The Antipodean Agenda

Future directions from Australian Social Marketing

(re)Ignite the Fire VII

@stephendannStephen.dann@anu.edu.au

This is an industry paperMy industry happens to be academia

Dr Stephen Dann• You may remember me from…• Dann, S. (2010). Redefining social marketing with contemporary commercial

marketing definitions. Journal of Business Research, 63(2), 147-153.

• Dann, S., Harris, P., Mort, G. S., Fry, M. L., & Binney, W. (2007). Reigniting the fire: a contemporary research agenda for social, political and nonprofit marketing. Journal of Public Affairs, 7(3), 291-304.

The Objective• Develop a series of research artefacts

• Three Criteria• A stated domain of interest, • Yet to be resolved to the satisfaction of others• Capable of divisible research

• Develop an agenda• Qualified, quantified, prioritised

These are not ten word answers

• Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They're the tip of the sword. Here's my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? • "The West Wing" Game On (2002)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745624/quotes

Methods*Madness

The Procedure• Observation

• WSMC15• ANZMAC14• Social marketing conversations

• Aggregation• Literature Reviews• Depth interviews

• Integration• This project

Personal Sources

• Academic Interviews• Research Masters, PhD • Lecturers, Senior Lecturers• Associate Professors• Professors, Directors of Centers

• Synonymized for the ethics• A Senior Research in the Field of Social

Change from regional National University

Problematic Ethical Considerations• Project has been almost blocked three times

• Researcher is known to the sample• Reputation is what opened the doors for the interview, reputation is what nearly left the project in dry dock

• Cohort is too small for anonymous / synonymous responses• There’s 43 universities, with less than 43 marketing schools, with less than 43 research clusters…

• Transcriptions*• Somebody’s RA leaked something important to the press OR• Legal discovery was used on transcript data

• Not that I’d worry about ‘Big Industry’ reading my notes, but hey…

*This nearly sank the boat. Entirely. A flat refusal by my ethics committee to release funds for the study because interview transcriptions may exist. There goes the method…

Why the academy?• This is for the supervisors

• Honours, research masters, PhD

• This is for the ECRS• Problem solvers

• This is for the Academy• Solve a problem, build a solution

• Pure Academy• Develop a foundation for the applied

Pure Academic

Applied Academic

Applied Industry

Research Agenda(Draft)

Five Items for Consideration• Agenda A:The Need for Social Marketing Originated Theory

• Agenda B: The Composition of Failure

• Agenda C: Competition/Competitor Analysis | The Boundaries

• Agenda D: The Politics of Social Change

• Agenda E: The Relationship Question

Agenda A: What do we call our own? • Social marketing specific theory• What wicked solutions are unique to us?

• What steps have been taken to identify, claim, and resource a school of marketing thought from within social marketing?• Does a distinct cohesive scholarly body of authors, theories and institutions

exist within the global pool of social marketing knowledge?

• Does a fundamental truth of social marketing exist?• Are the histories of social marketing being adequately documented?

An awkward question

(because none of us are getting any younger, and some of us don’t practice what we preach)

Are we preparing for the collective loss of institutional social marketing wisdom that time and inevitability are bringing towards us?

Retirement | Death | Selling out to the Corporate dollar

Agenda B: The Composition of FailureWhere are the campaign autopsies? We know more than we need to know about aersol cheese, everyone can tell you about the flaws of the “New Coke” and commercial failures of long dead airlines. Why do we know so little about the social marketing that didn’t fire?

• Commercial and Practitioners acknowledge failure• This is an area on non-adoptive behaviour

• We don’t need to fail fast and often, we need to document with the same rigor whether it’s success or failure

Agenda B: Chasm between Practice and Publish• Academia doesn’t want to know

• Academia likes • success stories, • feel good findings, and • correlations with pretty letters.• Big puffy charts• Hypotheses that pan out

• Failure provides none of the above

• Practice needs to know.

• Practice wants• Benchmarks• Warning signs• Explanations• Diagnostic tests• Support to explain what happened

• Failure provides all of the above

Agenda C: Competition/Competitor Analysis• Three tiers• competitive pressures facing

• social marketing (Discipline, domain, journal outputs)• Social marketers ($, grants, eyes of the ministers)• Social marketing offers (offer versus alternatives, inertia, commercial and spinwash)

Specialist Field (tax accountants within accounting)versus

Generalised Field (The 1980s “Communications is Marketing”)

Agenda D: The Politics of Social Change“Social Marketing as means to translate the intention of policy in actual behavioral change”

When the Government said they wanted less regulation interfering with people’s lives, we never thought they meant social marketing campaigns for healthy eating would be withdrawn...We thought they just meant stuff about the banks.

Are we seen as Agents of the Crown?The Nanny State?

Big Brother?

Agenda D: Understand the political implications• Surely this is a libertarian government’s wet dream – the “self service

individually responsible societal change” is justifying placing all of the blame on the consumer, and requiring none of the government spending on support.”

What are the consequences of social marketing for political agendas if we are all of the social change agenda?

Patrol the Boundaries

CommercialMarketing

Greenwash

CorporateSocial

MarketingEvidence or

Ideology driven?

Social change or

political campaign?Freedom to complyor

free choice?

Who takes the claim?Who wears the blame?

What ideology is not compatible

with social marketing?

Agenda D: Emergent outside of social marketing• Discussions of the role of the state

• Discussion of nudge• Mols, F., Haslam, S. A., Jetten, J., & Steffens, N. K. (2015). Why a nudge is not

enough: A social identity critique of governance by stealth. European Journal of Political Research, 54(1), 81-98.

Where does the state draw the line on intervention?

Agenda E: The Relationship Question• Part A: Big Data, Big Society, Big Problem

• Yes we can, no we shouldn’t, and before somebody does, we really need to talk about why big data predictive social change is that stuff the dystopian novelists write about.

• “Hello, we’ve detected from your Amazon Kindle reading material, Tindr and Facebook activity that you’re 56.7% more likely to require an STI screen… Mrs Robinson. Please confirm your check up date from the range of free times we’ve observed in your weekly FitBit routine.”

For every sufficiently advanced dystopia, there’s somebody looking misty eyed into the distance saying “I could make that nightmare into a reality, and it would be glorious…”

Agenda E• Part B: Relationship Marketing• Trust

• Does social marketing violate the principle of trust?

• Commitment• Do we provide committed resourcing when developing a social marketing programme? • Do we expect commitment from the end-user?

• Reciprocity• Where does the invisible hand scratch itself?

Steps from here• Delphi Panel (Europa)• Hi

• Delphi Panel (Oceania)• Later.

• Confirmatory Study• The Mixed Industry and Academy Survey

A Prioritization• Understand the political implications of social marketing

• Neutral toolkits with ideological underpinning• Why should the state intervene to save the individual from themselves?• Why should the individual intervene to save the state from themselves?

This is a discussion that needs to be open, brutal, factionalized and an accelerant for the evolution of Social Marketing Schools of Thought

(re)Ignite the Fire