The Journal of Marketing Management has just published a special edition dedicated to Arts, Heritage, Nonprofit and Social Marketing. Amongst the papers in this issue is one from Ross Brennan, Lynne Eagle and myself. The paper looks at how young consumers can be persuaded to make healthy nutrition choices voluntarily.
The paper underlines the point that while marketing communication is a good tool to raise awareness, it is not reliable when used to deliver behaviour change. For young consumers, motivational messages - especially those which use “new media”, internet and sms messages are more effective.

The full details for the article are:
Brennan, R.; Dahl, S.; Eagle, L (2010):
Persuading young consumers to make healthy nutritional decisions
Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 26 Issue 7, 635
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0267%2d257X&volume=26&issue=7&spage=635

Social media, and in particular user-generated media, offer a myriad of possibilities for enhancing the engagement of target audiences with social marketing campaigns. Social media, which enables easy and free content creation, is often seen as a cost effective way to promote social messages, engage users and inform stakeholders. This paper summarises much of the current research. The paper can be downloaded for free from SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1624522

I used the paper as part of a presentation at the Middlesex University Social Marketing Evenings - looking at ways to use social media for social marketing. The presentation from the evening is available here.

If you’d like to receive an invitation to forthcoming evening workshops/lectures, please send me an email: s.dahl@mdx.ac.uk .

The next evening is on the 21 July.
Exploring health literacy, deprivation and working in a cultural diverse environment, the lecture shows how Social Marketing can be used in challenging scenarios to deliver effective behaviour change. Intended for people with a basic understanding of Social Marketing, the workshop will examine successful examples how to overcome barriers and help deliver successful Social Marketing campaigns in hard to reach communities.

A short overview of Social Marketing in general & Social Marketing courses and research at Middlesex University from MDX Play.
For more information, check out

• Middlesex University  MA in Health & Social Marketing
  
• Free Social Marketing Evenings
• CPD / Saturday workshops on Social Marketing

Social Marketing Quarterly, the main scholarly outlet in the social marketing field, has published “Current Themes in Social Marketing”, looking at the main themes emerging from text mining social marketing research over the past five years. The article is available here (via Informa World)

Dahl, Stephan (2010) ‘Current Themes in Social Marketing Research: Text-Mining the Past Five Years’,
Social Marketing Quarterly, 16: 2, 128 — 136

“Analyzing advergames: active diversions or actually deception” - a review of advergames, especially those used by children, and the rhetoric versus reality of their claimed effects and effectiveness has won the Highly Commended Award from the Emerald Literati Network. The paper also highlighted that the majority of web sites do not comply with the existing broadcasting codes of practice for mainstream advertising - raising major concerns of what constitutes acceptable online behavior.
The paper was published in Young Consumers (Volume 10, Issue 1, p. 46-59) and can be found here.

Each year I run a volunteer & service-learning module at Middlesex University. It’s a very popular option on the MA Health & Social Marketing, though also catching on for the other MAs (it’s also a compulsory module for the PGCert Health & Social Marketing).

Students who take the module are required to volunteer for a charity of their choice for at least 50 hours over the academic year (many actually do more in the end!). In addition to the volunteering experience the students then also complete a marketing related project for the charity involved. Normally the project is asked for by the charity itself, i.e. it is based on a real problem or issue the charity is facing at the moment. This ensures that all the projects are “real live” projects, they actually help the charities involved, and they provide a base for the students to apply the learning they have in class to a real situation and come up with a real solution (rather than just talking in class).

Some of students also write a blog about their experience and work, and I thought I’d share a selection of the blogs with you as examples from the module:

Bettina’s blog is related to a project she carried out in Austria to increase involvement of young people in their local church in Vienna.

Pia’s blog is about her work finding out motivations of people volunteering at a care centre for people with learning difficulties.

Dina’s blog talks about her experience of helping to modernise the marketing of a North London arts centre.

Ka Wan’s blog shows how she researched how to recruit more student volunteers.

Other projects have included marketing health services to a local community, outreach projects in various communities, fund raising and volunteer communication support.

To everyone who gave up their time, participated, gave back and learned while studying with their respective charities a big Thank You! And a very big Thank You also to the various charities and organisations that have helped us over the last three years to run this module - and to deliver around 2000 hours of volunteer service to local communities, recruit new volunteers and funds for future work.

Probably the most frequently asked question at our social marketing workshops, at network events and free lectures  (some coming up soon!) is about what evidence there is that Social Marketing is cost effective. In times of decreasing budgets, spending squeezes and cost savings this is bound to become a more pertinent point then ever before. The problem is - as with commercial marketing, there isn’t an easy answer. It all depends on how well designed your social marketing campaign is - if it is a well designed campaign, the cost savings (and hence the return on investment) can be impressive; and we are talking “just” in terms of money here - not even measuring the feel good factor of making people healthier and living longer.

One stumbling block to calculating overall cost savings is that many social marketing campaigns have an effect on a variety of outcomes. Take for example obesity: Reducing obesity has multiple effects:

• on overall health care costs - by reducing sickness, chances of developing cancer, diabetes …
• on individuals - by reducing sickness, increasing earning potential, making people more productive, by increasing quality of life…
• on employers - by reducing sickness costs
• on the society as a whole - by increasing productivity of individuals, and thus leading to higher net contribution to society
• and all sorts of other costs I can’t think of at the moment….

If you want to have a go - there is a really cool “obesity cost calculator” for companies available from the CDC here . As an other cool feature, the tool also calculates the ROI of running an obesity prevention campaign at organisational level, which is where it all get’s tricky.

Sure, it is (relatively!) easy to say that the overall cost of preventable illness is roughly 20% of the GDP in England, or £187 billion (don’t trust me, the figure comes from here) - which coincidentally makes the bank bail out look like peanuts and the cost cutting proposed by the new coalition a total joke. Any small reduction will make a massive difference, and free up massive amounts of money elsewhere. But, unfortunately, there isn’t a way of saying that £1,000 spend on preventing illness will deliver £10,000 in terms of benefits. There are, however, multiple studies and evaluations around which show great effectiveness. A few examples: the Mpowerment intervention project among young gay males in San Francisco achieved up to $900,000 of net savings from a societal perspective. The Road Crew anti-drink & drive campaign in Wisconsin achieved a cost-effective 17% reduction in drunk driving accidents - and net total savings of $31 million. And many more cases (also from the UK) are of course available from the National Social Marketing Centre website. However, as marketing is no exact science, there isn’t a magic formula that can determine how effective any campaign will be.

So how can you ensure that a Social Marketing intervention is going to be a good investment? The answer is trying making sure the campaign is well designed, and driven by target audience insight - rather than quick fixes. A hard message to sell in times of reduced budgets, but the customer insight itself - together with an experienced team who really understand  Social Marketing, have a good understanding of health behaviour as well as consumer behaviour, understand how to create an effective intervention that makes use of the full marketing mix, rather than solely relying on  promotion - and importantly understand how to obtain, evaluate and interpret insights and turn insights into strategy. In other words, people who can effectively work with theories, learn from insights and synergise all into actions focusing on behaviour change.

What do you think are good arguments for the cost effectiveness of Social Marketing? Let me know!

With the general election looming in the UK - and public spending under increasing pressure, here’s a brief look at what (if anything!) the three main parties have said about their view of the future of social marketing.Both the Liberal Democrats as well as Labour make no mention of social marketing in their manifesto - or election material.

Labour has committed to make up to £20 billion worth of efficiency savings in the NHS between 2011 and 2014 - though has not said explicitly where these savings may be coming from. Labour has also committed to “sharply reducing spending on [government] consultancy and marketing” (1:3) - which may well hint at spending cuts for social marketing.

The Liberal Democrats are the only party not to commit to maintaining the NHS budget. However, although they are the only party to give a fairly clear breakdown of how they want to achieve a reduction in public spending, they don’t give any details of NHS related cuts either. Overall, the LibDem strategy seems more reactive then preventative from reading the manifesto - with the main commitment being that despite cuts they will protect front-line services. They also say that the Department of Health will be cut “in half”, and PCTs would be replaced by elected Local Health Boards. There are some clear public health points in the manifesto though, which include a commitment to regulate the sale of alcohol. But overall there is little detail about how this would affect social marketing (both in terms of health as well as other issues).

The most vocal about social marketing are probably the Conservatives: The party has clearly stated that it supports (and in fact wants to extend) the Change4Life campaign, and has already committed to being lead by the Public Health Commission, an independent think-tank with strong links to the party and overall very supportive of social marketing.

Overall, both Labour and the LibDems are rather silent on their vision for social marketing, while the Conservatives seem very favourable towards the role social marketing can play - at least in relation to health. Of course, social marketing per se is unlikely to be a major election topic, and therefore election material may therefore not really reflect the intentions of the parties. If you have any further information - please share them by commenting!

Personally, as an academic, I find publishing research results is often a little bewildering: On the one side there are literally thousands of journals in business alone - but finding the right ones to publish in is sometimes a challenge. Not at least, because with the REF looming in the UK, journal quality has become an important factor for me when considering where to send a manuscript. My university tends to rely highly on the Association of Business Schools Journal Quality list, which has fairly recently been updated (new list can be found here). Unfortunately, the updated version seems to have dropped a few (sometimes important) journals, crucially maybe Social Marketing Quarterly, some journals were relegated as they had lost their sparkle - and obviously new journals are not yet included (such as the forthcoming Journal of Social Marketing). Either way,  I thought it might be useful to compile and share an overview of the journals that more or less frequently publish articles related to social marketing - and their ranking in the ABS list. The ranking on the ABS list is from 4 (top international journal) to 1 (recognised).

This list may not be complete, as I simply looked through my Endnote file to identify the journals (if you have any additions, please let me know!). Also some of these journals may only very rarely publish anything related to social marketing (e.g. Business and Industrial Marketing), while others may be much more social-marketing-friendly. Of course, the ABS list in itself is not the only list that there is - there are a number of other ones, and a more extensive list can be found here. However, not withstanding these points, the ABS list does give (at least in my view) a pretty good overview over potential publication outlets - and the perceived quality of the publication.

Of course, publishing about research in social marketing is not only confined to journals which are “business-aligned”. In fact, many articles I regularly use come from health related fields etc - so for completeness here are some other journals from other fields that also regularly feature social marketing research:
Addiction, Addiction Research and Theory, Alcohol and Alcoholism , American Journal of Infection Control, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, BMC Public Health, British Food Journal, British Journal of General Practice, Conservation and Recycling, Drug and Alcohol Review, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, Education for Health, Environmental Management, Health Education, Health Education Research, Health Education Research Theory and Practice, Health Policy, Health Promotion International, Health Promotion Practice, International Gambling Studies, International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, Journal of Smoking Cessation, Medical Decision Making, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, Nutrition Reviews, Perspectives in Public Health, Preventing Chronic Disease, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Public Health, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Social Science & Medicine, The Diabetes Educator, The European Journal of Public Health, The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, Tobacco Control.

Middlesex University Business School in London is hosting a series of open evening lectures around Social Marketing. All the events are free, but you are requested to register your attendance in advance by emailing your name/organisation to s.dahl@mdx.ac.uk . Each lecture starts at 6pm and lasts for around 90 minutes, after which there will be some time to network with colleagues from the field.

Wednesday, 19 May
An Introduction to Social Marketing: Why? What? For whom?
This workshop offers an introduction to basic Social Marketing skills and tools, showing how marketing tools can be effectively used to change behaviour - for better health and societal benefit. It is intended for people who wish to have a basic overview of what Social Marketing is all about, and how it can be used in health care and beyond.

Wednesday, 23 June
Social Media & Social Marketing: Twitter for behaviour change!
Looking at how Social Media, and web 2.0 tools like blogs, facebook and twitter, can be used to communicate effectively, achieve behaviour change and support health & social marketing objectives, this workshop examines how Social Marketing can benefit from using new technologies. Intended for people who have a basic understanding of Social Marketing, the evening is a hands on workshop on how to do Social Marketing - the 2.0 way.

Wednesday, 21 July
Mind your language: Hard to reach communities & Social Marketing
Exploring health literacy, deprivation and working in a cultural diverse environment, this workshop shows how Social Marketing can be used in challenging scenarios to deliver effective behaviour change. Intended for people with a basic understanding of Social Marketing, the workshop will examine successful examples how to overcome barriers and help deliver successful Social Marketing campaigns in hard to reach communities.

In addition to these free lectures, please note that we also have a series of one day workshops later this year. The one day workshops can also be counted towards the Middlesex Postgraduate Certificate, Diploma and MA in Health & Social Marketing. For more information on these, please see http://bit.ly/cd7fk7

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!