Compliance and social marketing: a new opportunity for collaboration
Di Stafford explains why social marketing, rather than social media, may offer the best prospects for improving adherence.
By on Jun 28, 2010Di Stafford explains why social marketing, rather than social media, may offer the best prospects for improving adherence.
As the pain of austerity budgets begins to be felt across the globe, public health spending is one area likely to see drastic cuts.
Public health information campaigns have often been the subject of intense debate, given the millions of taxpayer dollars and euros being spent.
However, they are likely to face even greater scrutiny with the focus now being very firmly on results and effectiveness.
For many decades, government health departments have exhorted the public to stop smoking, get vaccinated, use contraception, and go for cancer screening, among other health promotion messages.
And yet most campaigns boast only very modest, if any, results.
This should be of considerable interest and concern to pharma because many of these issues impact products in their smoking cessation, vaccine, contraception, and oncology portfolios.
Its only in recent years that the realization has finally dawned that the traditional approach of hard-hitting public health messages isnt working.
The old-style paternalism and nanny-statism has been counter-productive, with many people deliberately ignoring advice and vigorously defending their right to future ill health!
Positive behavior change
So its out of the ashes of public health that social marketing thinking has arisen.
In fact, marketing experts Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman first established social marketing nearly forty years ago, but its only in the last decade that it has found a firm foothold, especially in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK.
Very recently its struggled to maintain its unique identity as a discipline, with the rise of social media marketing (think Twitter, Facebook) and the inevitable confusion between the two.
Definitions of social marketing abound, but perhaps the most concise is social marketing is using marketing principles to influence human behavior
to improve health or benefit society.
Social marketing was born out of the recognition that commercial organizations have a tremendous power and ability to persuade their consumers, using traditional marketing techniques.
Governments and public health providers began to ask why they couldnt learn from the commercial sector and apply the same tools and techniques for a different end goala positive behavior change.
As Gerard Hastings asks in the title of his social marketing primer, Why Should The Devil Have All the Best Tunes?
Historically, marketing has been the dark side of commercial activity, but now it seems marketing concepts are becoming better understood and providing a platform for shared learning and collaborative working.
Immediate benefits
Social marketing draws upon traditional marketing concepts, such as consumer centricity and insight, building a 360-degree picture of consumers and their needs in the health context.
It uses psycho-graphic research to identify values and attitudes that can act as barriers to behavior change, using this to create powerful segmentations and different types of intervention.
It also has a clear focus on behavioral patterns and trends, identifying both the problem (i.e. existing) behavior and the desired future behavior.
Perhaps most interestingly though, social marketing clearly identifies one of the reasons many health promotion programs fail.
Using the exchange concept, it highlights the unattractiveness of the cost-benefit equation.
Many of the things we ask patients and the public to do offer no immediate benefit or reward, just a vague promise of some much longer term benefit (longer life, possible escape from future diseases).
Successful social marketing programs manage to turn longer-term benefits into more immediate benefits and reduce the impact of short-term costs.
Engaging and inspiring patient services
For example, stop smoking services have often been bland, difficult for quitters to stay with, and lonely for the participant.
In a UK smoking cessation project, research uncovered the short-term benefits of smoking for young, pregnant smokers.
Although they knew all the risks to both themselves and their babies, they were reluctant to give up due to their lost enjoyment.
They described smoking as their only treat, their one luxury and chance for some me time.
A social marketing approach transformed the previous clinical stop-smoking service into more of a community-based social club, where the participants needs could all be met.
They could relax, have a chat, some time-out and pampering.
The weekly meeting became something they actively enjoyed, rather than a chore.
The service was later shown to have delivered three times as many quitters as previously.
Pharmaceutical companies are recognizing the success of this approach and several are now partnering with public health providers to make patient services more engaging and inspiring in areas related to their products.
Companies can often bring detailed research data to help inform patient segmentation and insight development.
They can also help with the marketing and communication of services.
At a time when engagement with prescribers and healthcare providers is becoming increasingly time-limited, perhaps social marketing could be the platform for future collaboration and partnership?
Di Stafford is Director of The Patient Practice, a health-marketing consultancy specializing in health promotion, patient compliance, and health-related behaviour change.
For more on deliberate non-adherence, see How to address deliberate non-adherence.
For more on personalized compliance programs, listen to Podcast: how personalized outreach can boost adherence.