Rebecca Brookes on "Low Cost Approaches"

There is a perception that you have to have a budget the size of Pepsi-Cola to do effective communications and effective social marketing, and it’s just not necessarily so. Because people think of mass advertising -- radio, TV, print -- and even if you have a large budget, that isn’t necessarily the best way to reach your target audience. So the key is segmentation. It’s understanding who your audience is. It’s understanding their needs and their wants, their desires, barriers and benefits -- which means, why aren’t they doing what it is that you want them to do and what will inspire them to do what it is you want them to do. The more you segment, the more personal the message is. The more personal the message or your program or your intervention, the more effective because we are enchanted by the person. “You” is the most powerful word you can put in a headline. It’s because it’s personal. So the more you are able to personalize your program, the more effective it will be; and the more you talk to everyone generically, the more you talk to no one.

About ten years ago, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England was trying to do a campaign to get people to come in for confidential HIV testing, and this was back before such marketing was commonplace. What we decided to do because our target audience again, in this case, was young men -- Burlington, Vermont is a test market for beer because there’s so much beer drinking that goes on -- so we did a bar coaster campaign using local bars. We talked to a weekly arts entertainment paper and a local radio station and the bar owners and gave them data about the growth of AIDS in smaller cities, because there was a real perception that AIDS was a problem in San Francisco and New York but not in places like Northern New England. So once they saw the data -- and this was all about educating the gatekeepers -- the radio station and the newspaper underwrote the costs for making bar coasters, and they gave us publicity. So the coasters had this intriguing message on one side that said, “Don’t have sex in the dark,” which was not a typical public health message; and then on the other side, there were factoids about the spread of AIDS and a number to call for confidential HIV testing. Something happened; there was a great deal of response -- so much that our centers asked us to stop doing the campaign for a little while because they were flooded with demand.

I think at that time, this was ten years ago -- and we were one of five test markets in the country for premium beer. We have five colleges in town; it’s a small town with five colleges.

No matter how small your budget is, you should never sacrifice talking to your target audience. If you can afford professional research, do it because it’s worth its weight in gold. But if you can’t, there are alternatives to research. Research itself sounds expensive, and it can be, but there are ways to do it better and cheap. It’s most important to realize that you need to stay in touch with your target audience because they, we assume that we know what they want. We assume we know what their motivations are. And from painful experiences, I can tell you that we don’t always know and we guess wrong. So different ways that you can do research. You can use free local resources. I used to teach college marketing, and my students -- the way most college marketing students -- are assigned to do some college projects, and doing research for local organizations was one way that they could get credit.

We were beginning a campaign to get young men involved in the prevention of unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, and what we did first was to search the internet for any research that had been done about a similar program with a similar audience. We found it. And what we were able to do is use the research; it was similar enough that we were able not to duplicate that research but to use it as a friction point to create our own focus group. You can do local focus groups. You can do their own. There are lots of books and guides and even classes available that are cost effective to teach you how to do your own research. You can also go together with other organizations and do shared cost surveys or studies. You can find out what existing research is going on in your area and see if you can just piggyback on it. Tack on a question or two. Oftentimes that will happen. Then there’s my favorite, which is just walking around research. What you can do is just go where your target audience is and listen. When I first went to Planned Parenthood, I spent eight hours sitting in our health center waiting room and just listened to the patients. We also have patient diaries in our waiting rooms, which allow patients to write whatever they feel; and I read those diaries and it’s a way just to keep your finger on the pulse of your target audience and it doesn’t cost anything.

They need to be careful of the disease of the month or the health issue of the year, because in the clutter of the marketplace we actually need to hear something nine times before we know we’ve heard it once -- or see something nine times. I imagine that number’s even higher. And so what we need to do is be aware that about the time we’re sick of a campaign or we’re ready to change it, it is just hitting the radar screen for our target audience. Similarly, we need to be careful of a crazy quilt approach. In an effort to save money, I’ve seen some organizations that borrow materials, use materials from other organizations and other programs; but it’s to the point where there’s no consistency, and consistency is very powerful in making an impression in a marketplace.

….we need to be realistic about what we can do with small budgets. The stage change model says that people go through several stages in order to make changes. None of us are very fond of changing, and it takes a while and we have to progress to the continuum. So we need to be realistic about our campaign and how far down the continuum the campaign can actually take somebody.

…don’t put your program out in a vacuum. By that I mean, especially if you have a small budget. We tend to be sometimes an inch deep and a mile wide. If you have a budget that allows you to do say 12 ads and a mailing and maybe some public relations, don’t do one ad a month for 12 months. Pile the ads up. At the end of the ads, drop the mailing. Just as the mailing is hitting, talk to the reporters and get something in the newspaper. That way you’re layering impressions in the marketplace, and I think we have a tendency to want to hold onto our money and make it stretch. By stretching it, again, it’s going to get lost in the clutter.

….people have the impression that production -- TV, radio, print production -- costs a lot of money, and it can. There are other ways to do production that’s very inexpensive. One is that radio and TV stations, in some parts of the world, will do free production for you if you buy a little bit of time. And so we have had ads done for as little as $125 that have actually won awards because the people who are doing the production get excited about the project and they get invigorated by it. Another inexpensive way is TV free resources. We have done TV and radio spots using college theater majors, who make excellent spokespeople and don’t cost a fortune. The other thing is to use members of the target audience themselves to make the spot. This is called testimonial, and it’s very powerful because it’s a member of the target audience speaking to another member of the target audience.