Subject: Marketing

Topic: Social Marketing.

Introduction

This thesis deals with an important task within forensic science - the comparison of bullets for the purpose of firearm identification. Firearms identification involves the identification of a bullet, cartridge case, or other ammunition component as having been fired by a particular firearm. Such distinctive identification is made possible in this thesis owing to machining processes used in the manufacture of firearms. These unique imperfections are transferred to the ammunition in the course of its firing, making it possible to determine which firearm fired a specific bullet.

Sociological research has revealed that health is of value to the individual not intrinsically, but because it assures a certain degree of personal freedom, independence, autonomy, and control over one’s life. The excessive consumption of alcohol is most difficult and dreaded not because it marks the absence of some ideal of the healthy life, but because it represents a loss of the individual’s freedom, independence, autonomy, and control. As this shows, it is not really health itself that people value most. Rather, it is the freedom, independence, autonomy, and control over their lives that come with being healthy for which people have the most fundamental need and desire. Therefore, the first lesson that the public health practitioner can learn by applying basic marketing principles to the fundamental task of marketing social change is that health itself is not the most effective product the public health practitioner has to offer. The most compelling product of the public health practitioner is the freedom, independence, autonomy, and control over life that come with health. This paper intends to draw a strategy to progressively reduce excessive alcohol consumption amongst young people of age group 16 to 22.

Targeting Young People in Behavioural-change Situations

The public health practitioner must realise that, as Andreasen (1995, p. 48) described it as “Target consumers in most behavioural-changed situations have very good reasons for maintaining the behaviour patterns they have held – often for a lifetime”. And as Salmon (1989, p. 44-45) noted, public health campaigns “represent only one social force among many driving and restraining forces. For every campaign message intending to dissuade young people from illegal drug use or cigarette smoking, there are literally dozens of forces…espousing competing philosophies, similarly at work”.
For example, although public health practitioner try to convince young people not to smoke by appealing to their desire for health, other messages in the younger people’s world appeal to more salient and influential core values. Marlboro ads tell kids that smoking will make them free and independent, like a cowboy. Seeing adults smoking in bars and other places where kids are not allowed tell teenagers and young people that smoking is a symbol of maturity and autonomy. The cigarette companies themselves, through campaigns that portray smoking as an adult decision and encourage young people to listen to their parents, tell kids that smoking is a way to exert independence from their parents and to give them, and not adult authority figures, control over their own lives.
The public health practitioner faces a similar challenge confronting alcohol consumption. As Winett and Wallack (1996, p. 179) suggested, “given the social value placed upon recreational alcohol consumption, the availability and accessibility of alcoholic beverages, the environmental cues encouraging social drinking, and the pleasurable physical effects people often experience while drinking – the social marketing campaign designed to dissuade people from excessive drink by teaching them of the health risks faces a profoundly difficult task”.
Although public health practitioners have not traditionally conducted marketing research to identify and understand the needs and desires of their target audiences, their opponents – for example, the cigarette industry – have long used marketing research to find out what consumers want, what is important to them, and what values are most salient, influential, and held most deeply by consumers. And although public health practitioners traditionally have relied solely on the individual’s inherent value for health, their opposition has taken advantage of more compelling core values to sell their harmful products.
The tobacco industry, for example, conducted extensive research in to the desires, needs, and values of young adults. The consistent finding of this research was the importance of the themes of independence, freedom, autonomy, control, self-reliance, and rugged individualism. These themes have formed the basis for many of the tobacco industry’s promotional campaigns during this century. As Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders concluded, “United States advertisers, too, have long thought that individualism and the simulating notions of independence, self-reliance, and autonomy are important strategic concepts in ad development” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [USDHHS], 1994, p. 177).
As early as 1929, Edward Bernays, a public relations consultant for the American Tobacco Company, organised a group of women to smoke publicly in the New York Easter Parade and to carry placards identifying their cigarettes as “torches of liberty” (USDHHS, 1994). This strategy was based on the work of consulting psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, who advised the company to promote cigarettes as “symbols of freedom” (USDHHS, 1994, p. 165).
These studies revealed the importance of the themes of freedom and escape to smokers. They suggested that the appeals based on health claims would offer only transient results, but to increase the cigarette market, companies would have to “tap the driving force of the real psychological satisfactions of smoking” (USDHHS, 1994, p. 171).
Imperial Tobacco Limited of Canada conducted research on young people that revealed that “a young boy seeks to display his new urge for independence with a symbol, and cigarettes are such as symbol” (USDHHS, 1994, p. 175). The research also found that young males in particular are “going through a stage where they are seeking to express their independence and individuality under constant pressure of being accepted by their peers” (p. 175). Another Imperial Tobacco Limited study provided guidelines “for the effective display of freedom and independence in advertising imagery (p. 177) and recommended that cigarette brands designed for youth show someone “free to choose friends, music, clothes, own activities, to be alone if he wishes”, who “can manage alone” with “nobody to interfere, no boss/parents” (p. 177). The research described the importance of developing imagery to tap into four core young people’s values: independence, self-reliance, autonomy, and freedom from authority.
Marlboro, the most popular brand among young people, epitomises the stereotype of American independence. As the Surgeon General noted, the Marlboro man is “usually depicted alone, he interacts with no one; he is strikingly free of interference from authority figures such as parents, elder brothers, bosses, and bullies. Indeed, the Marlboro man is burdened by no one whose authority he must respect or even consider” (USDHHS, 1994, p. 177). R.W. Murray, former president and CEW of Philip Morris, observed that “the cowboy has appeal to people as a personality. There are elements of adventure, freedom, being in charge of your destiny” (Trachtenberg 1987, p. 109). Jack Landry, a key advertising executive behind the Marlboro Man campaign, described the cowboy as “a perfect symbol of independence and individualistic rebellion” (Meyers 1984, p. 70).

Ethical Issues Must Be Involved While Advertising

Attempts to transform behaviour, as though the behaviour of health consumers were abnormal or bad, deny the underlying causes of that behaviour as it related to self-concept and self-esteem. For instance, the fact that one-third of young women are depressed bears a strong relationship to high-risk behaviours such as smoking, binge drinking. There are then ethical issues are involved. In today’s climate, as a would-be ethical advertiser, there is no way one could accept a cigarette advertising account. With the current problem of binge drinking in the UK amongst young people, one would have to be very careful in accepting drinks account. I have to see a drinks advert whose message was, “Enjoy our beer – but don’t get drunk!”
Advertisements can set out with the laudable aim of educating people. These advises are good, offered well, however, not in a spirit of social conscience but as part of the sales pitch. If consumers were less sensitive to such appeals to improve their health and life style, then advertisers would not waste time and money making them.
This illustrates the important point that advertisements can be very knowing – showing an awareness of the ethical issues which marketing that particular product raises, while at the same time deftly deflecting criticism. We are not offended because we get the point, we smile at the irony – and we buy the product.

Values That Are Ingrained In Our Society

Unfortunately, the core values that tobacco and other corporate marketers are reinforcing with their advertising messages – freedom, independence, autonomy, and self-control – are precisely those most deeply ingrained in American society. Once a person has recognised how an unhealthy behaviour supports one or more of these core values, it will be most difficult to change the behaviour, especially if one must rely only on an appeal to the yearnings for health.
The importance of the core values is apparent in the marketing campaigns of highly successful corporations. It is also instructive to note that when corporate marketers sell health products, they do not generally rely on the benefit of health to sell their products. Health clubs and exercise equipment are marketed to consumers not based on their ability to improve long-term health outcomes and prevent diseases, but based on their ability to give people a feeling of control over how they look, how they feel, and how attractive they are to others. One doesn’t usually see ads for health clubs that cite medical evidence about the benefits of physical activity in preventing chronic illness. More likely, one sees ads that show attractive people who seem to be in control of how they look, how they feel, and how others think about them.
Conrad and Kern (1994, p. 108) conclude that “to understand the effects of disease in society, it is also necessary to understand the impact of illness”. Perhaps it is the failure of the medical and public health professions to adequately understand the subjective meaning, experience, and impact of illness in addition to just the objective phenomenon of disease that best explains the epidemic of unhealthy behaviours and lifestyles in the population. The advertisers of unhealthy products such as alcohol and tobacco have listened to the people, understood their feelings and experiences, and provided them with products to satisfy their subjective desires and needs. On the other hand, medical and public health professional have tended to ignore the subjective meaning and experiences of illness and to provide the young people with what health professionals view as the needs of youth.

Finding out what the consumers want

There are many research fields that could potentially be used to help the health practitioner accomplish this goal, including traditional marketing, political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. And there are many research methods that could help them understand what drives consumers’ behaviour. These methods include traditional marketing research methods, public opinion polling and surveys, clinical studies, behavioural research, cognitive and psycho-dynamic psychology research, focus groups, and ethnographic and other qualitative research methods.
It is not the method that is important, but the fact that some attempt is made to understand the consumer’s needs, desires, and values before the health program is designed and implemented. Andreasen emphasised the significance of this point by noting that John Sculley, former executive at Pepsi-Cola, had for years “been convincing consumers to buy his brand of coloured sugar water over a competitor’s coloured sugar water with great success, mainly because he understood ‘The Pepsi Generation’ and how to speak to them (Andreasen 1995, p. 54).
While there is an abundance of quantitative articles in the medical and health literature that consider why young people do or do not engage in unhealthy behaviours, there is little qualitative research that allows the health practitioner to learn “what make them tick”. For example, Weitz (1994, p. 139) points out that “few published research studies have analysed the experiences of persons with AIDS, and none has looked specifically at the issue of uncertainty. Instead, the social science literature on AIDS largely consists of quantitative studies regarding why people do or do not change their sexual behaviour to protect themselves against infection”.
The formative research is so essential to marketing in public health that Andreasen (2006) has listed “listening” to the audience as the first step in the social marketing process and describes this process as being fanatically audience-centred: “because social marketing is fanatically audience-centred, it is essential that campaigns begin with a thorough understanding of the target audience they seek to influence. Campaign planners must know “where the audience is coming from” – what do audience members think of the offer implicit in the campaign, what do they see as the benefits and costs, what do their friends think, and do they think they can actually carry out the behaviour that is being recommended? Marketers must also know as much as they can about the competition the campaign faces from the target audience’s point of view. What are the alternatives, and why are they attractive? Where are there weak points? This type of research is often called formative research. One of the most common causes of failure in social marketing campaigns is inadequate attention to the “listening” stage (p. 97).
One further essential element of the formative research process deserves emphasis. Even among a narrowly defined target group, such as White young men, there is a diversity of attitudes, beliefs, and values. Cultural differences between population groups make it imperative to conduct formative research among all the cultural groups that one is trying to reach. The values that are most important to White young men, for example, may be quite different from those that are important to Black young men, or to young Latinos. Depending on the extent of cultural differences within the audience, it may be necessary to intensively study various segments within the overall target population to identify their unique needs, desires, and culturally influenced values.
Flora et al (1997, p. 356) describe the importance of market segmentation, or breaking the target audience down in to smallest possible homogeneous groups, in formative research: a fundamental tenet of social marketing is that health promotion programs must be designed in response to audience needs, implemented to meet those needs, effective in satisfying those needs, and monitored both to ensure that the program continues to meet these needs and to discover new or challenging needs.

SWOT AND PESTEL ANALYSIS

The SWOT analysis process might include pondering on the identified factors and the application of different quantitative techniques to evaluate the obtained results. Amongst other methods marketers might want to do a SWOT analysis for themselves and with their team:
Strength: Enthusiasm, an interest in reduction of excessive alcohol consumption amongst young people. Good communication skills and inter-professional relationships to enable inter-disciplinary working. Organisational skills, teaching skills and research skills must be used to provide a resource for the management of the reduction of alcohol consumption. The practice or workplace has sufficient spare capacity for quality improvements and is able to provide a resource for trust.
Opportunities: A contact in reducing alcohol consumption services for the locality. An individual with skills in the management of smoking and binge drinking cessation, who is enthusiastic to pass on his or her own newly acquired knowledge. Expertise at evaluating interventions is available on which one can build to improve professional proficiency.
Weaknesses and Threats: Deficiencies in equipment, time for carrying our services and in the availability of training. Too many other guidelines and increasing number of National Service Framework requirements or other national guidance for the practice team to meet.

PESTEL Analysis:

It is important that marketing managers are able to understand the environment in which they are operating. This means that a systematic PESTEL analysis will need to be undertaken on regular basis. The PESTEL analysis must include:

1.      Political factors such as changes in government and the ramifications of their strategies such as tax levels, pollution policies, education issues, etc.
2.      Economic factors such as the impact of the trade cycle, disposable income, inflation, etc.
3.      Social/cultural issues as the ageing consumer, increases in one-parent families, changing values, attitudes and beliefs – to smoking and binge drinking for example.
4.      Technological factors such as the increased rate of computer capability, production methods, etc.
5.      Environmental issues – such as attitudes towards pollution, energy use, etc.
6.      Legal issues – such as changes in advertising legislation for tobacco, alcohols and codes of practices for promotions, etc.

Redefining the Public Health Product

Alan Andreasen (1995) summarises the importance of redefining the market product based on actual consumer needs and wants, rather than on the beliefs, wishes, or intuitions of the marketer. Andreasen (1995, p. 14-15) explains that good marketers do not seek to persuade target audiences to do what the marketer believes they ought to do. They do not try to make the audience accept the marketer’s values and beliefs. Rather, they recognise that customers only take action when they believe that it is in their interests. Social marketing persuasion strategies therefore always start with an understanding of the target audience’s needs and wants, their values, their perceptions. Social marketers do not start out with an assumption that their job is to change the consumer to conform to the marketer. They recognise that they must often change their social marketing offerings and they way these are presented to meet target consumer needs and wants.
The challenge to the health practitioner is to redefine the products so that it is now perceived as being in the individual’s self-interest. The most effective way of doing that is to demonstrate that the product will help that individual fulfil some very salient and powerful need or desire. The practitioner can take advantage of, rather than be unsuccessful because of, the individual’s self-interest if she is able to find values or ideals to which an individual aspires and then sell the product as meeting those values or ideals that are in individual’s self-interest, not opposed to it.
The central task of redefining the health product is to clearly identify the benefits that the health practitioner has to offer the target audience. This task is so important to the ultimate success of a public health campaign that it must not depend only on the intuition of the practitioner. Formative research is essential to identify the needs and wants of the target audience. Only then can the practitioner decide what product benefits will be most likely to satisfy these needs and wants. David Ogilvy, the advertising wizard who founded the advertising agency known later as Ogilvy and Mather, told his agency staff, “your most important job is to decide what you’re going to say about your product, what benefit you’re going to promise…the selection of the right promise is so vitally important that you should never rely on guesswork to decide it” (Ogilvy 1964, p. 93).
Health practitioners must learn to redefine the public health product so as to offer a promise that appeal to people’s core values. For example, the health practitioner might try to prevent excessive smoking initiation not by selling the idea of being a non-smoker, but by selling freedom from nicotine addiction, independence from tobacco industry manipulation and victimisation, and rebellion against industry that is trying to trick young people, seduce them, addict them, and ultimately, to kill them.

Repackaging, Repositioning, and Reframing the Public Health Product

Once the product is defined, the health practitioner must begin the process of packaging it, positioning it, and framing it in such a way that it offers the benefits the target audience is seeking in a way that reinforces image for the product is central. This process involves the search for appropriate metaphors, symbols, words and phrases, visual images, and themes. All must work together to convince the consumer that the product will indeed fulfil his or her needs and desires, and in way that is consistent with and reinforces his or her most salient core values.
Lauffer (1984) explains the significance of this task of framing, or image-building, as part of the strategic marketing process:
“In image building, symbols can be very important. In the United States, “Welfare” tends to take on a negative connotation. To many, it means “cheating”, “dependency”, or a “drain on the taxpayers’ resources”. But no one is against the “deserving poor”. In a recessionary economy, who can be against “laid-off” workers, in contrast with the “unemployed”, some of whom, at least, are blamed for their situation. Some people may be turned off by the term “runaway kids” but not by “troubled teens”. People may be against the high cost of Medicare or Medicaid, but they won’t be against serving crippled children or good health care for impoverished senior citizens. They may be against welfare, but they are not against feeding hungry children (p. 305).
For example, repackaging, repositioning, and reframing the product in a youth anti-smoking campaign might focus on the young people’s core values of freedom, independence, control, identify, and rebellion. Focus group research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Office on Smoking and Health has revealed that “the desire of teenagers to gain control over their lives would make them responsive to a counter-advertising strategy aimed at exposing the predatory marketing techniques of the tobacco industry” (McKenna & Williams 1993, p. 85). The CDC research found that youth place a high value on “self-determination and being in control” (p. 87) and concluded that “teenagers” rebellion can be viewed as a manifestation of asserting their independence from adults’ influence and control” (p. 87). The CDC researchers suggested that the important young people values of independence and control could be used to frame an anti-smoking message: “if you smoke, you’re not in control; you’re being manipulated by the tobacco industry” (p. 87).
The result of formative research like this was used to develop a successful youth smoking prevention campaign in Florida (Hicks, 2001). The campaign, which emphasised to youths how they were being manipulated by the tobacco companies to start smoking, aimed to reframe the issue of independence and autonomy from something provided by smoking to something conferred to a youth by rejecting tobacco industry influence to attempt to get them to smoke. The campaign was successful in reducing thirty-day smoking prevalence among middle-school students of age group 16-22 from 18.5% to 11.1% and among high school students from 27.4% to 22.6% in just the first two years of the program (Bauer et al 2000).
Public health practitioners, too, must learn to provide equally compelling documentation or support for their promises. The increased use of peer as well as celebrity spokespersons is one approach that may be helpful. The source of the support is perhaps more important the support message itself. People may be less likely to be convicted by documentation that comes from perceived public health authority, especially when there is no public scepticism about all the many public health message that young people are bombarded with, many of which present conflicting messages (e.g. fat is bad, some fat is good, polyunsaturated fat is good, trans-fat is bad, alcohol is bad, some alcohol is good, etc.).

A: Public Health Surveillance: 1.                  Identify and prioritise problems based on public health burden. 2.                  identify effective interventions 3.                  Identify specific behaviours, conditions, or policies to be changed (the object). 4.                  Identify the young people for each desired social change (the target).

B. Formative Research 1.                  Identify and prioritise basic needs, desires, and values of young people. 2.                  Identify attributes of the unhealthy behaviour that satisfy or fulfil these needs, desires, and values. 3.                  Test ways of framing the desired behaviour that will reinforce core values of young people

C: Strategic Marketing 1.                  Redefine the product so that it offers as a benefit fulfilment of important desires (the product) 2.                  Package and position the product as a way to fulfil important needs and desires (the promise) 3.                  Show how the unhealthy behaviour conflicts with fulfilment of underlying needs and desires. 4.                  Frame the communications in a way that reinforce, and does not conflict with, audience’ core values. 5.                  Develop support for the promise. Demonstrate to and convince audience that the product does and will fulfil their specific needs and desires (the support) 6.                  Develop and overall brand for the public health program, policy or public health itself that ties together the product, the promise, the core values, and the support (the brand).

Finally, the practitioner can package, position, and frame the product in an effort to demonstrate to the audience how it will indeed fulfil these desires and needs. The strategic marketing plan should be continuously assessed and refined based on the results of process and outcome evaluation.

References:

Andreasen, A.R. (1995). Marketing Social Change: Changing Behaviour to Promote Health, Social Development, And the Environment. San Francisco: Jossey Bass
Andreasen, A. R. (2006). Social Marketing in the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Bauer, U.E., Johnson, T.M., Hopkins, R.S., & Brooks, R.G. (2000). Changes in youth cigarette use and intentions following implementation of a tobacco control program: Findings from Florida Youth Tobacco Survey, 1998-2000. JAMA, 284(6), 723-28
Conrad, P., & Kern, R. (EDS). (1994). The sociology of health & illness: Critical perspectives (4th ed.). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
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