March 2020 – Satheesh Krishnamurthy

Marketing, like most business disciplines, has its fair share of concepts and terms that have been adequately misunderstood and extensively misused. I wish to talk about one such misunderstood term – Social Marketing. I have not seen this being used in India adequately far less being misused!

What is Social Marketing?

Comprehension of this term varies from public service ads released by leading brands (drink so-many gallons of water every day; message brought in public interest by x brand) to advertising in social media by various brands.

The answer lies somewhere in-between.

The term social marketing was first coined by Philip Kotler and Zaltman in 1971 to refer to application of marketing to solution of social and health problems. The basic premise went something like this: Marketing has been successful in encouraging people to buy products such as Pepsi, Rolex, Ford, Nike etc., so, the argument was, it can also encourage people to adopt behaviour that will enhance their own – and their fellow citizens’ – lives.

They defined social marketing as “the design, implementation and control of programs calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas and involving considerations of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution and marketing research.”

That translated into plain English reads something like this: ‘Social Marketing is the use of marketing and communication techniques to sell social messages.’

A good example of Social Marketing in the Indian context is the ‘Aids’ campaign that was so popular that it is still referred as the ‘Pulliraja’ campaign! If you could recall, that campaign was run like any other marketing campaign. It had its own positioning, personality, logo, baseline, advertising strategy etc., and was run with the singular objective of popularizing the AIDS message to the target consumer.

In other words, message about AIDS was the brand and selling this idea to the target was the objective much like how marketing happens for many products and services. This, ladies and gentleman, is Social Marketing as defined by Kotler and Zaltman!

Social marketing, like generic marketing, is not a theory in itself. Rather, it is a framework or structure that draws from many other bodies of knowledge such as psychology, sociology, anthropology and communications theory to understand how to influence people’s behaviour add Kotler and Zaltman.

However, social marketing is less different and more difficult than generic marketing. It involves changing intractable behaviours, in complex economic, social and political climates with often very limited resources (Lefebvre and Flora, 1988).

Furthermore, while, for generic marketing the ultimate goal is to meet shareholder objectives, for the social marketer the bottom line is to meet society’s desire to improve its citizens’ quality of life. This is a much more ambitious – and more blurred – bottom line.

There are some important differences between social and commercial marketing though. Specifically, in social marketing:

The products tend to be more complex.
Demand is more varied.
Target groups are more challenging to reach.
Consumer involvement is more intense.
The competition is more subtle and varied.

Finally, one of the most serious forms of competition for Social Marketing comes from commercial marketing itself when it attempts to sell unhealthful or unsocial behaviours. For instance, for every small voice that urges people not to drink or smoke there is a huge scream from the marketers who urge you to smoke and drink.

Thank God we don’t have legalized prostitution yet in this country to take head-on the AIDS campaign. Imagine if we had it and there were enough ‘brothel’ brands vying for people’s attention. We could well see the following Press ad (no pun intended).

“Chosen from the finest among the fairer sex. Visit Slam bam Services, India’s finest brothel centre. Fill it. Shut it. Forget it”!

Social Marketing, then, would have met its match!

I had wanted to write about successful marketing companies for some time now. Not chronicling their history as much as sharing their secrets of success sprinkled with a few trivia and tidbits. While reading the Fortune magazine today, I spotted one such company that I thought could kick start this series. McDonald’s!

Though quintessentially American, McDonald’s has grown to be a 37,800+ restaurant colossus spanning 120+ countries with annual turnover of 21 billion dollars. The gargantuan size of the brand could be gauged by its turnover being more than KFC, Subway, Burger King, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell combined! Not bad for a company whose first day sales from its first restaurant in 1955 were a mere $366.12.

Though the company had a successful first fifty years or so, the brand was stagnating by the turn of the century. To make matters worse, was the sudden demise of their then CEO and his replacement too having to resign since been diagnosed with cancer. During those troubled times stepped in Jim Skinner its current CEO who had started his career in 1962 working in a McDonald’s kitchen. In fact, this is one of the many reasons for the company’s success. Most of its top execs have worked on the shop floor and hence know the pulse of the consumer.

Skinner is a hands-on CEO who perennially checks on his restaurants and delegates powers lower down to make sure the giant organization doesn’t turn bureaucratic. Skinner is obsessed with satisfying customers, even if it comes at the expense of his own ideas and preferences. A few years ago the company did extensive research on new coffee-cup lids and came out with a version that customers liked but Skinner didn’t. Instead of overruling the research, like most CEO’s would have, Skinner approved the new design and, in the process, came up with his own solution: he keeps a stash of the old lids on hand when he drinks coffee!

McDonald’s is renowned for its spotless service delivered day in and day out. Not an easy task considering it has more than 1.7 million employees across the world. How do they manage? Training; and training in their own facility called Hamburger University near their headquarters at Oak Brook, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. This sprawling University is a 130,000-square-foot training facility training McDonald’s employees in the various aspects of restaurant management. More than 80,000 restaurant managers, mid-managers and franchisees have graduated from this facility majoring in Burgers and with an elective in French fries!

The other fascinating facet of McDonald’s is the speed with which it delivers its food. While the category is fast food, McDonald’s is even faster! R&D is constantly egged by marketing to come up with new dishes and it constantly does. But if the new product overly complicates the kitchen and slows deliveries, the product is not launched; period. This always doesn’t endear Skinner to his finance department. But he always sides with marketing and dismisses those objections with a simple comment: “I want to remind you that it’s harder to make money than it is to count it!”

As a side dish, pun intended, though not McDonald’s doing but symptomatic of its towering presence and influence, its Big Mac serves not just hungry mouths but eager economists too. Through the Big Mac Index! Developed by The Economist magazine a quarter century ago, the Big Mac index uses the price of McDonald’s burger in different countries to construct an informal (but surprisingly accurate) indicator of real exchange rate.

India, which makes a debut in the index a few years ago, was found to have one of the most undervalued currencies vis-a-vis the dollar – even more than the Chinese Yuan. That is some fast food for thought!

McDonald has been growing at more than 5% in U.S and much more across the world. In a slow economy, that’s speedy growth from a fascinating fast food company!

People kept asking CEO Skinner when he was going to retire. His response: ‘When I run out of my old coffee-cup lids’!