Marketing Talk

I’m very pleased to be blogging the news that I was lucky enough to receive the Journal of Social Marketing award for Best Paper at the recent 10th International Colloquium on Arts, Heritage, Non-profit and Social Marketing, held at Leeds Business School on 7th September. This event, the length of whose title is proportional to its excellence, is an annual shindig for academics from all over the world to share their work in progress. It’s always a fascinating occasion. Amongst other things, this year’s Colloquium featured work on selling theatre to sheep farmers, what the Big Society means for marketing, and how to promote road safety to the Norwegians.

In a Colloquium you stand up for 20 minutes, explain what you are investigating and how, and what you’ve found out so far. Then your audience pitch in with their reactions so you get a sense of how much (if any) sense you’ve been making. They have to be constructive because more than likely they’re on next. It’s hard work, fun, friendly and a useful step towards getting an article in print (see my previous post Publish or Perish). And if you are very lucky, now and then there are prizes to be had! (Mine is a year’s online subscription to the Journal of Social Marketing by the way, and a very nice framed certificate).

My certificate (printed on recycled paper natch.)

Getting a catchy title is always a good start. Try ‘Fixing the menvironment and healing the shecology: a gendered approach to pro-environmental social marketing’. Well, the judges liked it!

The point of the paper is that men and women may well talk about environmental issues in different ways. If this is the case, it makes sense to aim separate marketng messages reflecting these differences at men and at women in order to encourage them to adopt greener behaviour. I got the idea for this when I was doing a project last year with my colleague Dr Anne Smith from ISM-Open (the Open University’s end of the Institute for Social Marketing which we jointly host with the University of Stirling). We were working with a number of organisations to find ways in which employees themselves could devise and then implement greener working practices, eventually ‘marketing’ them to their colleagues. We spent a lot of time talking to people in focus groups. I couldn’t help noticing that the men were talking differently from the women somehow but couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Reading around the subject I came across the work of the American linguist, Deborah Tannen. As long ago as 1990 she wrote the kind of book that most academics can only dream of — a best-seller that got her work in front of a mass readership, and catapulted her into a whirlwind tour of chat shows and radio interviews. The book was called ‘You Just Don’t Understand’, and the big idea behind it was that men and women are two separate cultures when it comes to communication. Do I see you nod your head? She claimed, convincingly enough for the book to go into several new editions, and to spawn a multitude of further research publications, that in order to avoid the kind of conflicts and breakdowns that are all too common a part of daily life, we need to adjust our communicative styles to take such differences into account.

Men are more competitive than women, she argues (forgive me Professor Tannen if you are reading this. I freely confess I am oversimplifying your excellent work). They’ll do anything to avoid being ‘pushed around’, including talking in a way which emphasises their technnical expertise (even if it is based on very slim credentials). Women on the other hand are more conciliatory. They will do anything to avoid being ‘pushed out’, including talking in a way which keeps relationships intact and values emotion.

Taking this theoretical framework to the conversations I had recorded in my focus groups, how did the evidence stack up? Sure enough, there were the men, jockeying for position in the talk, interrupting, disagreeing, coming up with technology-inspired solutions to global warming, and generally having a great time rubbishing each other. OK they weren’t all like that, but there was enough evidence for me to recognise many of the patterns Professor Tannen had revealed. The women, particularly if there were no men around to talk across them, were more given to nostalgia, worrying about how the environment was just part of the problem of society becoming less connected and generally agreeing that if we all did our bit, perhaps there’d be some hope of a greener future. Again, I’m oversimplifying vastly, but you get the general drift.

There is of course more to it than that. We speak as we do for many reasons, which interact with gender. But gender is important — and in recent decades it’s become a hot topic as scholars such as Judith Butler have questioned the apparently ‘given’ nature of gender, revealing the importance of social norms in what we take for granted as male and female. She argues that gender is something we ‘perform’ — so perhaps all that environmental talk I was listening to is part of a performance, as each speaker acts out a part based on what they consider appropriate to their image of themselves as male or female, or any variation thereof?

What might this mean for social marketers keen to find the most relevant and effective ways of communicating pro-environmental messages? Is the best idea to approach men and women with different stories? Might advertising work, for example, with male characters shown as solving environmental problems, ‘fixers’ using technology to triumph over the competition provided by global warming? Women, on the other hand, might be potrayed as directly involved in ‘healing’ an ecology of which they feel a part. A possible scenario might be a woman growing organic vegetables, a symbol of personal activity to reunite ‘natural’ processes of nurture and nutrition for family and friends. Or should we rethink this all, and wonder how we might find ways of offering changed environmental behaviour as ‘material’ somehow for ‘performing’ gender as individuals see fit?

What do you think?

First of all, welcome back to Marketing Talk! After a summer break we are back in business with yet more musings on the marketing milieu. (Well actually my professor has just accused me of being a lapsed blogger, which is worse than being a lapsed Catholic, as you can’t get absolution for Portal sin). So here I am again, clutching a firm purpose of amendment.

Happily, comment moderation is on (so you don’t have to read them), but the blogging lacuna has not deterred the many unknown admirers who praise my posts in superlative but grammatically-incoherent comments, promising me great things should I buy their electronics, marry their brides-in-waiting or apply their potions. Please people, enough! I’m happy as I am. Really.

Watercooler moment?

Now, to the subject of this post. We have just had notification of the final withdrawal of watercoolers throughout the university. It’s the end of an era. When I first got here they were generously dotted throughout the Business School in a canny attempt at social engineering. I think the idea was to unite knots of disparate colleagues in earnest debate around each watercooler about last night’s TV, recent advances in financial accounting, or who’d left their lights on in the South car park. But the only gatherings I can remember were actually impromptu seminars on which button was for the cold water, and where to put your cup to prevent a jet of refreshment hitting the carpet. The watercooler as social hub never really caught on.

The real epicentre of office socialisation then, as now, was the ‘coffee dock’ — a room down the corridor equipped with sink, wall-mounted boiler for hot drinks, microwave, fridge and — inexplicably but delightfully — a dishwasher. This is where you bump into people, steal their milk, and generally tune into what’s going on. Canny internal marketers stick their posters here, cunning managers visit in search of hard-to-find colleagues, indigent postgrads warm their meagre lunches here. So far no-one to my knowledge has worked out the dishwasher.

Coffee docks are fiercely territorial, used only by inhabitants of the relevant corridoor or wing. Cups and utensils are ranged proprietorially around the kitchen sink; clearly labelled milk bottles cram the fridge. Watercoolers are more universal somehow. They don’t belong to anyone. While they were here they were everywhere but nowhere in particular. Their passing has gone largely unremarked and unmourned. We are more of a ‘kitchen-sink’ than a ‘water cooler’ culture. And I suspect so are most other institutions.

The writing on the wall for our watercoolers dates from 2010 when the company which supplied them went into administration. Since then they have been maintained by the university, but the supply of parts has dried up and in the current financial climate the mains water tap seems preferable as a source of corporation pop. The failure of that company tells us something about social trends relevant to marketing. People have so many options to communicate nowadays (text, phone, email, even blogs) that the idea of hanging around a watercooler to do so seems a bit redundant. We also have fewer topics of common knowledge and interest. Apart from major sporting occasions and royal weddings we hardly ever all watch the same stuff on television, thus removing one mainstay of watercooler encounters.

This kind of diversity (of media, experience and interest) is a headache for 21st century marketers. Long gone are the days when they could rely on targeting broad segments of the population with more or less the same marketing approach. Many contemporary marketers think in terms of groups of consumers as ‘tribes’, united — often fleetingly — by certain habits and enthusiasms, just as they are divided by other characteristics such as age and geography. Rethinking how you see your customers so that you understand them in their own terms rather than the convenient ones you would prefer to impose is not easy, but should be at the heart of successful marketing. While watercoolers, with their universal pretensions to refreshment, are drying up, the coffee dock, with its tribal following, is here to stay. Hello kitchen sink marketing.