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Social Marketing

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18<br />

The Basics<br />

Working Toward a Strategy<br />

Regulation Problem<br />

Characteristics: The behavior is extremely difficult to perform. Understanding of the behavior<br />

is widespread and multiple attempts have been made to influence it voluntarily. The behavior<br />

causes great damage to society and there is now a consensus it has to be regulated. However,<br />

don’t limit your thinking of regulations to the government forbidding certain actions; regulation<br />

can take many forms. Indeed, it can regulate through discouraging individual behavior like<br />

smoking, or organizational behavior like the marketing of cigarettes to children. It can also<br />

add benefits by providing tax exemptions. And, it can increase barriers like taxing commodities<br />

and services.<br />

Examples: seat belt laws; smoking restrictions; illegal drug laws<br />

<strong>Marketing</strong> Problem<br />

Characteristics: The behavior is somewhat complex. People need resources, tools, and/or new<br />

skills to perform it well. It is not widely accepted, although it is often widely known. It has significant<br />

immediate barriers and few immediate benefits people care about.<br />

Examples: oral rehydration of infants in the home; using malaria bed nets; using condoms<br />

The most common reason<br />

for failure of social marketing<br />

programs is to default to the<br />

education problem, exclude<br />

the regulatory problem as<br />

not a marketing solution<br />

and ignore the power of the<br />

complete market mix.<br />

Each of these problems requires different<br />

marketing strategies emphasizing different<br />

combinations of the marketing mix. To address<br />

education problems, the promotion P, such as<br />

advertising messages to rapidly disseminate<br />

information on aspirin use for infants, may be<br />

more important than developing new products<br />

or services, pricing, or distribution systems.<br />

Likewise, to address regulatory problems, the<br />

promotion P is the most important element<br />

of the marketing mix, and should be used in<br />

conjunction with advocacy for policy change<br />

that increases the barriers to bad behavior or adds benefits to the preferred behavior. One such<br />

approach would be the use of earned media to publicize new and aggressive enforcement<br />

of seat bet laws. In contrast, addressing the marketing problem may require the development<br />

of new products and services that reduce barriers and increase benefits before promotion<br />

can be effective, such as the creation of specialized goggles to protect migrant workers from<br />

eye accidents.

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