Michael l. Rothschild on "Marketing Strategy - Exchange"

I think the basis of social marketing is the same as commercial marketing. It is the exchange. And I think that we often neglect the concept of exchange. I think most people most of the time do most things out of self-interest, and if we can't accommodate their self-interested needs, they're not going to do what we would like them to do. We're in a free choice society. People get to choose to do what we like or not do what we would like, and if we can't accommodate that -- if we don't come up with a better reason for them to behave, then the reason that they have to do whatever else they want to do -- then we're not going to win. They have the power as consumers do in virtually any situation where there's choice, and since they have power they choose to do what they want. So we need to give them a reason, and that's what exchange is all about. We want the behavior from them but, in order to get that behavior, we may need to give them something in return.

We need to focus on the consumer, but we also need to focus on the competition and our own capability. Basically it's a three-legged stool. We need to assess the needs. We need to know what the needs are. But if we meet needs without looking at what the competition is doing to meet needs, then we're not going to win; we're going to come out second best. So we need to meet needs better than the alternative choice.

We're basically in the behavior management business. What we do is try to get people to change behavior, and there's basically three sets of tools that we can use. We can use education. We can use marketing. And we can use the force of law. Education is sending out messages telling people how we would like them to behave. We don't reward them for the behavior; we just say, “You ought to do this” or “You ought not to do that. Don't drink and drive. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.” That sort of stuff. The force of law is coercive and forceful and tells people that if they don't behave the way we want them to, we will punish them in some way. We're essentially raising the price of the competitive behavior. “If you drink and drive and we catch you, we will fine you $500 and we'll make you go to a class for the next six weeks.” In marketing, what we do is we say, “Why are you behaving the way you are? What are the choices that you're making? What are the benefits of the alternative choice? And how can we give you more benefits for doing the right thing?” In a program that I've been working in, we developed alternative ride programs where we take guys home at the end of the night. So, rather than saying to them, “If you drive, we will nail you,” we say to them, “Don't drive and we'll give you a ride home.” And, in fact, we give them a ride to the bar and then we give them a ride back so that they can leave their cars at home. And I think that's really the essence of what marketing is all about. Now if we look at education, marketing, and law, we can also look at a way of looking at the entire marketplace that we deal with; and for any issue that we want to deal with, there's going to be a continuum of respondents, from people who are prone to behave the way we'd like to people who are resistant to behave the way we would like. People who are prone to behave, we can just send them messages. We’ll tell them what they ought to do and they'll say, “Oh, yes. Wow! Why didn’t I think of that? Of course, I’ll do that.” At the other end, we have people that are resistant to behavior; and if it's really important for us to get their behavior, then we might need to pass laws to get that behavior. Then there's also a group of people in the middle -- and each of these groups varies in size from issue to issue -- the group in the middle are people who are just doing what is in their own self-interest and behavior; and if we can change the balance of the costs and benefits of what we want them to do and the costs and benefits of what the competition is offering, then we can get them to change behavior. And that's how marketing fits in with education and law.

For many of the issues that we deal with, there are basically two choices: a good choice and a bad choice. We're selling the good choice. The good choice asks people to incur cost in the short run, but they'll get a long run benefit. If we want you to exercise, there is some cost to exercising. It hurts. It's uncomfortable. It gets in the way of other things. But in the long run, you'll be healthier. The bad choice is just the opposite. It gives you a short run benefit and a long run cost; and so when you don't exercise -- you watch television, you play a video game, you hang around a bar -- that's an immediate benefit to you. But if you do that every day, over time your level of health is going to deteriorate. And so we have this whole class of behaviors -- like exercise, diet, drug abuse, smoking, safe sex -- that over time will accumulate and have an impact in the long run. But for us to get that long run behavior, we need a series of short run behaviors because everybody does everything in the short run. And so, as we ask people to behave, we lose very often because the bad behavior rewards people right away. At 8:00 in the morning, you decide you're going to be a healthy person and you're going to exercise and you're going to go out and buy some good food to have for dinner that night. Then you go off to work full of good intentions for long run health. At 4:00 in the afternoon, you're tired. You're stressed out. You've had a bad day, and you say, “You know? I'm going to have a couple of beers. I'm going to watch television. I'll get a pizza on the way home, but tomorrow I'm going to start to exercise.” We call that the tyranny of small decisions. And that tyranny keeps us from getting to the long run behavior that we want; and so, if we're going to get people to adopt the behaviors that get them to long run health, we need to figure out how to give them rewards in the short run. We need to bring the benefits into the immediate, into the short run; we need to lower the cost of exercise, the cost of the good behavior. If we want people to cook food, we need to make it more readily accessible, taste better, easier to do, the vegetables are pre-cut in little bags -- the sort of things we're starting to see in grocery stores -- so that we can counter the immediate benefit that the bad behavior gets with an immediate benefit of our own.