Marketing Talk

Five years of social marketing were held to account in the Guardian last week  as the Kings Fund thinktank reported on the effectiveness of campaigns to support healthier behaviour in England 2003 – 2008. The study monitored change in four areas of activity which threaten long-term health (smoking, excessive drinking, poor diet and physical inactivity).

The good news (and it is good news) is that 2003 – 2008 saw a drop in the number of people indulging in three or more of these behaviours from a third to a quarter of the population. The bad news (apart from the fact that even this improvement leaves much life-shortening behaviour untouched) is that the gains have been restricted to the top end of society. The best-off and best-educated have been swift to embrace healthier lifestyles, leaving the poorer and less well-educated more or less where they were at the beginning of the period.

In traditional marketing terms the social composition of your customer base is less important than the fact they are buying your product. In fact many successful brands make their profits through being socially exclusive. Health isn’t like that, however. While it’s heartening to see an overall change towards healthier lifestyles, it’s in nobody’s interest for this change to be widening the gap between rich and poor. It’s morally miserable, socially divisive and wasteful of resources — both now and in the future treatment of avoidable conditions.

Today’s social marketers face straitened circumstances compared to a decade ago. But with less to play with, the challenge is to concentrate resources and creativity on closing the health inequality gap. This means turning standard marketing logic on its head. Instead of pursuing the most likely customers, health marketers need to prioritise the ones we used to call ‘hard to reach’ (a phrase which promotes the marketer’s view of the world, rather than meeting the customer on their own terms. You’re only hard to reach if nobody knows how to find you).

Rather than the ‘quick wins’ and ‘low hanging fruit’ beloved of management consultants, this gap is going to be a slow, tough nut to crack. But only by taking the long view, and acknowledging the difficulty, expense and time required, will policy makers ever hope to make an impact on the health behaviour of poorer and less well-educated citizens. If government really wants to bridge the widening health gap in society, it needs to close the gap between what we expect social marketing to achieve and the resources available to it.

Hands Off Our Packs (HOOP), the FOREST-funded campaign group, proudly announced last week (August 10) that over 235,000 people had signed its petition against proposals to make tobacco manufacturers use plain packaging for their products. What a coup for these doughty defenders of our freedom to sacrifice health for the sake of tobacco shareholders. Were it not for the sad fact that over 100,000 people die in the UK each year from smoking-related illnesses the list of signatories might have been even longer.

Prominent amongst the supporters of branded tobacco packaging is lobby group The National Federation of Retail Newsagents, whose objections to plain packaging include the danger that market share in this poisonous filth will be lost to counterfeiters and street traders. They add that plain packaging will double the time taken to sell a packet of fags. Imagine lengthening queues becoming restive in newsagents up and down the land as they witness exchanges like this:

‘20 of those ones please’

‘What, these ones?’

‘No those ones next to them’

These ones?’

No those ones’ etc.

You can see why they are worried.

I’m not sure if my local Tesco Express is a member of the NFRN but if so it needs to get on message. I noticed recently when fumbling for my ClubCard  that the cigarette display behind the counter has been revamped with deeper shelf-edging. There’s no branding on these shelf-edging strips – they are plain white (except for the price flashes) and they cut off a good deal of the visible packaging. Is this the thin(ish) edge of plain packaging unilaterally imposed by busybody retailers?

Actually, no. For you see, not only do the new shelf edge strips ensure that the packets don’t fall off the display, they also obscure the health messages which appear by government decree on the lower parts of the packet fronts to deter potential smokers and remind current addicts of the risks they are running (thus encouraging them to stop). Evidence, should you require it, of the resolve of Big Tobacco and its minions to foil democratically-determined marketing regulation aimed at improving the nation’s health.

It’s only a day since the confetti settled, mercifully, on the closing ceremony but Olympics withdrawal symptoms prompt me to blow the digital dust off the Marketing Talk blog for a nostalgic reflection on the 30th games.

There’s plenty of marketing we could talk about Olympics-wise: the hilarious legislation aimed at limiting the use of terms such as ‘London’, ‘gold’ and ‘medal’ to official sponsors, the exclusive deal struck with McDonalds over selling chips onsite (the 799 other food retailers could only do so if combined with fish – so British!), or the Byzantine pricing and distribution policies which left vast tracts of embarrassingly empty seats early on after droves of disappointed fans had been denied tickets.

What I want to talk about is, in fact, the Olympic marketing legacy… of tears. Can there ever have been such a lachrymose Olympics in the 116 years of the modern games? Weeping has become the new rock and roll for any self-respecting sporting hero – whether inconsolably because you’ve just won silver (!) like cycling superstar Victoria Pendleton, or uncomprehendingly like Chad le Clos (the one with the Dad) having pipped his hero Michael Phelps to the gold by a fingernail in the 200 metre butterfly. Spectators wept, commentators wept, even this blogger had to wipe away a furtive tear at key moments. It was emotional. It was cathartic. It brought us together as a nation. In fact, if you weren’t weeping on (or off) a podium, there might have been the suggestion you weren’t taking it seriously enough.

The podium antics of two of the record-breaking Jamaican sprint relay team were a case in point. Usain Bolt’s trademark ‘lightning’ stance and Yohan ‘The Beast’ Blake’s bizarre clawing routine seemed over-rehearsed next to the impassive but misty-eyed demeanour of their team mates Carter and Frater. And even Mo Farah — much, much credit as he is due — gave us a bit more ‘Mo Bot’ than we really wanted. Come on lads, stop messing about and shed some manly tears!

Given marketing’s concern with emotional impact, it’s surprising we don’t see more tears in advertising. Casting my mind back more decades than I care to count, I remember a touching TV ad featuring a small boy coming to the aid of his tearful grandma with a box of tissues (to the strains of the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana). It turned out she’d been chopping onions, something Italian grandmothers apparently spend most of their waking hours doing, but the little lad’s generous instinct chimed with Kleenex’s then tag line ‘softness is our strength’. More recently, circa 2004, we’ve had people shedding appreciative tears over Clover (a buttery spread), as served up by their loved ones. A very popular ad, it underlined the strong connection between informal meal times and caring (by a mum, a husband and a wife). That I can remember these ads so many years later suggests their power (or my sadness) but, unless I’ve not been watching enough TV of late, it also suggests they stand out because of the sheer rarity of commercial crying.

Perhaps now that the Olympics have got us in touch with our tear ducts, that is all going to change and the floodgates of emotional marketing are about to open. A case of cry before you buy?