Social Marketing

Marketing Mix 45
Product
Commercial products are often classified by five variables (Leo Aspinwall, 1958): 3
1. Replacement rate: How frequently is the product repurchased?
2. Gross margin: How much profit is obtained from each product?
3. Buyer goal adjustment: How flexible are buyer’s purchasing habits?
4. Duration of product satisfaction: How long will the product produce benefits?
5. Duration of buyer search behavior: How long will consumers shop for the product?
A similar set of product classes is useful in social marketing.
1. How much product do we need? (How many times do we have to re-supply the product –
ORS is needed for every bout of diarrhea. The fruit pickers; goggles last a long time.)
2. How effective is the product in solving the problem? (How much change does the product
motivate? Re-packaging ORS made a huge difference in compliance; pdas were less dramatic
in their effect on the reef)
3. How competitive is the market place?
4. How many other choices do consumers have? ORS competed against a wide variety of other
popular remedies while there were no good substitutes for the quality of the goggles.
5. How long does the benefit last? The goggles’ benefit was durable. The benefit of colored
condoms was fleeting.
6. How motivated are consumers to find any solution to the problem? Condoms were not what
gay men were looking for. Goggles – if they worked right – were a great solution from the
pickers’ point of view.
Determining the answers to these questions can help social marketers design better, more
effective products. But above all, for social marketers, the product adds benefits to difficult
behaviors that have no immediate reward. When we gave fishermen pdas for the first time, they
loved the technology itself, more than the idea of saving reefs. The product itself became the
benefit of the behavior.
Consumer Demand Design Principles
Product development might be considered the most important and unique contribution that social
marketing brings to social change. While public health scientists, traffic engineers and policy
makers design new social products and services all of the time, too often designers are driven
exclusively by the question: “What works?” Too often these experts ignore the questions: “What
do people want?” “What other choices do they have?” and “What matters most to them?” It is
the purpose of the Product P to answer these questions, and assist the scientist and engineer
in the creation of products and services that are both effective and satisfy consumer wants.
3 Leo Aspinwall, The Characteristics of Goods and Parallel Systems Theories, Managerial Marketing, Holmwood IL, Richard
D. Irwin, 1958. pp. 434-50.
Social Marketing Behavior A Practical Resource for Social Change Professionals