 As-Salaam-Alaikum-Khawwati-Nuh-Hazrat. Wasim As-San welcomes you to lecture number six of Marketing for Non-Profit Organizations, MKT 628 at the virtual University of Pakistan. Today's learning is going to be all about social marketing and the lecture is going to be divided into four components. The very first component is about social marketing, i.e. what it really is, how it differs from other areas within the NPO sector. The reason we really have to talk about social marketing in its separateness is that the terminology suggests that any program undertaken within the NPO sector is social marketing. The connotation owes the fact that all programs within the NPO sector are geared towards social welfare, improvement of society, and therefore any program which is about social welfare is social marketing. But that's not the case. There's a fine line or a distinction between social marketing and generic marketing. Generic marketing we talk about in the context of commercial marketing and we also talk about in the context of NPO marketing. As a matter of fact, generic marketing is all about application of the principles of marketing mix, meaning those four variables we keep talking about and we keep referring to in terms of different examples and different contexts within the NPO sector, the commercial sector, and so on and so forth. There has been quite a lot of debate about what social marketing is and what it ought to be and it just so happens that over the last 10, 15 years, meaning in this very 21st century, there has been a clarity on part of all the experts as to what social marketing is. Well, it is all about changing the behavior of the target audience. Now, this is something that we already have learned. How does it differ? It differs in the sense that while carrying out social marketing, social marketers draw their attention and apply all their expertise toward getting the behavior changed. This is not the case when you follow other programs relating social welfare. You may be selling a product, you may be offering a service, but here you're doing something which is all about the customer. In other words, whatever you do benefits the customer. Nothing goes to the benefit of the marketer. Everything goes to the benefit of the customer and the customer benefits only if he or she changes his behavior or her behavior. This is the basic difference. As a matter of fact, the results achieved from social marketing over the last couple of decades have been very impressive all over the world. Social marketing has been used in terms of the prevention of forest fires, in terms of achieving success on the family planning side, in terms of having teenagers quit smoking, in terms of convincing people to administer the oral rehydration therapy in case of diarrhea and therefore controlling child mortality. There have been so many different areas where social marketing has played its role. The only key is that social marketing brings about a complex and a sophisticated value exchange whereby it is the customer who stands to gain and not the marketer. Let me give you a couple of examples, rather two examples which are very parallel to each other. The one falls within the domain of generic marketing and the other within social marketing. However, they both pertain to the NPO sector. The first is about a dispensary which you as a group of social marketers are running. The dispensary is all about offering medical treatment to accident and crime victims, offering medical forestry to the walk-in patients and so on and so forth. You may have more than one dispensary because you have a comprehensive distribution system whereby you are offering your service at more places than one. Here you can see and you are convinced that you have to apply all the four variables of marketing mix and all the pieces are there. You have the dispensary as the point of distribution like I said and you are offering the medical treatment as the product. There's a price that you charge for that. It may be a minimal price subsidized or maybe it's free of charge and the benefit is what the target gets and the promotion is the actual existence of the dispensary of which the greatest manifestation can be by way of the ambulance which applies on different roads of the city. So this is an example which falls within the domain of generic marketing. You're offering a service, a very noble service with the help of the four piece of marketing but this is not social marketing because you're not doing anything to change the behavior of your customers, to change the behavior of the target audience. The target audience whenever it needs the service of the dispensary walks to the dispensary or have the dispensary send the ambulance to them so that they can be looked after, attended to and the need addressed. Let us not talk about the other example from the social marketing domain. You are a team of the marketing people running a program on inoculation and you have to educate and convince village folks from one of the communities about the efficacy of the inoculation because you want to prevent those people from the outbreak of a possible lethal disease and therefore you go to the community and you educate them before the medical team can arrive there about the utility of the program and convince them that they should get themselves and all the family members inoculated because it is going to be to their benefit. So in other words if you are in a position to convince them about the benefit in other words the action reward system if they take a particular action to the by way of presenting themselves for inoculation they're going to get a particular benefit you have done your job and you have achieved the mission and this is what social marketing does. In other words social marketing brings about a behavior change. To talk about the four Ps in this example as well let me say that the total administration of the program is the product inoculation being the final end. The wizard of the marketing team is the promotion and the wizard of the medical team that is inoculating the target market is the point of distribution and the price paid is the value exchange rather price paid is part of the value exchange and that is in actuality the behavior change. They have changed their values they have changed their attitudes in terms in fact before changing the value system after getting convinced that a behavior change is going to be to their benefit and therefore they have presented themselves for inoculation and this is what social marketing does. Let me assure you a graphical presentation which brings about complete parity on part of all of us as to what social marketing is and how it differs from the rest of the marketing as part of the MPO sector. This graphical presentation as you can see shows us the classification of social programs as you can see here social programs can be classified into two of the major areas because the one is generic marketing programs which is right here the other one is social marketing programs which is right there. I've talked about these two in clarity by giving you two examples the one from the generic marketing programs the dispensary example and one from the social marketing programs the inoculation program. It is obvious that on the generic side we try to achieve the mission through generic programs whereas on the social marketing side we seek a behavior change and both aspects basically converge at one single point right here which is social welfare improvement. Like I said at the beginning of the component that the whole MPO sector is all about seeking welfare of the society and bringing about improvements after improvements but there are certain fine distinctions between generic marketing programs and social marketing programs. I think in order to bring about even more clarity that we should say that the generic marketing programs are the welfare programs or rather the generic welfare programs whereas programs falling on the other side are the social marketing programs. One thing which this graphical presentation and the learning of the component has been made very clear is that social marketing is a bit complex complex in the sense because it is not the marketer who has to take an action as a matter of fact after his taking the action it is the customer who has to take the desired action at a stage which is not within the control of the marketing people. This also happens at the commercial side but there are certain complexities involved because the marketer can never be very sure that the benefit he has talked about as part of the education of the program of the target audience is really going to work or not. Well this again holds very much true on the commercial side but again there are certain certainties and complexities which make the whole thing rather more challenging and brings in an element of doubt whether this really is going to work or not and I'm going to talk about those differences in a moment. Another thing which is very clear is that there is no price charged as part of the social programs the beneficiaries are the target market and not the marketers and another the fact of social marketing is that the target market is totally educated of the utility of the program because it is complex and it is long drawn the implementation is going to take a lot more time than other generic programs and therefore to keep people engaged and to keep them interested toward getting the desired benefit it takes a lot more effort on the side of the social marketing programs in comparison with other generic programs may those fall within the sector of commercial marketing or NPO marketing. Now after having learned what social marketing is again one thing has become very clear that social marketing is different from the rest of the marketing which is generic marketing. What are those differences which make the social marketing more challenging and make the job of social marketers a lot more harder. What is it that makes the process so long drawn and what is it that makes the social marketing program kind of a self-generated programs in which the target audience has a lot greater role to play. Let me talk about those factors one by one. Well in the first place social marketing remains under a lot of intense scrutiny by the public because of the fact that they are working for improvement of the society on a program which is meant for social welfare they are under a lot more scrutiny by the stakeholders than commercial products are. If somebody is not really interested in buying a commercial product well they don't buy it but here conversely the social change is highly desirable and the people want the social marketers to work in a way that that change is brought about. So there are always stakeholders who keep you under the microscope and try to assess you on a performance appraisal scale but the fact remains there is no performance appraisal scale because the process is long drawn it is not really visible and it takes a lot more time a lot longer time to implement it and therefore the results which happen to be intangible are not seen. The only thing that you can offer is the promise and therefore the stakeholders can become impatient and they get impatient to the point that they start interfering with the programs and the structure of the organization. So in order to cope with this kind of a situation and circumstances what social marketers generally do they bring into the marketing mix of social marketing two more factors and those are politics and public relationing. Public relationing is not confined to just maintaining your relationships with donors and funders and other stakeholders it is an effort on your part to keep your stakeholders engaged in a way that they do not interfere that they keep involved and they are convinced they should stay convinced that your efforts will be fruitful one day. Another factor that really differentiates social marketing from the rest of the marketing is very high expectations on part of the stakeholders for complete eradication of the social problem. The problem will get resolved universally only if there is a universal adoption of the changed behavior meaning the change which is desirable and for which the organization is working. It is not really possible because you just cannot have 100 percent people or the target audience to rally around your point and change their behaviors which are so deep seated and have evolved over the last not just staggered but rather centuries. So the job of the social marketers is here to lower the expectations of the stakeholders. It is generally said that social marketers succeed in getting the behaviors changed to the extent of like you know 15 to 20 percent. In other words 20 percent is a very good score on a scale of 0 to 100. Therefore expecting that a social problem is going to be totally eradicated by 100 percent does not amount to having very realistic expectations. Yet another point which gives the very distinct differentiation to social marketing programs is the fact that social marketers have to deal with negative demand all the time. Negative demand is all those factors which are undertaken by the target audience and social marketers are out to change all those. In other words all those habits and attitudes and behaviors which the target audience is following and the social marketers are wanting to do something exactly opposite to that and opposite of that. Now this is something which the target market doesn't really like. They detest it as a matter of fact. Just to give you examples if you ask them to conserve water they may not like it. If you want to have your target audience to lower their thermostats during the summer period when it comes to using air conditioning or tell your target audience to start behaving in the roads in order to have sanity in the flow of traffic these are not the kind of things which they will immediately buy because these are very ingrained habits and this is what you call negative demand. Certain behaviors on part of the target audience which they want to maintain and continue with and you as social marketers want to change that is a huge challenge. Yet another factor which makes social marketing rather more challenging is that social marketers have to deal with mostly non-literate population. I'm not saying here illiterate it could be a combination of illiterate and semi-literate kind of people so the population of the whole is kind of non-literate. That is the reason that social marketing is generally practiced in the third world. It is not a phenomenon which is followed in the western world by and large it is seen as being practiced in the third world and the organizations that started undertaking social marketing programs and are still supportive in a huge way of social marketing effort are the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development meaning USAID. Because of the fact that it takes a lot more time and a lot more effort and the financial support these organizations have to jump into the arena trying to help the third world countries improve their social welfare. Back to the point of non-literate population the greatest challenge which social marketers face while dealing with this kind of target market is the communication effort and the communication programs. It is not a question of coming up with high flying kind of brochures and flyers or high sounding kind of marketing campaigns on radio and television. It is a question of talking with an audience that behaves in a very peculiar way because they have a very different kind of patterns of social interaction to show and therefore social marketers have to be very creative when it comes to putting together their communication campaigns and they do that with the help of the people from other social disciplines about which I will talk shortly. The idea here is to have campaigns which have an appeal for the target audience and since they are not literate you have to come up with things like cartoons or characters or some other local tricks which you put together with the help of mediators moderators and the local observers. Another factor which keeps social marketing programs under a lot of stress and poses a huge challenge is that social marketers are in a difficult position to prove that the programs they're talking about and the education they're imparting are really going to be very helpful and beneficial for the target audience because while they advocate their target audience there is nothing they can show them. There is nothing tangible they can talk about. They can only talk about promises but otherwise nothing happens and that makes the whole exercise very challenging. If you talk about the benefits I mean a mother which is going to administer an ORT to her children in case of diarrhea is not really convinced that when the time comes this is going to work and even if she gets convinced that this is a good program could be beneficial and she follows it in true lettering spirit she might still think that the same situation would have prevailed if she had not taken this action. I mean the babies would still have been okay even if she had not administered this ORS. So this is a great difficulty which the marketing people face while dealing with their target audience. This in other words is the invisibility of the benefit which the social marketer just cannot show his target audience. So it makes the job a lot more harder. Another thing which is a constraining factor is the misconception and misperception on part of the target audience that they do not get the benefit directly out of a changed behavior. Just go back to the example of lowering the thermostat of the air conditioners or conserving water and you will know what I'm talking about. These people may think that by lowering the thermostat somebody else is going to be the beneficiary. The benefit doesn't come to me you know that this is the way that these people think. By conserving water somebody else is going to have his portion of the water it's not me. I am going to pay for that water in any case. So why conserve water? So this is the third party benefit which becomes kind of a constraining factor because while these social marketers educate their target audience not only during the education program but also afterwards. As a matter of fact you see it counts more afterwards than during the education program because it is the timing you see when the target audience is going to take the action and if they do not take the action by not changing their behavior it means they either do not fully understand the dynamics of the action reward equation or they just want to stay oblivious to it. They just don't want to follow it because it is a selfish attitude they have on their part and not a selfless attitude. The fact of the matter is that social marketing is all about selflessness it is not about selfishness. So this is a huge challenge which the social marketers face. Another constraining factor which draws distinction between the social marketing and the generic marketing is that social marketers could always have to operate with severe budget limitations. They know they have to go to the outside sources for funding because they want to keep their finance pool sustainable at all times and therefore they do not want to get into a spending program or a spending mode which may reflect of wastefulness and give any cause for concern to the stakeholders and yet they have to be very effective in terms of getting out their programs because they want to achieve their mission they want to completely implement the program and you can well imagine the kind of predicament social marketers at times find themselves in. Another distinguishing factor of social marketing is that social marketers cannot modify their offering. Let me draw here a comparison of social marketing with commercial marketing. When a product is no longer preferred by the target audience what is it that commercial marketers do? They always talk with the production department of the company and bring about a change in the features of the product in line with the changing preferences of their consumers but this is not the case when it comes to social marketing programs. Just think of the ORS. I mean the way it is given maybe in sachets or maybe in the bulk form for you to prepare that solution in your homes the fact remains that there are certain dispensations created by the medical scientists and therefore that puts certain limitations on the way an offering or a product looks like. Another factor which social marketing apart is skepticism on part of co-workers colleagues and the many stakeholders who are otherwise supposed to support the programs and support the social marketers they start questioning the very validity of the marketing programs because they're convinced that these programs can be carried out without any marketing support. This is a huge misunderstanding on part of co-workers and colleagues and very unfortunate that the discipline or the area which makes social marketing or the programs successful becomes questionable and a point of contention by so many people or by so many stakeholders who are part of the organization or who are part of the total effort. Therefore marketing people on the social marketing side have to face with so many different challenges that their job is surely a lot more challenging than the job of marketing people on the other side of the fence meaning either commercial marketing or even genetic marketing on the NPO side. So this is all about the differences in social marketing and with this we now move on to the next component. Thanks. We're now going to get into new component which is about the importance of tools from other disciplines. The why I'm talking about tools from other disciplines because marketing happens to be a many-sided social discipline that borrows concepts from so many different social sciences. Of the social sciences that really have contributed towards the discipline of marketing or economics sociology mass communication and so on and so forth. The fact is that this combination of different concepts lets us understand how customers behave why they behave the way they do and what is it that we can do or should do in order to change their preferences and their beliefs and value systems and so on. If we take a look at social marketing it becomes very clear that the role of sociology and mass communication becomes even more important because we need to have a thorough understanding of the consumer behavior. Let me give you here an example of the commercial market where we try to influence the behavior of the customer by letting him change his preference. We are selling biscuits for example that we always can do something with the product and then support it with the help of the communication campaigns to convince our customers that our product is better and therefore they should change their preference. It is a challenging task. It is a very creative kind of a task but it has not something as difficult as social marketers will find their challenges when it comes to changing behaviors of their target audience. The behavior change on this side of marketing meaning social marketing is much more substantial and consequential as compared with just a change of preference on the other side of marketing. The reason is that on the social marketing side you need to have a much deeper and thorough understanding of the value system that has evolved over a long long period of time. Since it is a question of the behavior change your understanding has got to be much greater than you require in order to just change the plain preferences in terms of selling a commercial product and here there are two social disciplines that count a lot and from which the social marketing area bothers a lot and those are social anthropology and mass communication. They play their respective roles by supporting the field of social marketing in terms of getting out market research and implementing the programs in light of the research findings and then helping the organization with putting together communication program which is very relevant and which really has an appeal in the sense that you can have your target audience change their behavior. So how does it work? Let me explain that. Social anthropology is a study of the human society, its development, its functioning, its makeup and all these social cultural values and customs which the society has evolved over its evolutionary period and all that is very useful in terms of getting out your market research. This may sound very highly sophisticated and complicated but in practice it is not because many market research companies have the people working for them with expertise in the area of sociology and social anthropology and they are the people who guide the marketing effort in terms of indicating who are going to be the early adopters of the desired behavior and who are going to be the ones resisting the proposition and ones who have adopted the new values whether they have a chance of staying with those values for a long time to come or not. For example it has been seen that many smokers after quitting smoking for a few years again go back to smoking. So what is it that can be done or should be done in order to maintain the behavior which already has been changed. So these are the kind of leads which social anthropologists give the marketing people toward designing their market research programs. Once this has been achieved then the role of mass communication comes in and the fact is it is a very supportive supplementary factor because based on the research findings and the the makeup of the target audience the organization is in a position to put together a program which is a reflection of the values and the customs held high by the target audience. It is mass communication that lays the ground for creating a climate of the values and beliefs that the target audience finds beneficial. So in other words mass communication does the trick in terms of telling the customers or the target audience that the changed behavior is going to be socially desirable and acceptable and personally desirable and gratifying. So that's where the trick is the target audience has got to understand the reward action equation and it is mass communication that actuates the target audience into taking the desired action. So in other words it takes the target audience from the contemplation stage to the action stage. So these two disciplines social anthropology and mass communication are the ones that set the ground for behavior modification. The target audience changes and modifies its behavior and hopefully for a long time to come by understanding the reward action equation and that is what these two disciplines do to social marketing. Let me give you an example of a successful program which was kicked off by the government in most likelihood back in 2012 on how to prevent the polio. It is not a question of putting a few drops in the mouth of a baby. It is a question of a complete and clear understanding on part of the population at large how important it is to prevent polio from happening. Look at the consequences of the disease in the life of those who are inflicted by it. This kind of a campaign can be organized and executed by an NPO. No question about it but my point here is to the point of something which is a combination of what social marketing borrows from the two disciplines i.e social anthropology and mass communication. Another example which is very well quoted in the literature is on prevention of TB meaning tuberculosis in Honduras. The patients were not finding it very motivating to continue their treatment and they stopped the treatment despite the fact that they knew it was good for them. The NPO's carrying out that campaign that they got very concerned and found out that the real reason they were stopping the treatment was that they were not given emotional and social support by their families because they were considered as outcasts. With that feeling they thought it could be much more preferable to stop the treatment than to continue with it and therefore based on the findings of the marketing research these NPO's could working in that particular area came up with a campaign which was based on education of the families convincing them that they have to give total support to the patients because it is good not only for them but also for the families and they succeeded in educating the target audience. The campaign was run and it was a huge success because the campaign was designed all around the fact that you are not to desert your kith and kin when they are in difficulty. So this is all about the tools which are borrowed by social marketing from other disciplines namely social anthropology and mass communication. Two disciplines which are very prominent and with this we now move on to next and the last component which is about sustainability and institutionalization. Social marketing is very challenging because it is all about bringing about a change in behaviors but what is even more important is to maintain and sustain those behaviors. If people go back to their old habits and behaviors it is a failure of social marketing because that reflects the program has not been successful and therefore there is a need to develop institutions which can continue the effort on a protracted basis. So in other words there is a continual effort which is needed on part of NPO's to make sure that the people stay with the changed behaviors and those are the desired behaviors that they should stay for all times to come. What is happening right now is that initiatives in this particular sector are being taken by international agencies like the World Bank and the USAID. They have their expertise financial muscle and in particular the consulting help mainly from the US. They are in a position to initiate these programs get them implemented start getting the desired results but when it comes to maintaining the mainstream of those results it becomes a responsibility of the local people or the local government. The local governments in particular should play the intermediary role whereas the NPO's should take on the initiative left by the international agencies. Meaning NPO's should pick up the threads where those agencies have left them. We already have people who have been working for those agencies and therefore it is a challenge on part of the NPO's to make the best possible use of the expertise that already have been developed for those people and it is a challenge on part of the NPO's to develop systems and procedures within their organizations which can imbibe whatever they have learned and further build on the expertise and knowledge that is a combined pool and this is how these programs are carried out by different countries where social marketing has been a great success. The list of successful examples is quite long and all I can tell you is you just showed that such programs with the kind of savvy and knowledge which I have imparted with the help of the literature is something that we all should develop and make use of. Thank you very much.