Jewel C. Love on "Good Vendors Listen"

...one of the things that I always tell people is that we go to the audience first. And so the question around will the audience dictate sort of what you do in terms of channels and messages, well, they will guide you and they will help you to understand what you should do.

When I work with low income black youth or Latinos or white gay men, they will tell you how to reach them and how to do it and where to go and what to say. But we have to therefore listen. So that’s critical in a social marketing effort if that is happening on the front end.

They’ll tell you what to say. They tell you how to say it. They’ll tell you where to reach them. So part of the issue is, sure, we’re all smart. We’re program planners. We study this stuff. We know what we’re doing. But application and feelings when it comes together and you really do it, that’s where you get the learning. And so we have to move beyond, “I know what’s best for people. They don’t know what they want to do,” because that’s why we have the issues that we have now in public health; and we’ve got to start wanting and understanding that we’ve got to move outside the box -- however you want to say it -- to be a little more open, or a lot more open to doing things slightly differently. See, a methodology is good when you realize that the audience can pull it and tear it apart, because the populations that I get to work with, they’re not linear. They don’t always start at the beginning. They might start in the middle and then jump back to the beginning and then go to the end.

I’ll tell you about a story in, I was in Baltimore, and we were doing some focus groups in Baltimore. And they were with 14- and 15-year-olds, low income black youth, and we were talking about issues related to sex and sexuality. And we had done these groups in different places, but I remember this particular story from Baltimore. You know, we understand what the issues were and where young people were falling and what was important to them and what they needed to know more about; and I had a conversation in this group, and a 14-year-old spoke so eloquently and so clearly about how she enjoyed having sex. I mean, it was sophisticated. It was savvy. She was obviously experienced, but she was 14 years old. And so what we know as adults is that, you know, it takes a while to get this right but it was that notion that, “Well, what they’re going to talk about is X, Y, and Z,” and here what we learned was where young people are now because in the group that we were working with, they’re so sexual and the behaviors that they are doing earlier and earlier and earlier are even more adult than we think. And so what is top-of-mind for them, I was like, “Okay, there’s room to move further along the scale than I thought.” I mean, I knew they were, they were far along; and so that’s why you’ve always got to keep talking to the audience because, especially with young people -- adults are a little different -- they may change from day to day about what is the focus now in terms of the issue you’re addressing. So that one kind of really took me back. Maybe you can get that from a 17-year-old, but she was, and she was confident in what she was saying, and I was like… I did all I could not to make faces. So.

I think on the consultant side you have to -- what I’ve understood in client relations is that -- a client is hiring you because there’s some kind of expertise that they want you to give them, and that we’re not there to say “yes” to everything. Saying yes is fine, but you have to keep sort of steady to what you know they need and why they’ve hired you. So it’s not a good thing to just feel as though we have to do what it is they say. Challenging the client making them stretch a little is okay. What I like to get from a client is sure up front you want to make sure that clearly this is what you want to do, this is the time frame; but I also want them to know that, “Listen, I need you to really give me as much honesty about this situation, about your colleagues, about what we’re trying to get done, as quickly as possible.” I want to have that because it minimizes the surprises. There are going to be dynamics, sure. But let’s all get on the same page and stay on the same page, but stay open and honest in our communication because if we’re doing something that you don’t like, we need to know that. You know? And certainly it’s not a vice versa, but it’s also saying to the client that, “Let me take you down some different directions.” And so clients need options. They need lots of options because in some instances -- like if you take the notion of social marketing -- because if it’s new to a client and you’ve had all these wonderful experiences of implementing, you know, social marketing campaigns, they may have some hesitancy and you’ve got to understand that. But you need to have to make sure that you’re constantly saying, “Well, look. There are four ways you can look at this.” You know? “And so, choose the one that you might think is best for you, but this is what I’d recommend.”

We have a scenario here now; we’re getting ready to do some TV placement, and we’ve had the meetings. Now I’m the client in this case, and we laid it on the table. “We’ve got this much money. We’ve got to go across stations. Please do not give us a budget that is three-quarters of what we’ve told you.” And they did. Now we have a meeting tomorrow, but it’s like that’s the first thing I’m going to say is, “I asked you guys not to give us this. So I’m trying to understand, you know, how we can afford to have a working relationship.” But I guess part of what I’m saying is I’m a big [proponent of] “be very open, be very direct, and just keep that communication” because that’s how you really learn how to build these kinds of relationships and partnerships, in particular based upon the issues we work on. See the content’s going to, you know, eventually come up and it’s sensitive and, you know, you’re going to have a lot of dynamics around that so you’ve got to make sure your communication is real solid.

I think on the client side, you just need one person that you’re ultimately getting all of the information from. If you’ve got to deal with two or three people, what happens is there’s that confusion of who’s making the decision. And so I think, you know, that’s just the learning that I’ve had that it works better when they know that there are more than, that there’s more than one person who makes this decision, but internally you ask that, “Let us just have one person that we’re dealing with.”