Alan Andreasen: What can brand marketers learn from social marketing?

Social marketing and brand marketing have much in common, yet in other ways they’re like chalk and cheese.

 

Philip Kotler and Alan R Andreasen defined social marketing as "differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organisation… Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviours not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society."

 

Yet this difference, while small on paper, is significant in reality – and social marketers have a host of challenges and pressures to contend with that their commercial marketing cousins remain blissfully unaffected by.

 

Furthermore, until recently, the two disciplines were fairly segregated – social marketers rarely migrated into brand territory and vice versa. But this is beginning to change and both sides of the great (or not so great, depending on your point of view) divide stand to benefit from this cross-pollination of ideas and strategies.

 

So what lessons are they taking from eachother?

 

Alan R Andreasen is internationally recognised as one of the leading authorities on social marketing, having advised a wide range of organisations and government agencies around the world. The fact that these include such diverse bodies as the World Bank, American Red Cross, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, National Endowment for the Arts, and public health programmes in countries such as Egypt, Thailand and Jamaica, provides an indication of the growing interest in – and acknowledgement of – the value of social marketing.

 

Nonetheless, it is a challenging field. Not only do social marketers have to cope with dramatically lower budgets than in the commercial field, but they also have to grapple with higher expectations.  "Marketing campaigns that move market share up a couple of points are considered really dramatic and praiseworthy - whereas obesity programmes are supposed to reduce the average weight of everybody!" says Andreasen.

 

And to complicate matters further, the measurement of social marketing campaigns is also problematic in many cases. "One of the dimensions that has been most problematic in social marketing is the difficulty of measuring good metrics that demonstrate that it works,” Andreasen explains. “You can track whether attitudes were changed, whether people learned that something was bad or good, but as we keep saying it should be about behaviour. And in many cases, the behaviour is five years away or there is behaviour change, but you can’t track it to a particular programme or campaign."

 

He adds: "Metrics are really good and you can see lots of progress in areas like family planning. There have been huge successes in the US in the area of heart attacks and heart problems, with the death curves all nicely downward. But no-one can really claim that that they did it because there is so much going on, and the change goes over such a long period of time that it is hard to attach any major outcomes to specific programmes."

 

And there are other issues that social marketers have to contend with, for instance far greater public scrutiny than in the commercial arena. "Social marketing people are a little gun shy, they are worried a lot about getting blow back from a daring campaign – which you often need in order to get any kind of attention,” explains Andreasen. “The private sector can inundate us with stuff that strikes us  as bizarre and useless and we all kind of snicker at it and wonder why they are doing that. But if it is a social programme where they somehow think that charitable dollars or tax money is going into it, the anger level rises a lot – and so that has had an effect and they are sometimes nervous."

 

 

All in all, it’s a tough gig. But the growing impact of social marketing – only this week, the UK government’s anti-obesity campaign Change4Life was named best new brand at the Marketing Society awards for Excellence – demonstrates the excellent work that has been going on within these constraints.

 

"A lot of it is innovation and financial acumen. But a number of other things have happened," says Andreasen. "We have done a much better job encouraging people to take the long view and accept that this is not something that we are going to fix this year, or this business cycle. We’re talking about long-term changes. There has also been a lot of effort to build coalitions and have a lot of organisations trying to focus on the same problems.

 

"The third thing has been the recruitment of volunteers and augmenting of budgets through volunteer efforts in a lot of places. A good example here in the US was with the anti-smoking campaigns aimed at teenagers, where a lot of the workers in programmes were other teens because we had learnt early on that teens are unlikely to respond to messages and approaches that seem to be emanating from people like you and I, they see it as another example of adults trying to tell them what to do and the reason they smoke is in effect quite the opposite. So they built a campaign with lots of teen participation – teens talking to teens about smoking."

 

Social campaigns have also learnt to build in as much celebrity endorsement as possible to try and get as much leverage as they can from minimal budgets. "In the US in the area of obesity and exercise we have been encouraged by the fact that Michelle Obama has taken this cause up as a principle interest – and boy that gives you a very large megaphone."

 

In a bid to address the metrics challenge, social marketers have been encouraged to focus on relatively specific behaviours that they can have an impact on, understanding as much as possible about that behaviour and the people doing it as they can, and then addressing it.

 

"You can’t go after everyone. There are lots of examples of organisations failing on both counts – trying to get every kind of possible behaviour put in place and at the same time having programmes aimed at everyone. You get a lot of that from governments, who think that as it is tax payers’ dollars they have to approach everyone rather than singling some out and not others. But you need to look at the low hanging fruit – are there some folks who you can have a real impact on, and if so go for those. And if you have got a whole array of behaviours, what are the ones that are most likely to be responsive to a campaign? These approaches address the broad question of having mammoth challenges at a more tactical, strategic level."

 

 

Social marketing’s development is in part being aided by a growing 'private sector mentality'. Andreasen suggests that social marketing has perhaps been held back in the past by people who are "good hearted and well meaning" but also "not very good managers", who lack the qualities of private sector peers such as the careful setting of goals, comprehensive measurement, and so on.

 

"I’ve found that they’re just not very good at making brave decisions quickly – they have meeting after meeting and are often more tentative than you’d find in the private sector, where of course they have got bigger budgets but they have also got training and a mindset that is much more daring and quick to move. I’ve often used the cliché that in the private sector it is 'ready, fire, aim' whereas in the social sector you often get 'ready, aim, aim, aim, aim...' So that is a problem, but it is changing. You are getting many more private sector people and a private sector mentality seeping into the social sector."

 

But it’s not one-way traffic. Only recently, the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Mark Stuart commented how commercial marketers could learn a trick or two from social marketing. "Marketers want to know how customers think and how to best influence them to make one set of choices over another," he said. "Social marketers have become experts in behaviour change because they often deal with people whose behaviours are the hardest of all to change – whose norms are influenced by their cultural and situational surroundings and the attitudes of their peers. Often they have near-insurmountable barriers to change or are simply not motivated to change. The fact that social marketers are so successful in creating behavioural change in difficult areas like obesity, drug abuse and anti-social behaviour, is testament to their mastery of building relationships, innovating effective marketing practices and developing a true understanding of psychology and decision-making; both at individual and broader segment levels."

 

And Andreasen is in agreement. "One of the things that I think private sector marketers can learn from the social sector is that since social marketers worry a lot about changing intentions and attitudes to link behaviour, there has been a lot of focus on the theoretical notions of how intentions and awarenesses and so on link to behaviours. And while private sector organisations have historically been interested in that I think the social sector stuff has a lot to contribute in highlighting a more careful link between intentions and awareness and actual behaviour."

 

Furthermore, Andreasen believes that commercial brands could benefit from seriously considering the notion of behaviour being the bottom line of marketing, rather than return on investment or profitability, for instance. "Certainly those are metrics that you can use in the private sector, but I have been arguing that what we really ought to take as our guiding metric is behaviour. Because if you don’t get behaviourial influences, all the rest doesn’t fall out."

 

And from this perspective, social marketers are light years ahead of their commercial cousins. "There are a lot of advertising campaigns that are successful because people remember them, they are entertained by them, and they may develop iconic characters - but they don’t move sales. In the social sector people can’t afford not to have behavioural outcomes as their mantra because they don’t have much money."

 

As the cross-pollination continues, both social and commercial marketing look set to benefit. And Andreasen is delighted that social marketing has matured to the point where commercial marketers are taking some of their cues from the social sector. "In some ways it has come a long way..." he notes.