Hi all,
There are many ways that social marketing programs are designed and implemented, which makes it difficult to know what aspects of those programs lead to success in terms of influencing behaviour to solve a social or environmental problem.
We have benchmark criteria from social marketing leaders that tell us what elements are required in order for a campaign to be considered social marketing (e.g. behaviour change, priority group research, value exchange, etc). To my knowledge, there is only one study that has been done that identifies which elements are statistically proven to be predictors of success in social marketing programs. It was a two-part mixed methods study that was done as part of a PhD dissertation, published in 2013 by Audrey Robinson-Maynard.
The study identified 19 benchmark criteria (independent variables) and measured 100 social marketing campaigns against those criteria, categorizing each one as successful, partially successful, or not successful (dependent variables). The results revealed four elements that were statistically significant in terms of predicting success in social marketing programs.
They are the following:
- Piloting
- Clear benefits
- Sustainable support
- Understanding concepts
Of the four benchmark criteria, piloting was found to have the highest level of statistical significance. This makes sense, as it is at the piloting stage that biased or flawed assumptions come to light and can be corrected before full-scale implementation. You may recall that piloting is the fourth step in Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s CBSM five-step framework. Clear benefits are also unsurprising and dovetail with the second step in the CBSM framework, identifying barriers and benefits. It is important for people to clearly see the benefits of a particular behaviour, and to see that those benefits outweigh the costs or barriers associated with the behaviour. Sustainable support refers to the need for the priority group to have a long-term, sustainable source of social, emotional, and resource supports in place during and after a social marketing program. The short-term, ‘ad hoc’ nature of many social marketing programs means that desired behaviours are not adequately supported and therefore may not be maintained past the program end date. This finding corresponds with my own PhD dissertation research on success and failure factors in social marketing, which found that ‘ad hoc’ approaches to programs are a key factor in the failure of social marketing programs. And finally, understanding concepts is also critical to success. This essentially means that the social marketer fully understands the priority group, the problem that they are faced with, and the competing environment. The implication here is that thorough research at the outset of a social marketing program could ensure that this criterion is met.
If you would like to see more details on Robinson-Maynard’s study, please click on the following link (Note: her PhD dissertation is 250 pages long, so you may want to read it on your browser as opposed to downloading it). If you would like more information on common mistakes and failures in social marketing programs, you can read the entire two-part study from my PhD dissertation here, or just check out the second part of the study, which was published in Social Marketing Quarterly in 2021. That paper is attached.
