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The Seven Doors Social Marketing ApproachThe "Seven Doors" social marketing approach was developed by Les Robinson, a former campaign director and now consultant for Social Change Media. This paper was originally presented by Les to the Waste Educate 98 Conference. Education as a universal panacea'Education', like grief counselling, has become the universal panacea of public policy. If there is a problem of domestic violence, we will solve it with an education campaign. The same applies to drink driving, lack of civic participation, gun ownership, brain injuries, and so on. But what is this thing called education? You can't buy it off a shelf. There's no recipe book. You can't do a course in it. We are not even sure that it works...a few years ago Social Change Media carried out a consultancy for the Roads and Traffic Authority. We were asked to evaluate 20-odd evaluations of road safety campaigns. Every one of these campaigns had been evaluated to be a success. But, funnily enough, the proof of 'success' was whatever attitudinal change the campaign happened to achieve, even if it was marginal. Whatever 'education' is, it's not going to be easy. After all, 'education' is really a misnomer - our aim is not to get people to KNOW MORE THINGS. We are trying to get people to CHANGE WHAT THEY DO. Changing people's behaviour has always been the most problematic enterprise in human affairs. It's worth noting that many of the techniques and tools of 'education' have been developed in the advertising and public relations industries. But these fields have quite different goals to 'education'. Advertising, for instance, is mostly NOT about changing behaviour. It's about changing brands. We still drink beer...We still buy the car...We just buy a different brand of beer or car. PR, on the other hand, has nothing to do with behaviour at all, it's is about manipulating the media to project your interests into the public realm. Social change marketing, however, looks beyond advertising and PR techniques. It extends to things like community development, recruitment, training, infrastructure planning and more. So...as a panacea 'education' is not only elusive, it's always going to be a demanding and tough discipline. Received wisdomThe best guide to social marketing I know is Making Health Communication Programs Work - a planners guide, a 131-page guide written by the US Department of Health and Human Services in 1992, and reprinted endlessly. By the way, it's finally on the net at - http://cancer.gov/pinkbook It's a crash course in how to plan and execute a social marketing campaign. This publication begins with a useful warning about what education
cannot achieve -
In fact, much of Making Health Communications Work would be quite familiar to any communication professional. For instance, it proposes a 6-step cyclic process which relies strongly on pre-testing and evaluation of communication messages and materials. Now, I don't want to go on about 'best practice'...I'll talk for a moment about common practice. A lot of people who are not educators, especially (and I hope I'm not insulting too many potential clients here) engineers and professional managers, imagine that behaviour change is like any other constructed thing. You decide what behaviour change you want to make. You draw a plan, assemble the tools and resources and manufacture the thing. When it comes to behaviour change, there is a distinctly managerial hubris to all this. WE are the managers. We have the TRUE KNOWLEDGE and CORRECT BEHAVIOUR. THEY do not. If we can INJECT our knowledge into the (passive) audience, then they will realise the error of their ways and start behaving correctly. I call this the 'engineered awareness' approach. It's widespread, especially amongst, well, engineers and managers. It is based on the assumption that AWARENESS BUILDING is the key to behaviour change.
The 'engineered awareness' approach, before and after -
Even Making Health Communication Programs Work suffers from this. It is, after all, not a manual for behaviour change...only on how to do the communication bit. There are, in fact, no lack of models and approaches that guide us in designing awareness campaigns. But I want to propose that lack of awareness may not always be the problem and because of that we may need a much wider definition of what we mean by 'education'.
Is ignorance really the problem?Back when I was a cartoonist on Streetwize comics we interviewed some young people in a refuge. As usual, they discussed with great affection and enthusiasm their recent drug experiences - and, in this case, I am talking seriously irresponsible drug taking! When I asked the most irresponsible and drug damaged individual there what message he would like to pass on to other young people he became suddenly serious and said 'Don't take drugs'. And he meant it. Now here is an example of the failure of awareness. It was quite clear that no amount of awareness-building would change these kids' behaviour - they already knew what they were doing was dangerous and stupid. Maybe our addictions to environmentally-damaging behaviours are similar. After all, we know exactly what's right - but there are still a lot of situations when we do wrong to the environment. In fact there is no shortage of social research that shows that the general population have levels of environmental concern and knowledge that are way above that of regulators and politicians.
I've heard managers and others tell me that the public just don't understand environmental issues. And in a way it's true - there is a poor understanding of the purely technical facts of, for instance, the landfill crisis. But, while people may not understand the technical issues - they are not stupid. People are very smart when it comes to making judgements about their own lives. And, when you think about it...whether landfills are full is not nearly such a MOBILISING idea wether OUR ENVIRONMENT is under threat. If people understood that landfills were in trouble BUT didn't connect this to a larger problem of the HUMAN ENVIRONMENT, we'd be in trouble! So perhaps there is already plenty of 'awareness' - and of the right kind. But if that is the case why is there so little personal change? What if the REAL obstacles to behavioural change are things other than ignorance? What if, people already KNOW plenty about the problem AND have a pretty good idea what they should do and WANT to do it, but something else is stopping them? 7 steps to social changeThis worried me and so I spent a few months considering what it would take to change my own behaviour. I came up with these 7 pre-conditions which can be expressed as affirmations...
 Each one of these conditions is actually an obstacle, so you can think of this model as a set of 7 doors...  Notice how 'education strategy' is now about clearing away obstacles rather than awareness building. Notice also that the educator or social marketer has the humble role of a door opener, rather than a font of ultimate truth.
The importance of empowermentEmpowerment is the feeling of confidence that you can be a cause of genuine change. In practice, it's an elusive mixture of many ingredients - like skills, optimism, leadership, belief and experience. Empowerment can be built in a social marketing project by close association with your audience, even to the point of taking directions from them.However empowerment is surprisingly fragile. It can easily be destroyed by dishonesty or mixed motives. But it can also be destroyed by a well-meaning social marketing project. Here is a cautionary tale - In the 1970s, the $180m 'Mr Fit' health research program in the United States set out to determine how effectively professional intervention could reduce the risk of heart attacks. 12,000 men in the high-risk group for heart attacks were selected. Half were told that they had a high-risk of heart attack, but would be the used as the control group. The others were provided with intensive medical intervention - they were booked into cooking classes, fitness classes, family counselling sessions and so on. A 7-step research methodologyTo be useful, a 7 step approach needs to feed into a research methodology. We need to figure out where the obstacles are (ie. which gates are closed) with a given audience. Here is an example of the kind of research questions you could ask, assuming that home composting was the goal of the proposed campaign.
SerendipityNot many social marketers suffer from hubris because they know their task is tough and there are few unequivocal success stories out there. That's because real social change is not made by marketers. It's made by history.Social marketing in general, and the above 7 points in particular, represent a rather pallid kind of mediated social change. Sustained social change is made by our natural responses to inspiring people and great historical events and circumstances. It's impossible to fabricate the inspirational factor of a Dalai Lama, a Cathy Freeman, or an Ian Kiernan. Or the enormous national response to the government's failure to apologise to the stolen generations. Or the decisive national assault on firearm ownership in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre. Social marketers have always know that they must be alert to, and go with the social flow. Engineers and managers, however, often don't appreciate this. They expect that they can engineer change - but the truth is they can only influence changes which are already occurring. Educators therefore need to be alert, flexible and opportunistic for ways to connect their campaign to social shifts and movements as they occur. ConclusionIn conclusion, my central message is that an education strategy that actually works, as opposed to one that looks good on paper, is likely to involve a lot more than just communication techniques. If your social marketing mission is to be successful, then as marketers
you may need to step outside the conventional boundaries of 'awareness
communication'. You may have to help people visualise new futures. You may
need to work with engineers to build services and infrastructure. You may
need to work with politicians and managers to provide leadership. You may
need to create a sense of event. And you'll have to think in the long term
and ensure that resources are available to repeat and reinforce your
messages. |
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