Marketing social change: Changing behavior to promote health, social development, and the environment
The next chapter focuses on research to support social marketing programs. In it is a complete discussion of marketing research techniques appropriate for social marketing topics. I found particularly worthwhile Andreasen's discussions of low-cost research, formative research, and qualitative research. Practitioners will find the material comparing focus groups and individual interviews useful; however, I would have added a brief discussion regarding the latest work on that topic by Griffin and Hauser (1992). Interestingly, Andreasen (p. 125) quotes from a 1981 National Cancer Institute report, "Respondents may become unusually rational when reacting to such pretest materials, and cover up their true concerns, feelings, and behavior," thus suggesting the salience of feelings and such. Also, there are perhaps better ways to determine the importance weightings exemplified on page 132-that is, conjoint analysis or partial least squares (for the latter approach, see Alpert, Kamins, and Graham 1992). Andreasen's explanation of the distinction between association and causation will help practitioners immensely. Indeed, the entire chapter comprises a most clearly presented and easily understood discussion of a complicated subject.
Chapter 4 covers the details of changing behaviors-the dependent variable in Andreasen's model. On page 146, he lists six dimensions of behaviors salient for social marketers: acquisition versus cessation, addictive versus nonaddictive, frequent versus infrequent, legal versus illegal, public versus private, and socially acceptable versus unacceptable. Many of these issues are not even considered in commercial marketing research and theory. That is, do brewers and vintners study alcoholism? Only recently have we learned that tobacco companies indeed have studied the influence of nicotine levels on consumption. His comments here will be important for all studying such complicated behaviors in the future.
In Chapters 5, 6, and 7 Andreasen provides useful advice on implementation of programs, including sections on market segmentation and advertising media and messages. He does mention briefly emotional advertising appeals here. Perhaps most interesting, he talks about nonobvious channels of communication such as having dentists talk about the dangers of smoking. His discussion of laddering interview techniques will prove useful for practitioners. But the breast-feeding example he presents well demonstrates the limitations of such an approach. The respondents never mentioned the apparently unconscious effects of infant formula advertising, which have been found to influence breast-feeding behavior as well (Gilly and Graham 1988). Finally, on page 235 the author broaches the topic of role modeling and imitation, which he discusses in greater detail in the next chapter.
I believe the material in Chapter 8 to be the most important in the book. Here Andreasen begins to get at the subtle, often unconscious, social influences on our behavior. Researchers in both academic and practical contexts must work much harder in these areas. We simply do not understand well the mechanisms involved and how best to use such knowledge to design effective change programs. Pechman's program of research on tobacco use (e.g., Pechman and Rateshwar 1994) is perhaps the best example of the kind of work that must done in this regard.
Chapter 9 offers tips on inducing action and maintenance of behavioral change. The comments about Singapore's use of negative extrinsic rewards on page 286 is most interesting and a bit scary. Chapter 10 presents several examples of strategic alliances, including a comprehensive list of suggested partners on page 289. Andreasen demonstrates his deep insight on the topic by noticing the potential downside of "free" advertising agency help. For example, it seems that some advertising agencies "volunteer" to work on public service campaigns with creativity awards, rather than social progress, in mind. Both these chapters will be useful for directors of social change programs.
In the concluding chapter, Andreasen states (p. 309), "The book has not been intended as a comprehensive text on every aspect of social marketing." Despite his stated lack of intentions in that direction, I would have to say that he has done a wonderful job of giving us a comprehensive text on the subject. The material will be of immediate use to practitioners. The paradigm outlined in the last chapter and detailed in the book provides a crucial conceptual context for researchers working in the area now and in the future. I give the book my highest recommendation