Social Marketing Short Answer Questions

Q1. What are the five social issues that social marketing has addressed most often to date?

• Environmental protection—social marketing advances the need to change human behavior towards ensuring a more sustainable environment. Such include waste reduction, water quality and conservation, energy conservation, forest preservation, and hazardous waste management.
• Health promotion—social marketing adopts commercial marketing approaches, including target audience analysis, tailoring messages, and branding to promote sustainable health behavior change, including physical activities, a healthy diet, an obesity prevention campaign, and reduction in excessive tobacco and alcohol consumption.
• Injury Prevention—social marketing strives to persuade people to perform healthy behaviors, visit health facilities, and use health products. This helps to address HIV issues, lung, and heart diseases.
• Social inequalities—by promoting campaigns such as every child having has the right to education; social marketing has helped address some cases of disparities in our societies.
• Lowering the rate of illness and premature deaths—for instance, some governments such as the Swedish government uses upstream social marketing to garner support for the nation’s alcohol retail monopoly, an approach used by the country to restrict accessibility for alcohol (Wood, 2016).

Q 2. An Example of a behavior objective to decrease fall in seniors

The person will improve the training frequency against resistance alongside dynamic balance training to enhance strength and balance. This kind of training has proven to decrease the risk of falls in seniors through randomized control trials.

Q 3. An example of a knowledge objective for a physical activity effort prioritizing seniors

The adult should develop the knowledge and understanding of the relationship between physical activity effort in improving health and reducing the risk of developing diseases common to older people such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular, and cancer. Regular physical activity has long-term and immediate benefits for seniors, most notably improving the quality of life’ enhancing balance, and preventing falls.

Q 4. An example of a belief objective for a physical activity effort prioritizing seniors

The belief objective should be to help older people to leave behind the belief that physical activity is for younger people or that symptoms and physical limitations due to comorbidity issues should mean no exercise. There is various physical activity for every person depending on age and preexisting conditions, older people included.

Q 5. What are three questions ask your target audience to understand their barriers to a behavior you want to influence them to do

1. Ask the audience directly what their expectations are from the session. The audience’s expectations can either be to learn from the informational session, be persuaded, or be inspired by the speech. This helps to adapt the speech or lesson to their interest, beliefs, attitude, and understanding level.
2. Ask the audience demographic questions such as age and marital status, which are essential behavioral determinants.
3. Ask the audiences about their hobbies, how they spend their free time. This is important in determining behaviors such as physical activities.

Q 6. Identify the five types of positioning statements and give an example of each one.

• The price positioning statement; implies that the company wants to position its brand and products in a position relative to the competitor in pricing. For instance, Dollar Shave Club lowered its price compared to some high-quality brands such as Gillette, changing the refill blades and razors landscape. Study shows the Gillette’s market share significantly decreased because of Dollar Shave Club’s low prices. On the other hand, the market share for Dollar Shave Club increased.
• Quality positioning statement—in the luxury markets such as cosmetics, companies positioning statement may be based on quality products or services. For instance, Chipotle has captured significant market share in the restaurant industry, positioning itself based on quality rather than price.
•  Differentiation—differentiation sets your products or services apart from the crowd. For instance, Tesla entered the EV (electric vehicle) market with the luxury sports cars, significantly bypassing cars such as Toyota Prius. Tesla aimed to target the high-end market with its models such as Model S.
• Convenience—creating easier lifer for target audience/customers. For instance, Simple bank managed to attract most young and more tech-savvy customers by investing heavily in mobile apps, while traditional banks such as Bank of America were reluctant to do so.
• Customer service—restaurants and banks can position themselves in the customers’ minds by creating friendly and helpful interactions. For instance, companies such as Allstate Insurance is known for its emphasis on customer services. Contact with customers is vital for the firm. They have adopted customer-based communication messages as part of their marketing to focus on the position.

Q 7. What are the major benefits of selecting a priority audience for your effort?

Selecting a priority audience implies narrowing down the target to a group of individuals with shared traits, similar characteristics, interests, and niche hobbies. This saves on resources and energy directed on the marketing campaign. Brands with a limited allocated marketing budget should ensure that the message is directed to a well-defined target in the most cost-effective approach possible. Selecting a priority audience also aids in developing effective communication that can drive the potential audience towards the product or service. Once the campaign has achieved a positive outcome from the key segment/audience, it would be easier to scale the campaign to bigger groups through research and zero assumptions.

Q 8. Name three potential purposes for an evaluation.

• Evaluation serves as the blueprint for the marketing campaign and sales strategy.
• Evaluation helps to obtain a high-level understanding of the market. It helps to understand the customers and market as a whole and the potentials for success.
• Evaluation helps to identify and explore adjacent opportunities for expansion.

Q 9. How does social marketing differ from a) behavioral economics and b) nudge tactics?

1. Social Marketing and Behavioral Economics

Social marketing assumes that humans are rational in their behavior and interests. For instance, when a product is considered harmful or priced higher, people with perchance less. On the contrary, behavioral economics considers other social, psychological, and emotional factors (Lefebvre & Kotler, 2011).  For instance, the behavior or habits of people around will also determine the willingness to buy.

• Social Marketing and Nudge Tactics

Social marketing aims to achieve specific objectives for social good using marketing together with other approaches. Nudge tactics, on the one hand, deliberately manipulates how choices are presented to customers. The objective is to influence the customer’s choices towards what the marketer perceived to be suitable for them or to stimulate buying and increase product sales (Chriss 2015). Customers’ interests come first under social marketing, while in the nudge approach, the marketer’s interests to some extent may outweigh that of customers.

Q 10. The colleague working with drug-injection users should enhance access to and encourage the application of sterile needles and syringes, which has proven to be effective and comprehensive HIV-prevention for drug-injection users. I would advise the colleague to develop wide measures to improve access to and utilize sterile needles and approaches for disinfecting the reused or shared needles to prevent HIV-infection for the cared group.

Q 12. For diabetes in Sri Lanka case example, list the core product, actual product, and augmented product.

• Core products included the safe, effective, and low price of an herbal product (Siddha Medicine or Tamil Medicine) in treating diabetes mellitus in Sir Lanka compared to western medicine (Sathasivampillai, Rajamanoharan, & Heinrich, 2018).
• Actual products included the varieties of natural species that were used as herbal medicine to treat diabetes mellitus.
• The herbal products were certified and approved by both the Sir Lanka department of health and the WHO, guarantying their safety for the users.

Q 13. Name two potential outcome measures for an evaluation of a social marketing project.

• The acceptability of the practice or ideas in the target group—this may increase, decrease, or remain constant.
• Change of behavior—social marketing communication influences or informs behavior change to improve social situations. The changes can either be positive or negative, depending on the target audience’s response.

References

Chriss, J. J. (2015). Nudging and social marketing. Society, 52(1), 54-61.

Lefebvre, R. C., & Kotler, P. (2011). Design thinking, demarketing, and behavioral economics: Fostering interdisciplinary growth in social marketing. The Sage handbook of social marketing, 80-94.

Sathasivampillai, S. V., Rajamanoharan, P. R., & Heinrich, M. (2018). Siddha Medicine in Eastern Sri Lanka today–Continuity and change in the treatment of diabetes. Frontiers in pharmacology, 9, 1022.

Wood, M. (2016). Social marketing for social change. Social Marketing Quarterly, 22(2), 107-118.