Innovations in Social Marketing Conference – Day 2 – AM

by Nedra Weinreich | Apr 17, 2007 | Blog, Professional Development, Social Marketing

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.

Innovations in Social Marketing Conference – Day 1

by Nedra Weinreich | Apr 16, 2007 | Blog, Professional Development, Social Marketing

Having spent two days at the Innovations in Social Marketing Conference (with a half-day to go), I thought I would offer some of the main highlights and insights so far. There has been so much content that I will need to break this into at least a couple of posts. The theme of the conference is “It’s all about the customer,” and the organizers have brought in experts from the commercial marketing world to share how they maintain a customer-centric focus.

On Sunday afternoon after some introductory context, we heard from Robert Spector, who has written several books on customer service, offering lessons from Nordstrom, Starbucks and Amazon.com. His key points were:

• Create an inviting place in person, online and on the phone. (“Create a customer-centered experience” – all three of those brands do a great job of this.)
• Sell the relationship: service your clients through the services you offer. (“When you are dealing with other human beings, you are in the relationship business… Make them feel like ‘they understand me and what I want.'”)
• Hire nice, motivated people. (“Hire the smile, train the skill.”)
• Sustain those people through support, mentorship, recognition and praise. (“Never miss an opportunity to say ‘thank you.'”)
• Advocate teamwork through internal customer service.

His main point is that we need to not just offer a product, but to create an experience for the customer. We do this through all the touchpoints at which we reach people with our brand. For social marketers, this will generally start with a website, because we usually do not have actual personal contact with the audience. Use multiple channels, make it look and feel consistent in every medium.

On the same panel was Becky Ryan, who is director of marketing for Bel Brands USA (the company that makes Laughing Cow cheese). She focused on how they use research to get to know their target audience and thereby create a relationship with them. Bel has used Porter Novelli’s Healthstyles database to learn more about their core consumer — personified as “Diana,” an upscale mom who cares about her health and successfully manages her weight — a segment that comprises 4% of US households. Using the database, they learned more about her “passions,” manifested in four quarterly advertising themes: gardening, outdoor concerts, winter fun (mainly skiing), and holiday entertaining. They also found that TV was one of the worst media to use to reach her, and so focused on magazines, coupon inserts (because she considers herself a smart shopper), and the internet. The message revolved around the slogan “indulgence has a lighter side,” highlighting the great taste, low calorie count, and portion controlled wedges. It didn’t hurt that the product was also featured in the South Beach Diet book.

After these presentations, we were divided into groups to discuss what we could take from these ideas and apply to our own social marketing programs. While none of these concepts were really new — or at least shouldn’t be to people who have been doing marketing (social or otherwise) — it was good to be reminded of these core concepts and to struggle again with how to translate ideas designed for tangible products to our more challenging health and social issues. While I didn’t note who said what, some of the ideas/questions/key points that resonated with me included:

• How can we create a “third place” (ie, not home or work) where people will want to spend time?
• “The marketer knows the customer the best.” That’s our job. We have to know them inside and out so that we can be the advocate for the customer.
• “Market share is trust materialized.” How can we foster that trust?
• Relationships take time to develop, and we need to be patient to let that happen. Relationships can’t be bought, but must be earned.
• Personifying the target audience can be useful in understanding and applying data.
• “You need to be ready for your luck” and be flexible enough to change your strategy as opportunities present themselves.
• Could we in social marketing get away with only targeting 4% of the population? It would take demonstrating that addressing the tiny segment would make a big difference in the problem.
• Passions/emotion/lifestyle are all key to engaging people.
• How do we sell experiences and not just behavior change? When do we stop being “a health program” and start being part of people’s lives?

In the evening, our dinner speaker was Max Schorr, the twentysomething publisher and founding editor of GOOD Magazine. After a day of listening to and interacting with carefully polished professionals, Max was a breath of fresh air with his unbridled youthful enthusiasm for making a difference in the world. With his handmade Venn diagrams illustrating his desire to be at the intersection between idealism and pragmatism, and between power and humility (among several others I can’t remember right now), he reminded us of the reason we got into this profession in the first place (though, according to him, part of it just comes from the desire to get laid attract girls). I’ve been a subscriber to GOOD since I saw the first issue (the fourth just came out), and it’s worth subscribing to for its production values alone. It’s a gorgeous publication. Add to that the fact that 100% of your $20 subscription fee goes to one of 12 charities you can choose from, and you can’t go wrong.

Next post will talk about Day 2 of the conference.

Photo Credit: wiseacre photo

Invitation-Only Innovations

by Nedra Weinreich | Apr 11, 2007 | Blog, Professional Development, Social Marketing

This weekend I’ll be heading off to the Innovations in Social Marketing Conference in Baltimore. Never been to it? Missed the announcement about it? You’re not alone. Since about 2000, the conference has been an invitation-only event for a hand-picked group of social marketers. While I presented a paper at the ISM conference in 1999 in Montreal, before attendance was restricted, I have not been invited back until this year (was it something I said?).

So, I have some mixed feelings about attending. I’m excited about the agenda and the chance to talk to colleagues I haven’t seen in a while (and meet new ones). But it feels awfully elitist, as if I’m the geeky kid who’s finally been invited to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table. I understand the desire to keep the conference small (it’s limited to 125 people) and ensure that participants are knowledgeable enough about social marketing to be able to engage in a high-level discourse about the field. But from the outside, it looks like the same exclusive inner circle of social marketers talking to each other all the time.

Granted, the conference does publish its proceedings in the Social Marketing Quarterly each year, but to me that has always felt like “ha, ha, see what a great conference you missed?” You will be able to purchase the issue with this year’s proceedings for about $50 (though you may as well buy a full year subscription for $34 right now instead).

My purpose in laying out my perceptions of the conference is not to criticize and put down the organizers. Rather, I would love to find ways to be more inclusive and disseminate the content to those who cannot attend. I have received the green light to share information from the conference on this blog, so I will do my best to provide summaries of the sessions from my own limited perspective. Perhaps the conference organizers will also explore ways of providing webcasts or DVDs of some of the sessions so that other social marketers beyond the lucky 125 can benefit from the innovations discussed.

If you will be at the conference and would like to connect in advance, email me. Or if you see me standing by myself in the corner looking lonely, please come up and introduce yourself. I’d love to meet you. If you are in the Baltimore/DC area but not at the conference, and want to get together at some point on Sunday through Tuesday, please let me know as well.

Technorati Tags: social marketing, conference, ism07

Off to DC for Social Marketing University

by Nedra Weinreich | Mar 26, 2007 | Blog, Professional Development, Social Marketing

I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. This past week has been so busy with getting ready for Social Marketing University and 200 other things that I had to put the blog on hold. Now I’m about to leave for DC to get the event set up. We are completely sold out! I’m looking forward to meeting all of you who will be there. We even have a couple of people coming from Kenya.

It’s unlikely that I will have much time until next week to post again, but I just wanted to let you all know I haven’t dropped of the planet. Have a great week – I know I will!