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Marketing without Marketing without Campaigns

This podcast discusses what marketing is in the absence of communications.   This podcast discusses what marketing is in the absence of communications.

Date Released: 8/11/2008
Running time: 14:29
Author: National Center for Health Marketing (NCHM)
Series Name: Health Communication, Marketing & Media Conference

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[Announcer] This podcast is presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC – safer, healthier people.

I thought that was a terrific morning start off. I thought that Yankolovich guy was like very high energy. I just loved it. And a couple of us were remarking that, you know, we’re really glad there’s really good data about that because we’ve believed in that stuff for a long time now, so it’s good that we’ve got some serious commercial data behind it. I think all I have to do is press this thing. I’ll try in a second. What I wanted to do is to begin this session by sort of framing what marketing is if we didn’t have communications. You know? If we couldn’t produce a pamphlet, what would we do? How would we actually survive? And thinking about marketing without campaigns. You know, if you look at it from a commercial perspective, from a business perspective, they start with a product and a service. The purpose of that is to sell it and the purpose of the sale is to make a profit and a lot of people sell a lot of things and don’t make any profit and we get a lot of behavior change but we don’t get a lot of impact on help. So, for us our profit is really health. And then they use these other things, price and place and promotion to sell those products. If you look at public health, as I said, our profit is really health. Our sales are very much like consumer sales. We’re selling behavior. Now, consumers are interested in purchasing behavior so that’s a relatively simple behavior compared to the ones we have to do with, but it’s still behavior. And then when you come to products and services, we don’t do very many products and services. We sort of fold it all into information. Let’s look at what Bank of America did, for example. Here’s these, you know, they’ve wanted to make a little more profit and so rather than telling us that they were going to give money to a charity to get us to invest in their bank, they created a new card and I’m sure you’ve seen these cards. They’ve actually created a new product, which made it easy for them to sell this benefit to us. We can now walk around with this card in our pocket. They didn’t have a big media campaign saying “Bank of America will now be giving five percent of everything we have to a favorite charity.” That would have been a message campaign. They actually created a new product. Let’s look at this program from, I just pulled this off the web, if you look at the definition down there that’s being used - social marketing utilizes commercial marketing techniques to create advertising. It does? Well unfortunately, in public health it’s doing much too much of that. We are calling social marketing ‘advertising’ and we’re spending a lot of time on messages, and what I want to make, you know, kind of share with you, so we get this message out, sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Words Hurt, Be an Ally, this is an anti-bullying campaign that they’re running and of course the product is more information. Call an 800 number, but that’s really all they’re offering anybody to help with an anti-bullying campaign. Their product is information. Their price is they made it easy for call to more information. The place is print and telephone and their promotion is this sticks and stones idea. All messages, all channels, no products, no services, placed nowhere, just messages and channels. That’s why they think social marketing is advertising, and if there’s anything I can do today to get you to begin to really separate these two fundamental concepts. It’s going to be very hard because so many of us are working on message campaigns, but let’s imagine they created a whole monitor program, or they had a safety patrol, or they put cell phone monitoring in place so when a kid saw another kid being bullied he could just call in. Maybe they had a Face Book to out bullies. They could create a product or a service in addition to these messages and that’s where this place thing comes in. A real marketing question is what products and services, priced, placed, and promoted do I need in order to help people exercise, to resist tobacco advertising, to eat more fruits and vegetables, to lay my infant on its back and to sleep. But, we keep asking this question. What messages and channels will help people do that and I think we’re losing really the tremendous potential that marketing has to offer us. Now many of you are saying, well he must be talking about other programs, he can’t be talking about mine. One of the great things I get to do in life is be the editor of the Social Marketing Quarterly and so I get all kinds of articles from people who want to publish on their social marketing campaigns and this is a very typical one. They begin by describing their audience, as Ed said. You know they start with the audience, largely Latino, African American women, lower income urban population who have little access to healthcare services. Our strategy to help those women is an awareness campaign using the pop star with the message You Can Do It, and the results of their research says eighty percent of the focus group preferred You Can Do It to the more negative message You Must Do It. I don’t think it really matters. Then, they talk about the impressions that their campaign got and published the success. So, how they got from this problem to You Can Do It is totally unbelievable. I mean this is the one thing they can’t do and we’re not doing anything to help them. So, we’re just going to tell them that they can. They need a better service. They don’t need a pep talk and we’re not spending enough of our time creating services in places where people can; we can help people get this job done.

This is a really old one, probably some of you in here worked on Project Lean. This is interesting. They had a fancy slogan, a little bit better than the other one I think. This was Every year thousands of people are killed with a frying pan. This came obviously after the frying pan on the brains business. This is what they did. Fifty percent of their work was in PSA’s, a lot of print material, didn’t do really very much else than this and they called it a social marketing campaign and it’s actually a rather famous social marketing campaign. It gets talked about a lot. I think it’s a wonderful communications campaign, but I’m having a hard time understanding why it’s a social marketing campaign. Now, you see next to that little circle it says 1987, so I felt this is really unfair to beat them up in public over something that old, so I went and looked at the new stuff. This is December ’06, same stuff. Lots and lots of messages, lots and lots of telling people what they ought to do. Lots and lots of us being smarter, giving them advice that they don’t have instead of building a mobile test kitchen, cooking with communities, opening a new park with great exercise that’s fun, equipment, easy to use, and popular with old and young people. I apologize for that. Some of you know I’m a little overused- fun, easy and popular - but it, I think it’s really what successful marketing is about.

Two hundred years ago in Gambia, when I was a kid, we had to get mothers to mix a very difficult medication: sugar, salt and water. They couldn’t read anything, so we couldn’t use pamphlets. They only had radio, so we couldn’t use television and we had to teach the whole country to do this. And if they put too much salt in it, they would kill the kid and if they put too much sugar in it, they would dehydrate the kid more. So, it was very important to get this right. So what we did was organize a national lottery that ran for a year in which thousands of mothers mixed this thing in front of other mothers getting advice from each other on how to do it right and use of this product, correct use of this product, went from zero to about, because it wasn’t being used at all before we introduced it, to about sixty, I think it was sixty-two percent of diarrheal cases were being treated properly with this. Now, this is a really old story, but I think it illustrates the point. Create a place where people can come interact with each other and practice some of these. Create a service where they can do it, not just learn about it.

This is another great example I think of marketing competence. I don’t know how many of you know this story. Latino women are particularly resistant to using car seats. They just don’t believe in them and when you ask them why they say look, in addition, I know you Gringos believe in all your little plastic devices and your techno fixes and everything, but let me tell you, my kid is safer in my arms than he is any place else. And by the way, God kind of makes these decisions, so if God wants to take my baby, he’s going to take him in your car seat or he’s going to take him in my arms, so I just as soon he was in my arms. So, the obvious approach was to create an ad campaign, which explained that God was very busy in Iraq right now and really wasn’t doing car seats anymore, so that moms really ought to take over the job because God really wasn’t on the thing. Or, they could do what they did do, which is get priests to bless the car seats, and car seat sales and use zoomed in these communities along the Texas border. That’s creating a new service, got mothers together in a place to do something which was consistent the way they thought and understood the world. Low cost, but real marketing competence.

Campaigns have become equal in our minds to messages when you say I’m running a campaign, you really say I’m running a bunch of messages. I think a campaign in a marketing sense is creating a new product and service and then promoting that. We’re using messages as substitutes for products and services and I think we’re doing it at our peril. Even the U.S. military, I found this interesting quote: “The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of the U.S. military operations around the world involves shaping both the product and the market place and then establishing a brand identity.” Isn’t that cool? The military’s thinking about brand identity, but they’re right about this. Until they change what the Army does, it doesn’t really matter what they say about what the Army does. That’s what they’ve got to change.

One quick story to end up. I know you all know this ad, this is the Got Milk campaign. Fabulously successful advertising campaign, incredibly successful. Message loved by all kinds of Americans and this is the data after two years, zero change in milk sales. Very, very popular advertising. Zero change in milk sales. Quite frustrating because they were spending a hundred and ten million dollars a year trying to get milk sales. This is what they did change; they changed the milk. Three years after spending three hundred million dollars, they decided maybe it’s the milk and not the advertising and we see a whole bunch of new milk now. They changed the product. And where that was introduced, milk sales increased tremendously. Product and a good message. They didn’t give up the mustache campaign. The mustache campaign was great communications, but alone it wasn’t producing any benefit. They did a whole bunch of other stuff. Cross promotions on milk, barrel cooler replacements. They took a real marketing approach to milk and then milk got hit in the face with water and water sales starting zooming and milk sales started going down again, so they had to go back to the market place. More flavors of milk, re-sealable plastic bottles that they were using in schools. I think this is the story of a very excellent, complex marketing problem. A simple product lost its glamour, highly competitive market place, terrific advertising, no change in sales, change the product and begin to get a. People want things. They don’t just want advice. I love this thing, you know? Can I get miles with this? We want physical things. We like them and I don’t think in public health we’re giving them enough of them.

This is the last slide and I put this here to say that I don’t want you ever to believe that I don’t think communications can change behavior without products. I think it can and this is really good data. This is from the Netherlands and from New Zealand. Their campaign on SIDS. In fact, communication is so good it can get people to do the wrong thing. So the Netherlands taught mothers to put their kids on their stomach for the first year and then they had to go back and fix it. So, communications can change behavior and you have to make sure which direction it’s changing in, but I do think we have this tremendous opportunity to look at and answer this question. What products and services are we creating to make things more fun, more easy, and more popular and start really using the (?)?

[Announcer] To access the most accurate and relevant health information that affects you, your family and your community, please visit www.cdc.gov.

  Page last modified Monday, August 11, 2008

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