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256 CHAPTER 11 ■ Socialism Meets Social Marketing

• Knowledge objectives: Targeted manufacturers, distributors, and retailers
should understand that the usual risks of entering a new market will be
borne by SOMARC.
• Belief objectives: Targeted manufacturers, distributors, and retailers
should come to believe there is a commercially viable, unmet demand for
modern formulation contraceptives that can be profitable and worth the
investment of scarce resources.

B A R R IER S, B ENEF I T S, A ND C O MP E TI TI O N

Consumers

The biggest barrier to be overcome by the Red Apple with regard to the targeted
consumers was the long history of Soviet health care that effectively encour-
aged abortion through a professional/institutional misunderstanding of the
fundamental method of action of hormonal contraceptives and a resultant fear
of their use that was passed on to patients. This was coupled with a system that
conferred healthcare entitlements almost solely through a hospital-based sys-
tem of inpatient care/treatment, where abortion was often easier to access than
contraceptives.
Choices outside of this entitlement system were limited and relatively diffi-
cult to access, even though abortion was understood to pose considerable repro-
ductive health risks.
True to the paradoxical nature of most things Soviet, competitors to Red
Apple products were also its collaborators. Structurally, the abortion-biased,
hospital/inpatient care–based public health system, and its post-Soviet frag-
mented remnants, represented the largest obstacle to the substitution of contra-
ceptives for abortion, because it was the largest abortion provider. However, it
also was home to some of the Red Apple’s biggest supporters: dedicated, enlight-
ened, reproductive health physicians and public health policymakers, who rec-
ognized the many dangers from high abortion rates and were ready to embrace
alternatives.

Suppliers

Kazakhstani commercial suppliers were, by definition, new to the workings of
Western business and in almost all cases, new to commercial business itself. The