a plan, assemble the tools and resources and manufacture the thing.

When it comes to behaviour change, there is a distinctly managerial hubris to all this. WE are the managers. We have the TRUE KNOWLEDGE and CORRECT BEHAVIOUR. THEY do not. If we can INJECT our knowledge into the (passive) audience, then they will realise the error of their ways and start behaving correctly.

I call this the 'engineered awareness' approach. It's widespread, especially amongst, well, engineers and managers. It is based on the assumption that AWARENESS BUILDING is the key to behaviour change.

The 'engineered awareness' approach, before and after –

Even Making Health Communication Programs Work suffers from this. It is, after all, not a manual for behaviour change...only on how to do the communication bit.

There are, in fact, no lack of models and approaches that guide us in designing awareness campaigns. But I want to propose that lack of awareness may not always be the problem and because of that we may need a much wider definition of what we mean by 'education'.

Is ignorance really the problem?

Back when I was a cartoonist on Streetwize comics we interviewed some young people in a refuge. As usual, they discussed with great affection and enthusiasm their recent drug experiences - and, in this case, I am talking seriously irresponsible drug taking! When I asked the most irresponsible and drug damaged individual there what message he would like to pass on to other young people he became suddenly serious and said 'Don't take drugs'. And he meant it.

Now here is an example of the failure of awareness. It was quite clear that no amount of awareness-building would change these kids' behaviour - they already knew what they were doing was dangerous and stupid.

Maybe our addictions to environmentally-damaging behaviours are similar. After all, we know exactly what's right - but there are still a lot of situations when we do wrong to the environment.

In fact there is no shortage of social research that shows that the general population have levels of environmental concern and knowledge that are way above that of regulators and politicians.

I've heard managers and others tell me that the public just don't understand environmental issues. And in a way it's true - there is a poor understanding of the purely technical facts of, for instance, the landfill crisis.

But, while people may not understand the technical issues - they are not stupid. People are very smart when it comes to making judgements about their own lives. And, when you think about it...whether landfills are full is not nearly such a MOBILISING idea wether OUR ENVIRONMENT is under threat. If people understood that landfills were in trouble BUT didn't connect this to a larger problem of the HUMAN ENVIRONMENT, we'd be in trouble!

So perhaps there is already plenty of 'awareness' - and of the right kind. But if that is the case why is there so little personal change?

What if the REAL obstacles to behavioural change are things other than ignorance?

What if, people already KNOW plenty about the problem AND have a pretty good idea what they should do and WANT to do it, but something else is stopping them?

7 steps to social change

This worried me and so I spent a few months considering what it would take to change my own behaviour. I came up with these 7 pre-conditions which can be expressed as affirmations...

Each one of these conditions is actually an obstacle, so you can think of this model as a set of 7 doors...

Notice how 'education strategy' is now about clearing away obstacles rather than awareness building.

Notice also that the educator or social marketer has the humble role of a door opener, rather than a font of ultimate truth.

Elements of the model

This model allows us to identify which elements are already being fulfilled, and so concentrate resources on the gaps.

The seven elements are -

knowledge
desire
skills
optimism
facilitation
stimulation
reinforcement

1. Knowledge/awareness

An obvious first step is that people must -

know there is a problem;
know there is a practical, viable solution or alternative. This is important. People are practical - they will always demand clear, simple, feasible road maps before they start a journey to a strange place.
identify the personal costs of inaction and the benefits of action in concrete terms people can relate to (ie. they 'own' the problem).

An awareness campaign aims to harness people's judgement.

2. Desire - imagining yourself in a different future

Change involves imagination. People need to be able to visualise a different, desirable, future for themselves.

This is different to being able to recognise rational benefits.

Desire is an emotion, not a kind of knowledge. Advertising agencies understand this well - they stimulate raw emotions like lust, fear, envy and greed in order to create desire. However, desire can also be created by evoking a future life which is more satisfying, healthy, attractive and safe.

Example of a marketing campaign based on desire:

IMAGE: Sexy image of desirable partner rolling around in the compost heap

COPY: Get in touch with the good earth

- Call 1300 for your Good Earth home composting package.

To design a campaign that harnesses your audience's imaginations, you'll have to start by liberating your own (I'm the first to admit that in an era where everything has a strategic plan, this can be difficult!)

3. Skills - knowing what to do

Being able to easily visualise the steps required to reach the goal. This is not about emotion - it is purely rational (it is what we have rationality for).

People learn skills best by seeing someone else do them. The best way to do this is to break the actions down into simple steps and use illustrations to make visualisation easy. It's amazing how many social marketing campaigns forget this element.

Example:

Home composting is easy!

[Illustrate step1, step 2, Step 3]

Call 1300 for your free 3-step Easy-compost booklet.

4. Optimism (or confidence)

The belief that success is probable or inevitable. Strong political or community leadership is probably an important ingredient of optimism.

I can't over-emphasise optimism. EPA research showed about 14% of the population are disabled from environmental action by their sense of isolation and powerlessness. If government and business are not leading by example, who can blame people for sensing their individual efforts may be futile?

5. Facilitation - having outside support

People are busy with limited resources and few choices. They may need accessible services, infrastructure and support networks that overcome practical obstacles to carrying out the action.

If personal behaviour change is blocked by real-world obstacles (and it usually is) then all the communications on earth will be ineffective. The role of an 'education' strategy might therefore need to be expanded to involve the establishment of new services and infrastructure. This is why recycling has been successful - we now have simple, quick, low-cost collection services which make recycling easy.

Example:

Home composting is easy!

Sign up for a free home compost bin delivery service.

6. Stimulation - having a kick-start

We are creatures of routine. Even with all the knowledge, desire, good will and services in the world, there is still the inertia of habit to overcome. Consciousness is the tool human beings use to overcome habit, but we are unconscious most of the time. How can social marketers create moments which reach into our lives and compel us into wakefulness?

When I think of the moments which have compelled me to act, they are of two kinds - either threatening (direct and personal, like an airport being proposed in the next suburb; or a threat to my world-view like a terrible famine in Sudan); or inspirational. The inspirational has always happened in a collective context - a kind of inspirational mass conversion which is based on our human social instincts (like the mass meeting where we make a personal commitment or give an extra large donation).

So the stimulation could be an imminent threat (like a cost increase), a special offer or competition (based on self-interest), or, better still, some communally shared event which galvanises action (e.g. a telethon, a public meeting, a festival).

7. Feedback and reinforcement

A host of voices, situations and institutions daily compel us to act in undesirable, unhealthy and anti-social ways. These forces don't disappear just because we've run a campaign. Effective social marketing is about continuous recruitment and reinforcement of messages - with regular communications which report back to people on the success of their efforts and the next steps which are expected of them.

Many NGOs (CAA, Amnesty, Greenpeace etc) have learnt this lesson and devote considerable resources to continuously feeding success stories and updates to their contributors, as well as new calls for support and action. We need to learn the same lesson and devote resources to celebrating people's successes (a Waste-Not Week might be a useful focus).

The importance of empowerment

Empowerment is the feeling of confidence that you can be a cause of genuine change. In practice, it's an elusive mixture of many ingredients - like skills, optimism, leadership, belief and experience. Empowerment can be built in a social marketing project by close association with your audience, even to the point of taking directions from them.

However empowerment is surprisingly fragile. It can easily be destroyed by dishonesty or mixed motives. But it can also be destroyed by a well-meaning social marketing project. Here is a cautionary tale -

970s, the $180m 'Mr Fit' health research program in the United States set out to determine how effectively professional intervention could reduce the risk of heart attacks. 12,000 men in the high-risk group for heart attacks were selected. Half were told that they had a high-risk of heart attack, but would be the used as the control group. The others were provided with intensive medical intervention - they were booked into cooking classes, fitness classes, family counselling sessions and so on.

The result, after several years, took the researchers by surprise. The control group improved their prognosis, while the intensively assisted group did less well. The explanation is that the assisted group were disempowered by the intensive intervention - they did not need to really take responsibility for their lives, because a health professional was doing it for them!

A 7-step research methodology

To be useful, a 7 step approach needs to feed into a research methodology. We need to figure out where the obstacles are (ie. which gates are closed) with a given audience. Here is an example of the kind of research questions you could ask, assuming that home composting was the goal of the proposed campaign.

Knowledge

STATEMENT: The best way to have great garden is to compost kitchen scraps and lawn clippings.