Are needs, target audiences, barriers, benefits and risks illuminating solutions for social marketers or keeping them in the cave? What are the questions to ask to step out into a different light? What other metaphors lurk in the shadows?

1. Escaping the Cave:
Changing the Metaphors of Social
Marketing

2. It Is Just Semantics
Semantics: The relation of words to thoughts
and reality – the way that speakers commit
themselves to a shared understanding of the
truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored
to things and situations in the world. Also the
relation of words to community… emotions…
social relationships (S Pinker, 2007. The stuff of thought).

3. “Needs”
• A need is something required for a safe, stable
and healthy life (e.g. food, water, shelter).
• Needs Assessment: “A gap in actual and
desired results.”

4. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

5. Mapping of Universal Values
S Schwartz (2006). Basic Human Values: Theory , Methods, and Applications.
http://www.yourmorals.org/schwartz.2006.basic%20human%20values.pdf

6. Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(United Nations, 1948)
22. Social Security. We all have
the right to affordable housing,
medicine, education, and
childcare, enough money to live
on and medical help if we are ill
or old.
25. Food and Shelter for All. We
all have the right to a good life.
Mothers and children, people
who are old, unemployed or
disabled, and all people have the
right to be cared for.
26. The Right to Education.
Education is a right. Primary
school should be free.
See all 30 rights in the Declaration at
http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

7. Questions Outside the Cave
Is human autonomy and
dignity always honored?
Are satisfying needs the
road to sustainable behavior
and social change?
How can peoples’ values
inform social marketing?
Are human rights a ‘need,’
an ethical framework, or a
call for action?

8. “Target Audiences”
The intended audience or readership of a publication,
advertisement, or other message.
“Target market:” A particular group of consumers at
which a product or service is aimed.

9. Top-down and Seeker Models

10. Methods
Top-Down
• Policy and regulation
• Enforcement
• Guidelines
• Research for problem
description and analysis
• Expert (evidence)-based
interventions
• Change behavior
Seeker
• Citizen engagement
• Policy advocacy
• Normative changes
• Research for understanding,
empathy and insight for
solutions
• Co-creation
• Learn new things

11. Questions Outside the Cave
• Who empowers whom?
• How and when to identify
and harness individual and
community assets?
• How and when to tap,
nurture, expand and weave
together social networks for
learning and change?
• How and when to build and
sustain social capital?
• How and when to shift
markets and society?

12. “Barriers”
• A fence or other obstacle that prevents
movement or access.
• A circumstance or obstacle that keeps people
or things apart or prevents communication or
progress.

13. What Barriers Do To Us
We generate lists of barriers rather than analyzing which
ones -
A. Are important to people.
B. Are theory and evidence based.
C. Can be addressed by social marketing.
Focus on removing them rather than –
A. More important determinants or constraints on behaviors.
B. Changing the conditions that led to them being there in
the first place.
C. Allowing people to be active agents in getting around
them.
D. Designing facilitators for new behaviors.

14. For Example
Food Deserts
Residents of the intervention neighborhood received a new
41,000-square-foot supermarket. Residents of the comparison
neighborhood did not.
 Few residents adopted the new
market as their main food store.
 Exposure to the new market had
no statistically significant impact on
BMI or daily fruit and vegetable
intake at 6 months.
 The new market appeared to have
a positive impact on perceptions of food accessibility.
Cummins et al. (2014) New Neighborhood Grocery Store Increased Awareness Of Food Access But Did Not Alter
Dietary Habits Or Obesity. Health Affairs; 33(2): 283-291.

15. Benefits and Risks

16. Why Not?
• Used only in Health Belief Model and Stages of
Change Model.
• Reinforces a ‘rational person’ approach to
explanation and intervention.
• Assumes people have the cognitive capacity
(attentional bandwidth, self-control and
understanding) to stop, think and make ‘rational’
choices.
• There are better predictors of behavior (self-
efficacy).

17. Naming the Shadows
• “Nanny state” & “Liberal paternalism”
• Containers
• Control
• Power
• Tradition

18. Implications for Life Outside the Cave
Language and metaphors can
constrain or illuminate new
ways to think about social
marketing and wicked
problems.
Think critically about the
frame, or theory, you use in
social marketing projects.
Talk about and treat others as
you would want to be talked
about and treated. That’s the
core exchange!