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marketing into the strategy of social programs. From talking with the leaders of these programs and read- ing their accounts there are three key lessons that can be applied when seeking to embed social marketing programs as an integral part of all social programs.
1: understand what matters to your policy customers
In this case, the customers are the people who control the policy and strategy making procedure and those who will be responsible for program delivery. ere is a need to be precise about what they care about. What most politicians care about
is being seen to do a good job and doing a good
job. Most senior policy makers and planners are focused on these two issues but also are o en driven by their own performance management systems to care about e cacy and e ectiveness. Delivery-level sta are o en concerned about the t of any new intervention with existing practice and their capacity and capability to deliver. ey also o en want to be engaged in the intervention development process
so that their experience and tacit understanding
of situations can be used to develop more e ective interventions. ese are the concerns and issues that need to be addressed when setting out a marketing plan to market social marketing within organiza- tions. All of these needs and concerns will need to be built into interventions to embed social marketing.
2: build compelling stories and keep promoting them
Develop and supply a narrative that politicians, policymakers and professionals can understand and one that they value. e narrative should also be one they can use to persuade others. For example, one of the most e ective ways that was discovered in the UK to get a Government Minister to become a champion for social marketing was to get a local group to invite them out to see a program working on the ground. is was by far the best way to get them to appreciate the principles of social mar- keting and what to promote, and it also gave them
a story they could tell to others. It is important to keep refreshing and repeating this narrative until it
becomes the everyday language of the organization.
3: build a set of required standardized processes
If successful in making the case for embedding social marketing, one of the best ways to ensure continued application of social marketing principles is to develop as an early task a set of systems that require social marketing principles to be applied. ese systems can range from budgetary systems that require applicants to show that they are applying the principles before budgets are allocated through to national training programs, sets of auditable stan- dards and guidance on issue such as segmentation, planning, and evaluation. Examples of such systems are the National Occupational Standards for social marketing in the UK or the Health 2020 social mar- keting competency program targets in the USA. e uptake and use of quality standards is something that politicians and policy makers and professional asso- ciations can be asked to champion.
Of these three lessons, the most important is
the rst. e only way to persuade policy makers, strategists and professionals is to convince them that social marketing can help them solve the challenges that they face. e last thing you should do is pres- ent social marketing as a new and additional set of challenges that policy makers and practitioners need to accept if they are to create more e ective and e - cient social programs. Social marketing needs to be positioned as part of the solution that senior manag- ers and politicians and practitioners can use to help them solve their problems. As part of this process, there may be a need for those who lead social policy development or social marketers who are assisting them to undertake an organizational diagnostic on how marketing orientated the current organizational culture is. Figure 2 on the next page sets out four stages of this assessment and development process.
e rst stage is focused on developing a thor- ough picture of just how user-centric or not the organization or team is and, if necessary, creating a new vision about what needs to be done.
e second stage of the embedding process is focused on developing a clear plan about how to move the organization to a more citizen- or
MarketiNg for social chaNge
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