It’s time to develop the marketing strategy! The 4 P’s (product, price, place and
promotion) will now be described to assist in this process.
Product Platform:
First, product strategy!
A product is anything that can be offered to a market to
satisfy a want or need, it can be: physical goods, a service, an experience,
an event, a person, a place, a property, an organization, information, or an
idea. In social marketing, many campaigns include:
- Benefit the target audience wants in exchange for performing the behavior
- Any goods and services you will be promoting to your target audience
- Any additional product elements you will include to assist your target audience in performing the behavior
When developing the product it is important to keep in mind
the following three levels:
- Core Product- the benefit the audience wants in exchange for performing the behavior
- What’s in it for the customer to adopt the behavior?
- What problem(s) will it solve?
- What needs will the desired behavior satisfy?
- Ethical considerations: the core product suggest the benefit an individual will receive if they perform a behavior, however, how can you really ensure this is true. Also, how much should you disclose about the probability of success if you cannot ensure this level of success will be attained?
- Actual product- any tangible goods and services you will promote
- Could be existing goods or services or new goods or services
- Ethical considerations: decisions have to be made relative to the specific behavior being promoted. For example, providing discounted, at home drug and alcohol tests for parents to use with their teens. Could this create worse consequences for the family structure than the positive effects of keeping teens safe? Another ethical consideration for the product is to examine how visible a funder’s name is in the campaign.
- Augmented product- additional product elements to support behavior change
- These are sometimes considered optional but may be what the individual needs for encouragement, removing barriers, or sustaining the behavior
- These could also present an opportunity to brand the campaign to create more attention, appeal and memorability
- Ethical Considerations: ethical considerations in this case could be more relevant if campaigns are tax funded, aka, did this program “performed as promised”.
Additional information about the product:
Thinking forward to product design, it may be more
beneficial to use design thinking. This
means focusing less on the object and more on an approach to designing products
that fulfill human desires, solve problems, and create world-changing innovations,
which were brought up in the core product.
Should your product have a brand? While brands in social marketing are not as
common as in the commercial sector the use of a brand (any name, term, sign,
symbol or design) that identifies the product as being unique could be
beneficial in the marketing campaign.
Price:
Price is the cost the target audience associates with
adopting the desired behavior and includes four dimensions including: monetary
incentives and disincentives & nonmonetary incentives and
disincentives. Monetary items are
usually associated with any good or service that is needed to adopt a
behavior. Nonmonetary items are
intangible and include costs such as time, effort, energy, psychological risk
and physical discomforts. when developing
the price, it is important to increase the benefits or decrease the costs, this
can be done through:
- Increasing monetary benefits for the desired behavior
- Example: providing a 3.5 cent credit for using your own grocery bag or giving a $5 gift card for blood donations
- Increasing nonmonetary benefits for the desired behavior
- Example: offering an extra point for hocky teams who do not receive any penalties
- Decreasing monetary costs for desired behavior
- Example: offering coupons for bike helmets
- Decrease nonmonetary costs for the desired behavior
- Example: offering detailed maps and signs where produce can be purchased by WIC customers at farmers markets
- Increase monetary costs for the competing behavior
- Example: impose fines for those who text and drive
- Increase nonmonetary costs for the competing behavior
- Example: encouraging teens to develop their own messages and provide personal reasons for delaying sex in a teen abstinence campaign
While prices for tangible goods and services are normally
set by retailers and producers, social marketers can decide what good and
services would be beneficial in facilitating a behavior change, suggest
discounts and incentives, and promote their use.
Ethical Considerations:
Social equity, potential
exploitation, public shame, and full disclosure of costs all come into question
when discussing pricing. These are all
fantastic ethical considerations and one must ensure to address them when
determining the price for the product.
Place:
Location, Location, Location! “Place in social marketing is where and when
the target audience will perform the desired behavior, acquire goods, and
receive associated services.”
Develop a place strategy:
- Make the location close to the target audience
- Make the location appealing
- Be where your target audience shops
- Be where your target audience hangs out
- Extend hours
- Be present at the time when the target audience will make a decision
- Overcome psychological barriers associated with place
- Be more accessible than the competition
- Make access to competition more difficult or unpleasant
- Work with existing distribution channels
Ethical Issues: The
ethical issues surrounding place often arise when considering distribution
channels and their equity and/or unintended consequences. One way to tackle the issue of equity is to
add more places at more times.
Overcoming unintended consequences may be slightly more difficult,
however, social marketers can implement pilot programs with the intention of
measuring behavior change and thus use these data for future campaign
implementation.
Promotion is, “Giving your brand a voice and establishing a dialog with
your consumers.”
A 1-2 page creative brief can be an effective way to
establish clear, meaningful, believable and distinctive messages while ensuring
all team members are on board. Typical
elements in the creative brief are:
- Purpose of communications
- Target audience
- Communication objectives
- Positioning statement
- Benefits to promise
- Support for the promise
- Style and tone
- Openings
Moving forward to developing the message strategy, it's
important to keep in mind that this is focused on what the actual content of
your message will be and will answer the questions: What do you want your target audience to do?
What do you want them to know? What do you want them to believe? The messages can be one sided (telling all
the good) or two sided (mentioning product shortcomings). When picking how many sides you want your
message to have, research suggests that one-sided messages are generally more
accepted by those who already favor your product, while two-sided messages may
be more accepted by those who oppose your product. It’s also important to consider what stage of
change your target audience is currently in while developing the message.
Creative strategy (how do get from the content to the
specific communications):
- Keep it simple and clear
- Focus on audience benefits
- When using fear, follow up with solutions and use credible sources
- Try for messages that are vivid, concrete, and personal
- Make messages easy to remember
- Have a little fun sometimes (the opposite of fear based messages)
- Try for a BIG IDEA
- Consider a question instead of a nag
- Make norms more visible
- Tell real stories about real people
- Try crowdsourcing
- Appeal to psychographic characterizes and desires of the target audience
When you’ve gotten all this done… Don’t forget to PRETEST
your overall message before moving forward in the process!
Ethical Considerations: Please try your best to make sure
your messages are accurate and not misleading and that the language and graphics are
clear and appropriate for exposed audiences.
The question is; whose criteria should you use? (most of the time it will be the funders criteria).
Kotler, P. & Lee, N. (2016). Social Marketing: Changing
behaviors for good. Thousand Oaks,
CA:Sage.
