Page 160 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

152 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

interested in needs assessment and quality assurance. In other words, be-
yond the short-term goal of connecting buyers with the firm’s products,
there is also the long-term goal of creating the products or services that
people need (Kotler & Levy 1969, p. 15). The authors emphasized that
reaching out to some customer or client base, not merely for the purpose
of sales but also to ascertain what they want and need, is in the interest of
all organizations, whether they are hospitals, schools, labor unions, or
government agencies.
One key technique for outreach and needs assessment of a target popu-
lation was the focused interview (which later developed into the “focus
group”), first developed by Robert K. Merton and Patricia Kendall in a
1946 paper published in the American Journal of Sociology. Reflecting on
that groundbreaking paper some 40 years after its publication, Merton
(1987, p. 565) stated that “the focussed interview is not at all confined to
market research,” and that “it might even be described as ecumenical.”
Rather than a purely market-based model for selling products, the focus
group is a more general strategy for collecting and analyzing qualitative
data to help understand the sociological and psychological circumstances
in which persons find themselves in relation to some social issue or ques-
tion. For example, a legal defense team might hire a researcher or consult-
ant to conduct focus groups with citizens (who are all potential jurors) to
ascertain their sentiments toward the death penalty. The legal defense team
is, of course, not interested in selling a product to these citizens, but it is
interested in gleaning information about citizen attitudes toward the death
penalty that could be used at trial. For example, the defense team could
seek to enter into evidence the low levels of support for the death penalty
discovered among focus group participants as a way of influencing the
judge, who may have the discretion to rule out the possibility of a death
sentence in the particular case at hand.
Several years later, Kotler and Zaltman (1971) put this earlier idea
of broadening the concept of marketing into practice while giving it
a name. They called this new approach to planned social change
“social marketing.” The authors referred to the then-current bestselling
book by Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President, which implied that
“you can sell a presidential candidate like you sell soap” (Kotler & Zaltman,
1971, p. 3).
Kotler and Zaltman (1971) believed that standard marketing principles
could be effectively applied to the promotion of a range of social rather
than narrowly economic or financial objectives, whether brotherhood,
family planning, safe driving, or even the elimination of poverty. Here, the
authors utilized the “four P’s” approach developed by McCarthy (1968),