Page 40 - Social Marketing for Public Health Global Trends and Success Stories

57977_CH01_final.qxd:Cheng 11/5/09 4:32 PM Page 13

Using Social Marketing for Public Health: Global Trends 13

and presenting awards to outstanding pieces (Cheng & Chan, 2009). Given this
unique social environment in China, the Chinese government played a major role
in this nationwide anti–hepatitis B campaign, which was, in fact, co-sponsored by
the China Foundation for Hepatitis Prevention and Control and the Information
Office of the Ministry of Health, with donations of expertise from McCann
Healthcare China and airtime and space from many media outlets.
Cultural influences on social marketing campaigns for public health are abun-
dant in this book. In the anti–HIV/AIDS case study in Mexico in Chapter 4, the
campaign focused on “redefin[ing] gender norms among Mexican youth,” because
the traditional inequitable gender roles between young men and young women in
Mexico was identified as a root cause of risky sexual behaviors among them. In
Singapore’s anti–dengue fever campaign examined in Chapter 15, all communica-
tion materials were produced in four languages—English, Chinese, Malay, and
Tamil—because they are all official languages in this multiethnic nation.
As Willard Shaw, author of the case study on insecticide-treated mosquito nets
in Nigeria, concluded in Chapter 9, “Keeping an eye on both . . . regular monitoring
and adapting to changing circumstances is the only way to achieve success.” An ex-
ample he gave in the chapter in terms of campaign agility to deal with unpre-
dictable government regulations was that tariff increases in the country could
jump from 5% to 75% overnight during the campaign.

Trend 9: Valuing Marketing Research

A commonality among all the case studies in this book is that research played a piv-
otal role in all these success stories of social marketing for public health. As “the
systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data and findings relevant
to a specific marketing situation facing the organization” (Kotler & Lee, 2008, p.
74), marketing research can be divided as formative, pretest, monitoring, and eval-
uation. While formative research helps “form strategies, especially to select and un-
derstand target audiences and develop draft marketing strategies” (Kotler & Lee,
2008, p. 75), pretest research, monitoring research, and evaluation research are con-
ducted before, during, and after a marketing campaign is launched, respectively.
The success stories of social marketing for public health all resorted to some
types of marketing research. One of the major lessons provided in these success
stories is that “properly focused marketing research can make the difference be-
tween a brilliant plan and a mediocre one” (Kotler & Lee, 2008, p. 44).
Because the social, cultural, economic, and technological conditions in those
countries are quite different, you will find that marketing researchers paid great
attention to not only the appropriateness of a research method for a target market,
but also the feasibility of research in a target market. That is why, while relatively