PR vs. Social Marketing

"Everyone can sell chocolate. Selling getting up, going to the gym and exercising every day takes a real marketing genius." Stephan Dahl

In the 1970s Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman discovered that the same principles that were being used to sell products and services to consumers could be used to 'sell', to the same people, attitudes, ideas and behaviours. Thus a new discipline was born - social marketing - with a background in both social sciences and policy and commercial and public sector marketing.

According to French & Blair-Stevens, social marketing can be defined as "the systematic application of marketing, alongside other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioural goals, for a social cause." It can be differentiated from marketing as its efforts are directed towards a social good and not a financial gain. It has received, however, its fair share of criticism with claims that it is only interested in getting people to change their behaviour but not really caring how they do it.

The National Social Marketing Centre in the UK has produced an 8 point social marketing National Benchmark Criteria that is used to help encourage and promote greater consistency in the use and application of social marketing:

• Clear focus on behaviour and achieving specific behavioural goals

• Centred on understanding the customer using a variety of customer and market research

• Theory-based and informed

• 'Insight' driven

• Uses 'exchange' concept and analysis

• Uses 'competition' concept and analysis

• Has a more developed 'segmentation' approach (going beyond basic targeting)

• Utilizes an 'intervention mix' or 'marketing mix' (rather than relying on single methods)

Used mainly in the public sector and non-profits, social marketing is used for campaigns raging from health issues awareness, reducing smoking or traffic safety.

One of the questions from this week suggested that PR, a field with somewhat questionable ethics, should look and learn from social marketing. Because social marketing is somewhat of the marketing industry's conscience. But isn't that a bit paradoxical? Marketing is used to promote alcohol and cigarettes or cars that run at 200 km/h (and it is perfectly legal to do so), but then public institutions resort to social marketing, which was especially created as a discipline to ask people to stop drinking, smoking or exceeding the speed limit.

This is not to say that social marketing is not efficient or beneficial, because it most definitely is. But it is far from being the ethical high-ground to be used to guide related fields of practice. PR surely has a valuable lesson to learn from activism methods of generating change or social marketing approaches to dealing with the audience while reaching its socially beneficial aim. But in today's world, where boundaries between advertising, marketing and PR tend to get more and more blurred, public relations is probably better off not just learning from social marketing but by engaging and collaborating within change initiatives and campaigns, thus making a commendable contribution.

References:

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  French, J, and Blair Stevens, C. (2005) Social Marketing Pocket guide (1st Edition) National Social Marketing Centre for Excellence, http://www.nsms.org.uk/
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  Kotler, P, Zaltman, G. (1971) Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change. Journal of Marketing 35:3-12.
  

Ethical PR - a reality for the entire industry?

“The only way to practice ethical PR is to work in the NGO or voluntary sector, all the rest is corporate propaganda or spin”

Today's debate, which I was a part of, brought forward the ever burning question of ethics in public relations: is ethics in PR an oxymoron? Is ethical behaviour the goal that the entire industry is in pursuit of or is it just a reality in certain sectors?

The debate's statement was based on an assumption that is, in my opinion, unrealistic and over generalised: if the only way to practice ethical PR is to work in NGO's, then all for profit organisations or corporations practicing PR are fundamentally unethical in their activity.

There is no sustainable evidence to support such an assumption, unless we consider that making money is an unethical act. And in that case, why would we even bother with matters of ethics in PR is the entire global economy was a ramp for unethical behaviours?

The ability to engage in ethical reasoning in public relations is growing in demand, in importance and in responsibility. Academic research, university education, and professional practice are all paying attention more than ever to matters of ethics. Careful and consistent ethical analyses facilitate trust, which enhances the building and maintenance of relationships – which is the ultimate purpose of the public relations function.

First thing to look at in such a debate is the fact that ethics varies with culture: we can't compare western standards of ethics with, for example eastern ones. We can't compare eastern business practices with western ones and pass judgement on their morality. What may constitute an unethical behaviour in a Western Europe country - presenting your business partner with an expensive gift - can represents a standard practice in an Eastern culture like China. So before we can even start to judge a practice as being ethical or not, we need to consider the underlying cultural traditions and beliefs of the particular society in which it occurred.

This further extends to sectors of PR: what may constitute a faulty PR practice in the Third Sector could be a perfectible acceptable strategy in the, let's say, fashion sector.

Like in absolutely every industry or profession, there are examples of unethical practices in public relations. They exists, are well known, and no one is denying them. However, they exist in every sector, this including NGO and voluntary. To emphasise that NGOs can be very unethical just take a look at cases such as Greenpeace, Brest Cancer NGOs worldwide, Haiti relief NGOs or Amnesty International. They have all faced accusations of money laundering, hiding information of public interest, harassing for-profit companies and so on.

Another example to emphasise the point above is CharityComms. This is a professional organisation for people working in communication in the NGO sector. This organisation does not have, until today, a code of ethics, thus being incapable of offering a minimum ethical guideline for its members to follow.

Furthermore, there is no proof that PR organisations - such as the CIPR or PRSA - have more members from the voluntary sector or that more of these practitioners abide by the codes of ethics of these societies.

The idea of unethical PR has been fuelled by journalists as part of a decades' long feud between the professions. Cases such as those of Enron (Bowen & Heath, 2005) or Hill & Knowlton (among other things they represented 'Citizens for a Free Kuwait' who created false testimony delivered to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus) stand out because they keep getting cited with every opportunity and because negative examples always attract more attention and are long lasting. But the truth is that cases of corporate propaganda or spin are only a handful. They just are more memorable, as their happenings get repeated to the public with every occasion. However, we must keep in mind that the cases of ethical PR behaviours - such as those promoted by The Body Shop, Lush, New Look or Sainsbury's, are truly the ones at a majority and they define practices within all sectors of PR.