By Jim Crawford
Published Sunday, January 1, 2012
| From the January 2012 Issue of FireRescue
I hear so much these days about social marketing: reaching people via Facebook, Twitter and Linked- In. To gain a better understanding, I contacted Sara Isaac at Salter Mitchell. This small but powerful marketing firm has been involved in numerous, measurably successful marketing campaigns for social issues; they also helped the Vision 20/20 project establish a national theme for fire safety. The point: They’re good. And they produce a great book on the subject aptly titled “The Little Book on Social Marketing.”
According to Salter Mitchell, social marketing is “an approach that treats your social program as a choice, not an imperative, and provides ways for making it more appealing than the alternative.” Example: Our parents told us that vegetables are good for us, and that hungry people would love to have them. But most of us volunteered our vegetables up for the hungry. As a marketing technique, the argument did not work.
How, then, do we make the choice of eating vegetables more appealing? Provide an attractive alternative—a choice of fruit or vegetable—or drive a worthwhile bargain: No ice cream until you eat your vegetables.
The “little book” stipulates that we can also use negative consequences to influence behavior. Many communities have “click it or ticket” campaigns that have produced measurable results.
So how can we replicate this approach in fire prevention?
The Right Message
Salter Mitchell stipulates that successful marketing campaigns focus on changing attitudes and behaviors—something that’s familiar to public educators in our fire and life safety community. Further, successful campaigns do three things well: 1) Focus on specific audiences; 2) define an observable action that they want that audience to take; and 3) provide the context and details to support the action.
Add to that a reward or consequence to further motivate behavior changes, and you have the beginnings of a successful marketing campaign. But of course there’s more.
Not all audiences are alike; they’re motivated by different things. Effective market research can reveal why people do the things they do, and why they may not respond well to our safety messages. For years, we’ve collectively lamented that we can’t seem to get people to pay attention to the scope of the fire problem in the United States. Perhaps we’ve been using the wrong messages.
The market research Salter Mitchell did for the Vision 20/20 project revealed (in part) that high-risk audiences already know it’s their responsibility to provide for their own safety. They think they are already doing it—so they’re not motivated by messages telling them that they must take more personal responsibility. In fact, they’re much more inclined to accept a message that makes them feel they’re part of something bigger than themselves.
The Social Part
But so far, everything here sounds like regular marketing—where does the “social” part come in? Social marketing uses the principles of commercial marketing to drive changes in behavior that benefit society as a whole. We used to talk about targeting our educational efforts to reach people where they were—the shows they watched, the papers they read, where they shopped—so that we could maximize our limited education dollars.
Social marketing does the same thing in a new and growing social media market. The people who place ads on the websites I browse that recognize which movies or books I’ve bought from Amazon are using sophisticated market research that helps them target their efforts.
We can and should take advantage of these new social marketing tools in fire prevention, and to do that we’ll need the help of experts like Salter Mitchell. But it’s still going to boil down to providing the right messages that capture attention and ultimately create behavior change.
You can’t tell me it doesn’t work, because I’ve seen the measurable results of campaigns on smoking cessation and drunk driving, among others.
For More Information
Salter Mitchell
www.saltermitchell.com
Contact: Sara Isaac
sara.isaac@saltermitchell.com
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Jim Crawford
Jim Crawford is chair of the NFPA technical committee on professional qualifications for fire marshals and the project manager for Vision 20/20. He is the author of Fire Prevention Organization and Management and is a contributor to Managing Fire and Rescue Services. Crawford is a retired fire marshal and deputy chief of the Vancouver (Wash.) Fire Department, past president of the International Fire Marshals Association and has served on the NFPA’s Standards Council. He is a life member of the IAFC and a member of the Institution of Fire Engineers U.S. Branch. In 2011, Crawford was awarded the R. Wayne Powell Excellence in Fire Prevention award; he was also named the “Fire Protection Person of the Year” for 2011 from the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. Read Full Bio
