by Nedra Weinreich | Sep 28, 2006 | Blog, Social Marketing
Yesterday I wrote about what branding is and how it is used in social marketing. Today, I’ll share with you the article that got me started thinking about branding and the unique aspects of social marketing that need to be considered for your brand.
William Arruda wrote an excellent article on MarketingProfs.com called The 10 Cs of Branding. These are the attributes that contribute to a successful brand (though #7 seems to have gone missing when the article was posted – I will update if I get it) (see inserted #7 below).
The brand must be:
- Competent – the product or service must fulfill its promise
- Credible – the brand needs to be believable in delivering on the product or service
- Clear – the brand sets itself apart from its competitors in an easy to understand way
- Compelling – the brand is appropriate for and interesting to its target audience
- Consistent – everything the brand does supports the brand image and attributes
- Constant – the brand remains constantly visible to the target audience
- Confident – the brand stands behind its decisions and appears strong
- Connected – the brand is part of appropriate communities, affiliations and partnerships
- Committed – the brand is built over time and not just a fad or one-time event
- Current – the brand remains relevant to the target audience as it changes
I highly encourage you to read the original article, which goes into details about the meaning of each C.
Just as I added more Ps to the marketing mix for social marketing, I think we need to add at least five more Cs to the attributes for a successful social marketing brand when addressing health or social issues. Here is what I think is missing:
11. Change-oriented – The brand must support your program’s overall behavior change goal. A cool brand that has nothing to do with the health or social change you are promoting is useless. The Back to Sleep campaign has been so successful in preventing SIDS because the name and logo tell you exactly what to do.
12. Competitive – There are a lot of brands out there – belonging to both for-profit businesses and nonprofit organizations. Your brand needs to be perceived as being of sufficient quality to compete against the others in your category. Guidestar lists about 850,000 nonprofits, many of which are competing for your audience’s attention. And depending upon the issue you are addressing, you may also be competing against big-name brands like McDonalds, Budweiser or Marlboro. Make sure your brand is at least as appealing as the competition’s.
13. Compatible – Your brand image must be compatible with the cause it is promoting. The truth campaign‘s gritty cynicism would probably not be appropriate for a campaign on dental health or arthritis. Consider the characteristics of the issue, the target audience(s) and the context in which the brand will be operating.
14. Caring – Give your target audience reasons to care about your brand. How does using it benefit them or others? Building an emotional connection to the brand comes from the words, images, fonts, channels, and music you use in the campaign. It comes from the interactions your audience has with your organization and its staff members, from its perceptions of your chosen spokesperson to the things that their friends and family have to say about your brand. Do they feel like your brand cares about them?
15. Culturally Appropriate – Some brands cut across cultures with no problem — Coke is an excellent example of this. But when you’re dealing with an issue like domestic violence or family planning that has a strong cultural component to it, creating the brand can be tricky. How you frame the issue, how you depict the product users/nonusers, and even the shape and color of the logo can either enhance the brand or make it less desirable, depending upon the cultural lens of the viewer. Testing the key pieces of the campaign with the intended audience can help to take this into account.
Would you add anything more to the Cs of branding for social marketing? Have I or William Arruda missed any key pieces by limiting ourselves to words that start with the letter C? Let me know what you think.
flickr photo credit: adri
Technorati Tags: branding, social marketing, brands, marketing
by Nedra Weinreich | Sep 27, 2006 | Blog, Social Marketing
Nonprofits and government agencies are generally several steps behind the commercial sector in applying marketing concepts to their health and social issues. Branding is a word that is thrown around a lot by marketers of all stripes without a complete understanding of what it actually means. We know we want to have a strong brand, but to some that just means creating a logo and tagline. A brand is much more than just the product itself, or the visuals you create to promote it.
Your brand is how your audience thinks about your product and connects with it emotionally. It’s the combination of how you market your product and how the audience experiences it. It’s the feeling that by using the product someone becomes part of an elite group, and membership in that group reflects the image of who that person aspires to be.
Think about the most successful brands and the emotions they evoke among their fans — Harley-Davidson, In-n-Out Burger, Starbucks, Apple Computer… They inspire loyalty and positive feelings toward the products created by that brand. You’d have to pry my Mac from my cold, dead fingers before I’d ever consider using another type of computer; when I was discussing branding in my training last week another participant said that as soon as she saw that I was using a Mac for my presentation, she felt an instant kinship with me as a fellow Mac user. That to me was a perfect illustration of my point.
No amount of amazing advertising is going to create an effective brand for you if the product stinks. In the case of social marketing, the product is the health or social behavior you are promoting — if the audience tries doing what you want them to do but has an awful experience, the brand image suffers. Or the brand may be your organization, with various products that you offer falling within that brand (e.g., if you are at a local health department with initiatives addressing different health topics). So branding involves strategically crafting all the elements of your audience’s interactions with your organization and its products so that they support the right image and evoke the right emotions. Your product or organization may already have a brand image — but is it the one you want?
Some social marketing campaigns have been quite successful at building an effective brand. The truth campaign is the archetypical example. By looking at what emotions/values are important to youth, they were quite successful at redirecting the instinct to rebel against authority from “smoking to rebel against their parents” to “not smoking to rebel against the tobacco industry.” The truth brand stands for being savvy to the deceptive tactics used by tobacco companies, being part of a youth movement to take on the industry, and being hip to youth culture. The Verb campaign is another example of a social marketing brand.
The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation‘s pink ribbon campaign is a cause marketing brand that is instantly recognizable. They’ve created a visual – the pink ribbon – that is applied in many different ways, such as pink Yoplait lids, pink bats at major league baseball games, pink vacuum cleaners, Ford’s sale of scarves, the Race for the Cure and other products. Every partnership they build and event they hold contributes to the image of the brand — health, women, and wholesome American icons. I don’t think you would see the Komen Foundation partnering with Hooters or Absolut Vodka, for example (though in Hooters’ defense, they have just donated $1 million to another foundation for breast cancer research).
So how can you develop your social marketing brand? Tune in for Part 2 tomorrow.
flickr photo credit purplelime
Technorati Tags: branding, social marketing, marketing, brand, nonprofit, komen
by Nedra Weinreich | Sep 26, 2006 | Blog, Entertainment
This summer I was on the selection committee for a youth screenwriting contest sponsored by an organization called Scenarios USA.
Scenarios USA teamed up with the RAP-IT-UP Campaign, a partnership of BET and The Kaiser Family Foundation, to launch the national “What’s the REAL DEAL on Growing Up in the Age of AIDS?” Story and Scriptwriting Contest for youth, ages 13-18. They asked youth to write a story or script about how HIV/AIDS has affected them, their friends, school and community.
Scenarios USA will work collaboratively with the winners and professional Hollywood directors in developing the stories into scripts. Scenarios will also work with the winners’ schools and communities to pick locations in which to shoot the films and to recruit local youth to intern on the film sets. Once the films are completed, the writers and directors will be the featured guests at the films’ premiere in the spring of 2007. The films will then be distributed to high schools and community groups nationwide, streamed online, and premiered on Showtime Networks. The 2006 winners will also have the opportunity to continue working with Scenarios USA as spokespeople and advocates on the issues that their stories address.
Scenarios USA’s short films from past contest winners have been selected to be the first featured videos in YouAre.TV‘s new initiative Content for a Cause. YouAreTV is similar to YouTube but seems to put a premium on independent filmmaking that is of higher quality than the random chaos found on YouTube. Unlike DoGooder.TV, which is a similar concept that I wrote about last week, this is not a nonprofit-only site, but they will be highlighting the work of a different nonprofit each month. This approach encourages nonprofits to create and submit the highest quality video, rather than whatever they happen to have in video format.
Ten short films from past Scenarios USA contest winners are posted on the YouAre.TV site. These mini-movies that are conceived and co-directed by youth are of high professional quality and seem like they would make a strong impact on their peers. The movie embedded above — Choices: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly — is a good example, with engaging characters, realistic situations and a plotline that shows the consequences of unprotected sex (teen parenthood, contracting herpes) without preaching.
On a side note, as I was looking at the YouAreTV site, I came across this video, which offers a humorous look at the effects of depression in young adulthood. Depression here is depicted as a surly slacker who is almost driven away by drill sergeant Motivation and corporate pep-talker Confidence. But in my opinion the mumbling pajama-clad Sloth steals the show. Some profanity, so perhaps not entirely safe for work, but it’s an interesting take on talking about an issue that is often ignored. There’s even a “The More You Know”-style piece at the end where the actors talk briefly about the issue. It’s not necessarily effective social marketing, but it’s not meant as such, and is an interesting example of how you could open the conversation.
UPDATE (9/26/06): The embedded video is working now, thanks to quick action by David at YouAreTV.
Technorati Tags: YouAreTV, YouTube, dogooder, nonprofit, aids, hiv, video, youth, scenarios
by Nedra Weinreich | Sep 21, 2006 | Blog, Entertainment
I have been meaning for a while to write about DoGooderTV after receiving an e-mail from someone affiliated with the project, and now that things have calmed down a bit I have a chance to catch up with the topics I had put off for lack of time. DoGooder.TV is a site that seems to be a combination of YouTube and MySpace for nonprofit organizations (still in alpha version according to the logo).
Registered nonprofits can upload up to 100MB of streaming video to their page for site visitors to view. When individuals see the videos and are moved to take action, the site provides ways to donate, volunteer, and create a community around those organizations.
Is it effective? Too soon to tell. Just like on YouTube, there are videos that are interesting and well-made, and there are videos that are of no interest to anyone except the director of the nonprofit that made it. Certainly, the video medium has the potential to evoke a strong emotional reaction when done well. But are the kinds of videos that nonprofits typically make compelling enough for an average person to seek them out?
You can’t expect to just load your video onto YouTube and see the
number of views take off. To get viewers and generate buzz, the video
needs to be unusual in some way — whether it’s a humorous angle, a new
way of looking at an old issue, something that hits close to home,
something unexpected… The standard 5-minute organizational promo
video is not going to do it. If DGTV is just more of the same old approach, it will be DOA. If, however, the nonprofits post content that is fresh and exciting, it has a much better chance of breaking out.
Another question is whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing for nonprofits to segregate themselves away from where the action is. If a nonprofit already has video(s) created, or has decided to create something new specifically to distribute via social media, should they choose to upload it to DoGooderTV or to YouTube? The answer is yes. Right now the audience is at YouTube but perhaps eventually DGTV will be known as the place to go if you want more information on a particular nonprofit or a specific health/social issue.
I think the best direction that DoGooderTV could take would be to become a showcase for PSAs and television ads created on various health and social issues. Posting ads on YouTube has been a strategic decision by many brands/agencies to reach more viewers than they could reach on television, but not all agencies are as forward-looking. According to FutureLab’s blog, when marketing blogger Coolz0r posted an anti-drunk driving spot on YouTube and referred to it in his blog, the Irish agency LyleBalie served him with a DCMA take-down notice for the ad and YouTube suspended his account. Perhaps DoGooder.TV would be considered to be a more appropriate venue for that sort of ad (though for those who are stuck in Command and Control marketing, any use beyond the actual medium for which the ad was created may be too threatening).
On a side note, one not so minor annoyance when I go on the DoGooderTV website is that their featured video automatically starts playing with the sound on, which I find very annoying. They should either have the video wait to start until someone clicks it or start the video with the sound off and let people increase the volume if they want to hear it. A pet peeve of mine is when websites load and play sound files without my permission. Of course I would never do this, but what if I were web surfing while talking on the phone or on a conference call? It’s a good way to guarantee someone will never come back to your site.
I’ll be keeping an eye on DGTV. It will be interesting to see how it develops.
Technorati Tags: dogoodertv, dogooder, youtube, myspace, nonprofit
by Nedra Weinreich | Sep 21, 2006 | Blog, Social Marketing, Social Media
I’m back from leading the inaugural class of Social Marketing University, which was an amazing two days. The participants at the training were enthusiastic and knowledgeable about their fields, and we learned as much from each other as they did from me. I’m looking forward to offering SMU again, perhaps in the Spring or Summer, and I’ll be looking at other locations for next time as well (especially my favorite city of Washington DC). If you are interested in receiving announcements of future trainings, please send me an e-mail at training@social-marketing.com.
One of the topics that was received with the most enthusiasm at SMU was the discussion of how new social media and Web 2.0 applications are leading to the next generation of social marketing (or NextGen social marketing, to coin a phrase). If you are in the Washington DC area, you have an opportunity next week to catch one of the social marketing social media pioneers talking on this topic.
Craig Lefebvre, whose blog On Social Marketing and Social Change was the first on the topic of social marketing as far as I know, will be the featured speaker at the Public Health Communication & Marketing Program (pdf) at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services on September 27th at noon. Here are the details as announced by e-mail:
The Public Health Communication & Marketing Program at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services is delighted to announce the launch of a quarterly lecture series focused on cutting-edge issues at the intersection between theory and practice. Each seminar will be a one hour lecture and discussion with a provocative speaker whose work is helping to refine the practice of public health communication and marketing.
The seminars will be scheduled for the second Wednesday of every quarter during the noon hour (except in the case of holidays or other special circumstances). They will be held on the GWU medical campus in Ross Hall, and webcast live.
Our inaugural speaker – September 27 at noon – will be Dr. Craig Lefebvre, an internationally renown expert in social marketing. Craig will address the implication of “social media” (e.g., MySpace) for social marketing and public health. An overview of his topic is below. Future seminar topics and lecturers will be identified on the basis of nomination.
To nominate topics or speakers for future seminars, and for additional information about the seminar series, please contact Dr. Ed Maibach (emaibach@gwu.edu).
The Implications of “Social Media” for Social Marketing and Public Health
Craig Lefebvre, PhD
“Social media” is the use of media to facilitate collaboration and interaction among people. These media can be seen as mere digital extensions of older forms of communication ( e.g. promotional campaigns based on word-of-mouth, viral marketing, “narrowcasting,” or “slivercasting”). However, thinking about these new media as just new promotion channels misses the essence of what the new media revolution is all about…using media to do new things, not using new media to do old things differently. These new technologies have implications for how we think about the public health behaviors, products and services we market; the incentives and costs we focus on; and the opportunities we present and places where we interact with our audience and allow them to try new things. The implications of social media are not confined to how we should think about our target audiences, but also includes how we should think about our colleagues, our information and inspiration sources, and the resources we attempt to cultivate to do our jobs bigger and better.
Dr. Lefebvre is one of the nation’s leading experts in social marketing and public health communication. For over a dozen years, he directed the Social Marketing and Health Communication group at Prospect Associates and American Institutes of Research, and before that he was Director of Interventions for the groundbreaking Pawtucket Heart Health Program. Craig is particularly known for his innovative and insightful thinking about how to enhance the impact of investments in public health.
It sounds like a worthwhile way to spend your lunch hour!
Technorati Tags: social marketing, social media, public health
by Nedra Weinreich | Sep 15, 2006 | Blog, Social Marketing
Social marketers often have to walk a thin line between making an unhealthy behavior seem unappealing and stigmatizing those who engage in that behavior. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a Public Opinion Spotlight on the topic of Attitudes About Stigma and Discrimination Related to HIV/AIDS that includes the fact that
Fear of being stigmatized by one’s HIV status (or perceived HIV status) also appears to have at least some relationship to people’s decisions about whether or not to get tested for HIV. About one in five say that if they were to be tested for HIV, people they know would think less of them.
In this way, a social marketing campaign promoting HIV testing could backfire by increasing the perception of stigma and thus reducing the number of people who get tested.
Liz Losh of Virtualpolitik let me know about an upcoming forum that’s going to be happening in New York later this month that touches on this issue:
Selling Us to Ourselves:
Is Social Marketing Effective HIV Prevention?
Tuesday, September 26th
6:30 – 8:00PM
LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street (btwn 7th/8th aves.)
New York City
Free and open to the public
From bus shelter ads to give-aways in our communities, social marketing is becoming a larger part of community HIV prevention efforts. But is marketing an effective public health tool, or is it just another facet of consumer culture that sells our lives back to ourselves? Is it a vital means for reaching those who are not in the loop of community organizations, a way of refreshing the messages on AIDS after decades of efforts? Do some social marketing efforts have unintended consequences of stigmatizing community members?
Presenters will show recent social marketing campaigns that they have
produced or critiqued, and participate in a vibrant discussion with the audience on the pros and cons of these approaches.
Refreshments will be provided.
Speakers include:
Liz Losh, University of California, Irvine
Anthony Morgan, New York State Black Gay Network
Les Pappas, Better World Advertising, San Francisco
Kevin Trimell Jones, Black Gay Men’s Leadership Council, Philadelphia
Moderated by: Julie Davids, CHAMP
Co-sponsored by:
Black Gay Men’s Leadership Council, Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), LGBT Community Center, New York State Black Gay Network (list in formation)
For more information or to be added as a co-sponsor, contact
sonny@champnetwork.org.
I suspect that this forum is a response to this HIV campaign that was pulled in Philadelphia after concerns arose among the target audience that the campaign stigmatized black men. A similar forum was held in West Hollywood, Calif. recently when a backlash by HIV-positive men arose against the HIV (not fabulous) campaign because they felt it stigmatized them.
If any of my New York area readers attend, I hope you will report back on it. I missed the West Hollywood event because it was on the eve of the first day of school for my kids. I look forward to seeing what Liz will have to say about her appearance at the forum.
****
On a different note, I am busy preparing for the Social Marketing University training that is starting on Monday, so I will be incommunicado until the middle of next week. We have attendees coming from around the world, and from a wide range of organizations. It should be an exciting event! I’m hoping to offer another training within the coming year and will keep you posted.
Technorati Tags: hiv, aids, social marketing, stigma
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. 
