by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 11, 2007 | Blog, Social Marketing
Social marketers use the tools of commercial marketing, but we face additional challenges that a business marketing its products or services probably does not need to address. I write about these challenges in my column today at Marketing Profs Daily Fix:
Back in the 50s, Gerhart Wiebe asked the question “Why can’t you sell brotherhood like you sell soap?” and thus the field of social marketing was born.
This question has formed the basis of wide-ranging efforts addressing issues like preventing youth smoking, promoting mammography, staving off bacterial infections from chitterlings, stopping domestic violence, encouraging physical activity and healthy eating habits, touting recycling and many more successful campaigns….
(I’m not including cause marketing here, which usually involves the purchase of commercial products, and benefits a partnering nonprofit.)
So, is the answer that brotherhood and soap are, indeed, pretty much equivalent products to be marketed? Well, yes and no.
Yes, in that we can think about healthy or pro-social behaviors as products we want people to adopt and use. Purchasing a commercial product is a behavior too. We can use the same marketing tools to promote colonoscopies as Coke uses to sell its colas.
But there are some key differences that social marketers run into that complicate the transfer of the business marketing model to selling health and social behaviors.
Read the rest of the article at the Daily Fix to find out what some of those differences are, and some ideas for how to address those challenges.
While you are over at the Marketing Profs site, come join in on the Book Club discussion (free registration req.) about Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba‘s new book Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message
. It’s about the brave new world of social media that’s empowering ordinary people to influence and promote their favorite brands (or out problems with their not so favorite brands) by creating their own content. I will be soon be reviewing the book here from the point of view of how to apply its concepts to social marketing. I’ve posted a discussion question at the Book Club to try to collect some examples of how citizen marketing has been used to promote health and social issues. Come on over and put in your two cents and learn more about this great book.
Technorati Tags: marketing, social marketing, health, marketing profs daily fix
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 10, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous
I had never paid much attention to MyBlogLog, even with the announcement that it was just bought by Yahoo, until I saw an example of what a blog community’s page looked like on the site because someone had clicked here from it. I was intrigued at the idea of being able to find out more about the people reading my blog and discovering new sites that my readers frequent. Presumably, someone who is interested in my content would be looking at other things I might want to know about too.
On MyBlogLog, you can join a blog’s community as a member, see who else has joined, leave messages, and explore what other likeminded people are interested in. I have seen other sites with the “Recent Readers” widget (see green box in my sidebar), but didn’t realize how many people are MyBlogLog members until I put the code on my site and started seeing people coming through immediately.
So let’s try this out. If you’re a MyBlogLog member, or if you would like to become one, go to the Spare Change community page and click on “Join Community.” We can get to know each other and discover some new sites together. What do you think?
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And speaking of community, one of my fellow bloggers, Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention, is asking for your input through a survey she is conducting on nonprofit communication trends. Take the survey here within the next week or two, and Nancy will be reporting back on what she finds so we can all benefit from pooling our combined knowledge.
Technorati Tags: mybloglog, blog, community
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 9, 2007 | Blog, Communication
Guy Kawasaki just posted an interview with Chip and Dan Heath of Made to Stick fame. It’s definitely worth a read.
For fun, he’s put together the Stickiness Aptitude Test (SAT), for you to see how well you are applying the concepts from the book. Not all questions will be applicable to your specific situation, but you can get an idea of how to interpret them by seeing the point value scores listed by each answer.
Sometimes the right answers are counterintuitive:
Is there someone on your marketing team who fundamentally does not understand the technology that underlies your idea?
Yes (bonus + 4 points)
No (0 points)
(This relates to the “Curse of Knowledge” that makes it harder for you to communicate your idea clearly when you know so much about the subject that you can’t conceive of not understanding its basic underlying concepts.)
And sometimes the questions pinpoint some key approaches to use to make your idea stickier:
Can you describe your idea in the way Hollywood directors often pitch their movies, with a simple analogy? (E.g., the movie that became Alien was pitched as “Jaws on a spaceship.”)
Yes (+ 2 points)
No (0 points)
(People can understand your idea better when it’s connected to something they already are familiar with.)
Even if you haven’t read the book yet, take the SAT and you’ll probably learn at least one new thing that you can start applying right away.
Technorati Tags: SAT, guy kawasaki, made to stick
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 8, 2007 | Behavior Change, Blog
And we go from talking about celebrity spokespeople to looking at peer role models. Real people who have made positive changes in their lives can be great motivators of change in others. Of course, this is classic Bandura. His Social Learning Theory says that when we observe someone else engaging in a behavior and receiving positive consequences as a result, especially if the role model is similar to ourselves, we are much more likely to try out that behavior as well.
This is why GlaxoSmithKline only sought out actors for its commercials for NicoDerm patches who were smokers or former smokers. And why its new campaign for Commit nicotine lozenges will follow four real people over 13 weeks as they attempt to quit smoking. Watching someone else struggling with quitting and succeeding provides much more useful information in someone’s own attempts than inauthentic actors reading lines.
And this is why one woman was able to inspire her community to lose 8,000 pounds. I recently received a prepublication copy of a book called From Fat to Fit – Turn Yourself into a Weapon of Mass Reduction. The author, Carole Carson, relates the story of how her own efforts to lose weight (62 lbs.), which were chronicled in her local newspaper, turned into a community-wide fitness campaign called the Nevada County Meltdown. This effort — run entirely on a free, volunteer and ad-hoc basis — involved over 1,000 participants, who lost nearly four tons of weight in eight weeks.
Now, with Carole’s book coming out in April, she is offering her guidance to another community to replicate the success they experienced in Nevada County (Calif.). She is sponsoring a contest to select the next Community Meltdown location. If you are a professional working on obesity prevention, or if you are a motivated individual who wants to help members of your community become healthier, think about entering the contest — all it takes is a 2-minute VHS or DVD spot on why your community should win, along with a 150-word written plan. You don’t get any funding for it, but you do get the benefit of Carole’s experience and lessons learned. And hurry, because the deadline is January 30, 2007.
Technorati Tags: obesity, weight loss, fitness, health
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 8, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous
For 2007, I’m trying to improve my own health as well as the health of my blog. To that end, I have been wrestling with my feed to try to slim it down. After several programming frustrations, getting into the intricacies of xml that I never wanted to know, I think I’ve fixed it. If you’ve noticed the feed not working right for you (especially if you use Bloglines) for the past couple of days, I think it should be okay now.
I am putting my feed on a diet, narrowing it down to just the Feedburner feed and taking away the atom and rss options for new subscribers. Don’t worry, the Feedburner SmartFeed will work with any feed reader or application you want to throw at it.
If you are already subscribed to this blog via an atom or rss feed, I would love it if you would upgrade your subscription by just clicking on the orange
feed icon here or in the right sidebar, or if you use Firefox you can click on the orange feed image in the URL box of your browser. This will give you some added features at the bottom of each post, and will help me keep track of how many subscribers I have (because I love each and every one of you). It only takes a second (okay, maybe three).
If you are not yet a subscriber and don’t want to have to bookmark and manually check for new posts, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about with all this feed stuff (especially after talking about putting the blog on a diet), here’s a great introduction to how it works and some recommendations for feed readers you can use (and don’t worry, even though the article talks about RSS, it also applies to Feedburner’s feed as well).
Enough housekeeping. Back to social marketing!
[UPDATE: Fri 1 pm PST: Bloglines is still not showing the corrected feed, and I have an email in to them to fix it. Should be soon.]
[UPDATE: Mon 9 am PST: Thanks to everyone who updated/started your subscriptions. New posts are showing up correctly in Bloglines now, but some older ones are still truncated and out of order. It shouldn’t affect you unless you are looking back at older posts via the feed reader, in which case you should just come directly to the blog.]
Photo Credit: Omnia
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 8, 2007 | Blog, Communication, Entertainment
Nowadays you can’t go a week without hearing some celebrity talking about a health or social issue — either their own medical problem or one they feel is important enough to comment on. Generally, this is a good thing because it raises awareness, which may lead to changes in public behavior. Laura Bush recently publicized her own bout with skin cancer, which will hopefully have the effect of increasing awareness of skin cancer prevention and screening. Lance Armstrong may have singlehandedly caused hundreds of cases of testicular cancer to be caught early (pun not intended!), by speaking out about his own experience and encouraging men to screen themselves. Katie Couric felt so strongly about the importance of being screened for colon cancer after her husband died from it that she had an on-air colonoscopy on the Today Show, increasing nationwide testing by 20%.
But what do you do when celebrities make public statements about an issue that are just plain wrong, and even worse, detrimental to your cause? Tom Cruise’s spoutings off about postpartum depression being merely the result of insufficient exercise and vitamins may have prevented women suffering from the condition to avoid antidepressants or psychiatric treatment that would help them. Anna Nicole Smith endorsed weight-loss drug TrimSpa, for which its marketers were recently fined millions of dollars for deceptive advertising claims. Madonna certainly brought attention to the issue of child adoption, but should she serve as a model for potential adoptive parents? (Angelina Jolie doesn’t think so!)
Bob Brody of Ogilvy has a useful guide on how to create celebrity health campaigns. But how do you do damage control when a celebrity not affiliated with your program spouts off nonsense? For better or worse, when celebrities speak, people listen. Certainly not everybody cares what Paris Hilton or Brad Pitt has to say, but perhaps it’s more likely to be those who do not have the basic health or science knowledge to realize that the beautiful people are speaking bunk.
A British organization called Sense About Science is taking on these celebrity self-appointed advocates and armchair scientists who claim to know the real truth (Tom Cruise: “Here’s the problem. You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do… There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.”), by offering good science and promoting respect for evidence on issues ranging from alternative medicine to bird flu, stem cell research and genetic modification of crops. (via Instapundit)
The incorrect statements need to be countered with logic and peer-reviewed research, indeed, but social marketing efforts can take advantage of the celebrity’s status to get out accurate information. Using the story of what the celebrity said as a news peg for your own information gives a reporter both the lure of being able to write about that celebrity again and to cover the conflict and controversy — especially if yours is a well-respected organization taking on a popular personality. And don’t just talk to the media, but contact the person who is spreading the inaccurate information and offer the benefit of your expertise so that if they truly do want to be an effective advocate, they will be able to speak from a position of real authority rather than the flimsy spotlight of the red carpet.
Right now, I’m reading a book sent to me by the publisher called When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine by Barron H. Lerner, which I think will speak to some of these issues. I’ll revisit this topic once I’ve had a chance to get through the book.
Photo Credit: nicklee
Technorati Tags: social marketing, celebrity, lance armstrong, katie couric, laura bush, tom cruise, anna nicole smith, madonna, angelina jolie, paris hilton, brad pitt, sense about science, health, ogilvy
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
