William Smith on "Marketing Strategy - Fun, Easy, Popular"

You know, when people -- I think they often start thinking about the audience first, and I think that’s a problem. I think it leads them to advertising solutions and not to marketing solutions. I think they really ought to think about the problem first. Let me give you an example. Teen smoking. Who’s the audience? Teens? Parents who don’t talk to their teens about smoking? Cigarette companies who market to teens? Or stores that sell cigarettes illegally to teens? Until you figure out which of those problems you’re going to address, you’re seduced into saying, “Well, let’s have a program for teens to get teens not to smoke.” When, in fact, teens may not be really the problem. But suppose you’re going to select stores that -- you know, in a community you don’t have huge national bucks, you want to do something about teen smoking, and you’ve figured out there are six stores in the community that are selling cigarettes illegally to kids. Well, you wouldn’t necessarily have a media campaign to get six stores to stop selling cigarettes, but you can easily see how a kind of advertising approach would start with teen smoking and lead a community to spend a lot of money, the message is addressed to teens, and it’s not really taking the marketing perspective.

I think it’s better if people begin to take that sort of broader frame first. I think that’s what marketing brings to health communications. I think the health communications people really have the, “Once I get an audience, I know what to do.” But I don’t think they always get the audience right.

A lot of people who’ve read anything I’ve written know that I’m sort of the “fun, easy, and popular” guy. And people always beat me up for that because they say, you know, “Public health, you know, this isn’t a fun thing. This isn’t Disneyworld kind of stuff.” But I saw this great t-shirt in the mall the other day that says, “We’re putting fun back into funerals.” And I figured, “You know? That’s an interesting idea.” So I kind of think you can get fun into a lot of things that are serious. What I don’t think fun is though is Walt Disney, colored balloons, that kind of stuff. Fun is kind of crude shorthand for what it is that really motivates people to get involved with something. If you take a guy who’s a rock climber, he’s not interested in making things easy. He or she loves a challenge. They love the toughest mountain, the hardest thing. They want to come back the sweatiest, the dirtiest, that they could possibly come. So if we’re going to get through to that guy or gal, you’ve going to make something challenging for them. And that to me is in the context of making it “fun” for them. So it’s not always making it ha-ha. Humor’s a different issue. I just deeply believe we seriously underestimate the use of humor in marketing. Humor is more memorable than anything else we’ve got. People will just remember a good joke when they won’t remember the guy going through the windshield of the automobile. I saw one of the most fantastic ads. It was a Smoke Ender’s ad in which there is this balcony in a high-rise building. It’s a beautiful view over the city. And all the smokers are out on the terrace, of course, because you can’t smoke in the building. So this one smoker guy just comes into the party, and the party is all on the terrace. The glass doors are closed. He’s the only guy inside. So he comes out and just before he opens the door, the terrace collapses and all the smokers fall to the ground 30 floors to the ground. It’s a perfect Saturday Night Live kind of event. And then it comes on says, “We told you that smoking was dangerous to your health.” It’s the kind of thing no one will forget. It turns the idea around in our minds. It keeps smoking serious, but it treats it lightly. Can you do that with colorectal cancer? I bet we can.

It totally depends on the audience I think. It’s how familiar they are with the topic, how susceptible they personally are to humor, and how tastefully the humor’s used. You know, there are different kinds of humor. I don’t want to push this one too much because I really don’t think humor is the only tactic we have by any means. I just think we really need it sometimes and we could do a lot more with it than we tend to do in public health because we’re scared off by the, “Well, we can’t joke about that.”

People always talk about the difference in terms of tangible and intangible. I actually think the difference is in between proximate and delayed. So if you tell me right now, “Gee, Bill, you’re fantastic on camera,” that’s a very intangible thing but it makes me feel good, however untrue it might be. But if I tell a teen, “Stop smoking now because 60 years later, you’re not going to get cancer,” that’s really a delayed reward for that kid. So I think it’s a question not so much of tangible and intangible, but rewards that are delivered now and a reward that means something to somebody versus a reward that doesn’t. The Florida Truth campaign -- brilliant in my mind because what they did was find out that kids love to attack adults, so we just give them the easiest adults in the world to attack: the tobacco industry people, the sleaziest, slimeballs of our culture, and these kids, all they had to do was find out the facts about these guys and they went right after them and loved it. Absolutely loved it. That became an immediate reward for those kids to be able to put down an adult in public and have people give them money to do it. I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that

I’m a tweaker. Let me tell you why. I think we talk about interventions as though we were some sort of engineer who builds frameworks and who creates models. It sort of sounds like we want to be architects somehow, kind of social architects. And we’re that sustaining, you know, or buildings stand up in a strong wind kind of stuff and will be there afterwards. And it leads us down the wrong path I think, because I don’t think we’re in the business of engineering. I think we’re much more in the business of farming. A farmer has a seed, and science can improve seed varieties. And definitely most interventions were testing improved seed varieties. But another intervention is to go in some place that it’s going to rain or that it’s not going to rain too much. It’s got to be tended. We know that some of those seeds are going to die no matter how good they are; they’re just not going to work out. And, you know, some are going to grow into really nice trees, and when we know that when we leave that forest -- after we grew this great forest -- if we leave it, it’s going to change, but it’s still going to be a forest. And that’s what I think communities are like. I think they’re like forests in which we try to plant an idea; but if that community needs a little bit more water or a little less water, then we shouldn’t be stuck with this, these instructions on the back of the seed pack.

I think branding is a very powerful tactic. I think it’s getting much more attention than it needs to get right at this particular minute, but that too will pass. What’s it good for? First of all it was good before we had any big discussion of it. Coca-Cola actually did develop a brand in 1870-something before they had any marketing textbooks on branding. They kind of knew having a name was a good thing to do. Brands are talked about now as though they’re almost mystical. You know, “It communicates value. It captures the emotions of the audience. It summarizes the meaning and translates the essence of your product.” You know, sometimes it does that, but sometimes it’s just a name that’s memorable and you tack onto things.

To make a lot of different things look like it’s going from the same place, so you’re getting basically the same message from multiple sources. A very good idea if people trust the source. If they don’t then it’s not a good idea. (LAUGHING) So it’s just the fact that you’ve got to kind of figure out whether you, whether you need it or not.

I think there are three questions which come to my mind when I get to the stage where I’m trying to figure out what the audience ought to be -- and maybe it’s because I’ve done so much social marketing on such limited budgets -- because one of the biggest problems of social marketing is, you know, for $50,000 we try to change attitudes about something in Minneapolis. You know, it just isn’t going to happen. But the three questions are: Who are the people most likely to make a difference in this particular problem? Which of those people can I best reach given my resources? And of those two, what I’m left with in that list of people, who’s most willing to start now? Who’s most willing to change? Even if they’re highly-resistant, who’s most willing to change? Because with almost any of these social issues, you’ve got to build some sort of norm around it. We’ve got to get people to think that somebody else wants to do this too. So starting with the toughest guys never gets you anywhere in that frame; but if you start with people are, “Okay, I’ll try it,” then you can tell the hard guys, “Hey, these people are doing it already. Look. You know, they’re out there. You’re going to be the last on your block.” That tends to work with some problems and with some groups.

And you get this sort of a sense who you are in the marketing mix. All of us have a brand incidentally, whether we want it or not. Whether CDC went through a branding exercise or not, CDC had a brand before it went through that branding exercise. The IRS had a brand which it’s trying to change. The U.S. Post Office has a brand. Exxon has a brand. Whether it creates a brand or not, it’s got it. So you’ve got to figure out what that brand is and who is going to listen to that brand. If you’re a woman’s organization in a town, you have a brand. People expect you to speak about certain things. And you have to understand what those expectations are, as well as understanding who they are and what they want. So it’s a, marketing really is about exchange. It’s about my giving you something and you giving me something back in exchange. And to do that, we both have to have this image of each other that that exchange is fair.

I think the best thing we can do as marketers is try to remember that as professionals we’re individuals with different strengths and that there are at least three different strengths we have to have on the team. We’ve got to have somebody who really knows research, who knows how to ask questions so that consumers can answer them in ways that’ll give us the right answers.

We’ve got to have people who are very creative who can just come up with some looney-tune idea no one else would think about in the room, because they are the people who are going to break through that muddle of all the ordinary messages. And then we’ve got to have somebody who understands communities and organizing and how to get communities together and communities to work together.