So You Want to Be a Social Marketer…

by Nedra Weinreich | Apr 24, 2007 | Blog, Professional Development, Social Marketing

For some reason, in the past couple of weeks I have received a flood of emails from people asking how I started working in social marketing and how they, too, can get started in this exciting career. (Cue low-budget daytime TV commercial: “Do you want to train to be a social marketer, or just look like one? Come to the Barbizon School of Social Marketing!”)

I came to social marketing through an interest in health communication and using the mass media to promote healthy behaviors. Out of college, I had worked developing content at a health promotion software company (which was way ahead of its time in exploring ways to provide health information via videotex and proto-internet portals like Prodigy) and heading up a traffic safety program at a county health department, before going to grad school. While getting my master’s degree in public health, I happened to hear mention of something called “social marketing,” though nobody really talked about it in any of my classes. I landed an internship with Porter Novelli in Washington DC, working on some of their social marketing projects like Five a Day and USAID-funded international programs. And I knew I’d found my calling.

I focused on social marketing throughout my studies, working on building up related research and evaluation skills and marketing/communications knowledge. After graduating, I went back to DC, which was (and still is) the epicenter of social marketing. I worked for a while for a Federal contractor doing marketing for an HHS agency’s clearinghouse, but did not have much opportunity to address behavior change-related issues. I eventually decided to become a consultant and pursue the kind of social marketing work I wanted to do. In 1995, I started Weinreich Communications and was selected to coordinate a social marketing project to prevent unintended pregnancies among young women in six states, funded by the Public Health Service. And many clients and projects later, here I am.

From what I have seen, just about everyone who has been working in social marketing for a while has taken a different route to arrive where they are (though newer social marketers have slightly more straightforward paths available now). Traditionally, there have been two main tracks that feed into the field of social marketing — either from the public health side or via the commercial marketing sector. Becoming more common nowadays also are people with a nonprofit marketing or activist background, particularly coming from the environmental advocacy arena.

Social marketers work in many different settings, including (but definitely not limited to):

• Public relations/marketing agencies with some social marketing-related contracts, such as Porter Novelli or Ogilvy, or agencies specifically focused on social marketing
• International development organizations, usually funded by USAID or foundations, such as PSI or the Academy for Educational Development
• Government agencies at the Federal, state and local levels, including departments focusing on health, the environment, energy and safety
• Nonprofit organizations at the international, national and local levels
• Schools and universities

More and more often, you will see jobs with titles like “social marketing coordinator” or “director of social marketing,” which was not very common even five years ago. You might also need to look for a position which is not necessarily focused on social marketing, but in which you can bring its principles and practices in your interventions. So, health educators, project directors, communication managers, and account executives may use social marketing as one tool in their professional belt, or might be able to shape their jobs to focus more on that aspect of the work.

In terms of academic preparation, there are now two schools that have graduate programs focusing on social marketing — George Washington University and the University of South Florida, both from a public health angle. There are many other programs that offer at least some related coursework, either in their public health or business schools. I have compiled a list of the social marketing-related education programs I could find (please let me know if you know of others that should be added). You can also look at schools that have the following criteria (suggested by Mike Rothschild):

• Great marketing department in a business school
• Great public health school
• A faculty person with a strong interest in social marketing
• A university that has the flexibility to allow the student to work across disciplines to create what is desired

To be prepared for a career in social marketing, I suggest taking courses in:

• Quantitative research methods/statistics
• Qualitative research methods
• Evaluation design
• Behavior change theory
• Marketing and communications
• Mass media
• Production/design
• Medical anthropology/sociology/psychology
• Social change methods
• Program planning

Of course, a healthy dose of curiosity, creativity and common sense are necessary. And the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes and realize that we don’t necessarily hold all the answers ourselves help too.

If others (social marketers and otherwise) have additional career advice for people interested in this field, please add it in the comments.

Good luck in helping us change the world – we need you!

Photo Credit: Picture from “Life and Its Marvels,” 1960, uploaded by icklebird
(it shows “how blood cells of one man would stretch round the earth”)

Technorati Tags: social marketing, careers, job

Innovations in Social Marketing Conference – Day 2 – PM

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

I’m still recounting the events of the Innovations in Social Marketing Conference from earlier this week (see Day 1, Day 2 am summaries).

The afternoon of day two continued with a bang with Craig Lefebvre shaking people up as their dominant media paradigm came crumbling to the ground. If you read his blog (or pretty much any marketing blog these days), you already know how the new media are turning consumers into participants rather than members of a passive audience waiting to receive our messages. I’m not going to repeat the presentation here, but one fact he shared that struck me is that with 60 million members as of July 2006, MySpace is the equivalent of the ninth most populous country in the world (with Rupert Murdoch as its president). By the way, best wishes to Craig on his new position as Chief Technical Officer of PSI. Just a little side gig to add to his blogging.

The conference then featured two Federal programs that are good examples of being customer-focused. Betsy Humphreys of the US National Library of Medicine talked about how Medline and other products have evolved as they get feedback from their users. Because they serve so many different types of audiences — from physicians and researchers to individuals looking for information on their own health conditions, NLM has tried to organize information around common topics in ways that make it more accessible and simple to use.

Jill Abelson of the EPA’s Energy Star program talked about some of the campaigns and partnerships they have built to promote energy efficiency in products and buildings. They have over 9,000 partners including retailers, manufacturers, utilities, home builders and others. Over 2 billion Energy Star qualified products have been sold. Brand awareness of their consumer symbol is over 65%. Working with partners like Home Depot and Sears, they create promotional campaigns that make it easy for retailers and manufacturers to incorporate their materials within their own ads.

In the Q&A, I asked Jill whether they had done any outreach to home improvement shows or home makeover shows on TV, because they seem like ideal partners. I don’t think she quite understood what I was getting at, because she first responded that they do a lot of media outreach, quite successfully. But when I clarified I was not talking about public relations, but product placement within the shows, she said that she thinks it would be too costly and too much “Hollywood glitz” for 5 seconds of airtime. I have to disagree with her on both the cost and potential for increasing use of their brand. If the EPA were willing to invest a little time and money on meeting with the producers and hosts of these types of shows to make sure they understand what Energy Star is and how it could be featured within the shows, it could have huge dividends. Whether the host points out the Energy Star label on a new appliance and explains why consumers should look for it, makes an offhand remark that makes it seem that using Energy Star is just the normal and accepted practice, or the camera just pans over the label while showing a product, all of these things are easy for a show to do and cost nothing. It’s not Hollywood glitz, it’s reaching an audience of people who are primed to follow the advice of their favorite shows (and by the way, the going rate for 5 seconds of commercial airtime is much more than the cost of flying out to LA for a few days to meet with the staff of various shows or execs at HGTV). Just a thought.

I’m going to end the conference recap here. Soon I’ll write another post about the discussion we had about the future of the field of social marketing, but that’s for another time.

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