Innovations in Social Marketing Conference – Day 2 – AM

Monday, the second day of the Innovations in Social Marketing Conference (see Day 1 Summary), continued the focus on learning from commercial marketers how social marketers can better understand and create relationships with our customers (the people whose behavior we are trying to change).

A team from IDEO‘s Consumer Experience Design practice, Chris Waugh and Holly Kretschmar, led us through the human centered design process that they use to answer questions like “What’s the future of community?” and “What’s the future of farming in Africa?”. Though they more often are in the business of designing “things” for the top companies around the world, IDEO also looks at designing spaces and processes; they are currently working with the CDC to redesign food, figuring out how to get tweens to eat more fruits and vegetables. Social marketers need to start looking more at product design rather than always heading straight for the promotion P with a communication campaign.

The process IDEO uses (which they emphasized is open source) follows four stages:

1. Insight – observe people and look at their behavior in context, develop an empathetic understanding
2. Strategy – synthesize what you learned to create a framework of understanding
3. Expression – come up with ideas of how to implement the strategy
4. Communication – define the experience as more than just the tangible product

While IDEO may use “unfocus groups” in which consumers prototype a product, like a shoe or medical device, they don’t necessarily rely on the end user to entirely define the final product. I loved the Henry Ford quote from the presentation: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” While we definitely need to listen to our target audience, we also need to use our own professional expertise and judgment to figure out how to apply their input.

Holly posed a set of questions for us to think about in applying the design mindset to social marketing, which I thought were quite apt. They were:

1. What if we called ourselves storytellers instead of marketers?
2. What if we thought of the people we serve as creators/designers instead of consumers?
3. What if our brand was about helping people reach their goals? (a la 43 Things)
4. What if a social change movement could be successful with little to no promotion?
5. What if we embraced experiments instead of waiting until we have the perfect answer?
6. What if the people we serve created the messages to reach them?
7. What if we invited people at the extremes to put our messages in surprising places?
8. What if people were clamoring to play with us?
9. What if we understood our stakeholders as well as we understand the people we serve?
10. What if social marketing were synonymous with ‘trusted advisor?’

Chris and Holly then led an exercise in which each table was given a different set of photographs taken by various individuals showing scenes from their daily lives — their meals, their furniture, members of the family, their commute — and we had to piece together the clues to figure out everything we could about that person’s demographics, lifestyle, aspirations, etc. (ours showed things like refried beans cooking in a pot, a mostly empty Naked orange juice gallon jug in a car, an undecorated bathroom with shaving cream, a razor and two toothbrushes).

Once we had deduced what we could about that person (young professional single man with a girlfriend who cares about convenience and sex appeal), we were given a quote from that person (ours talked about enjoying drinking with friends, taking power naps and having sex) and a design challenge (in our case, designing a hybrid car for that person). We brainstormed ideas for what that car might look like or include — things like windows that darken automatically, kitchen-like convenience, convertible model and club-like benefits related to his lifestyle packaged with the car. We then hooked up with another table that had the same design challenge, but a different person (upscale busy mom) and found that we had designed completely different cars for each. Finally, we got to see a picture of the person we were designing for with some basic information about them, and it turned out we were pretty dead on.

I think the application of this exercise to our work is fascinating. Imagine giving 20 members of your target audience a disposable camera and having them take pictures of their world for us to then analyze for clues about what is important to them and what they are currently doing related to your issue. Or giving someone a task to do (e.g., installing a child’s car seat into a car or administering some simulated medicine to a toddler – neither easy for even an educated adult) and observing the process to see where the pitfalls lie and the types of workarounds people come up with.

If we can make the product more appealing or easy to use through good design, it just may sell itself.

More from Day 2 in the next post.