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.