Why unions need to know about social marketing

Now more than ever, unions have a critical need to recruit and activate members. Social Change Media consultant Mark McGrath explains how unions can use social marketing techniques to improve their workplace campaigns.

The union movement has enjoyed a good return on their investment in adopting a professional marketing approach for their large scale Your Rights at Work campaign. Similarly, unions could get a valuable return by investing in a social marketing approach for their on-the-ground workplace campaigns to recruit new members.

Unfortunately, most unions tend to think that producing some good looking brochures, posters and a website is all the marketing you need for a workplace recruitment campaign.

But the experience of applying social marketing in other sectors indicates that unions are missing out on recruiting new members by not using social marketing in their workplace campaigns.

Social marketing for social change

As marketing has evolved as a professional discipline, a number of sub-disciplines have developed to service the specific needs of clients. One of these sub-disciplines is social marketing, which is a specialised form of marketing designed to service those organisations who have social change goals. It makes sense then to use the form of marketing that matches your organisation and its goals. This means that commercial organisations should use commercial marketing and non-profit organisations with social change goals should use social marketing.

As a practice, commercial marketing has been developed with the primary goal of changing the buyer’s choice of product or service. Essentially this type of marketing aims to change awareness and attitude.

Social marketing is ‘the systematic application of marketing concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioural goals, for a social or public good’. (French, Blair-Stevens, 2006).

Although it may also aim to raise awareness and change attitudes, social marketing tends to have a higher goal; changing people’s behaviour. For example, getting people to save water by changing their water usage patterns or getting workers to adopt safer workplace behaviour.

It’s no surprise then that social marketing has developed different models to achieve behaviour change rather than just attitudinal change. These models are based on the factors behavioural scientists have found that lead to voluntary behaviour change.

Recruiting members requires changing behaviour – not just attitude

Unions campaigning to increase membership and activism at the workplace are effectively running what is known in the field of social marketing as behaviour change programs. Asking a non-union member to join a union and participate in workplace action is asking them to change their behaviour; not just their awareness or attitude.

A potential new union member may well change their attitude to unions but still not take the step to join. Social marketing provides answers on why this is the case and how we can get them to take that extra step.

Information on its own doesn’t change behaviour

There is quite a lot of evidence that shows that campaigns that aim to only raise awareness or change attitudes are not very successful in changing behaviour. The classic example here is the early quit smoking advertising campaigns. These campaigns successfully conveyed to targets the message that smoking was bad for your health and shortens life expectancy. But most of these targets still didn’t quit.

Why? Because information, on its own, is not enough to change people's behaviour. To change people's behaviour a campaign needs to also address factors other than information that contribute to behaviour change; the social factors.

Social marketing works

We know from experience in other fields like health and road safety that social marketing works.

In 2006 the UK government conducted a review into the potential of using social marketing for preventative health programs ("It’s our health"). One of their key findings was that after initially having comparable adult smoking rates in the early 1970’s, Australia’s use of social marketing to reduce smoking had reduced the adult smoking rate to 18% compared to 26% in England, where there has only been limited use of social marketing. Furthermore, adult smoking was decreasing faster in Australia, where it is forecasted to reach an adult smoking rate of 5% 30 years earlier than England, if England’s current under-use of social marketing continues.

Models for planning behaviour change campaigns

Social Change Media consultant Les Robinson has developed two models for planning and evaluating social change campaigns:

• The Enabling Change model: a comprehensive step by step planning model to develop strategy for behaviour change campaigns;
• The 7 Doors model: a prescriptive checklist to ensure the right mix of messages, products and actions in a behaviour campaign.

The Enabling Change model

Whilst most campaign planning models will list the essential elements of campaign strategy (goals, objectives, target audiences, key messages, products and channels), most of these don’t provide a sound, systematic method to decide what the actual values of these elements should be.

The Enabling Change model provides a comprehensive set of templates, guidelines and decision-making tools to:

• develop a research agenda that will discover what works and what doesn’t
• determine realistic and measurable objectives
• identify the different types of target audiences
• create credible key messages that address the specific needs for each type of target audience
• pre-test these messages to weed out problems and improve the final product
• prioritise high-value campaign actions
• formulate an appropriate mix of communication activities for each audience type
• resolve the inevitable conflict between campaign wish lists and finite resources
• measure your campaign performance so you can improve next time

Most union workplace campaigns would do a reasonable job on identifying:

• desired outcome (eg more members)
• partners (eg site delegates)
• who has to act (non-members)
• the required behaviour change (joining and participating)
• common vision (a better workplace)
• tactics (eg information and meetings)
• one of the key messages (benefits of joining)

But I suspect many would not address the following factors in the table below, which have the potential to dramatically effect the impact of these campaigns.

The 7 Doors model

Here below is a summary of the 7 Doors model.

The 7 Doors model

The doors analogy is used here because we see the campaign manager’s role akin to an educator leading participants through these doors, which act as a way through obstacles.

Social Change Media has used this model in consultancy work on behaviour change projects over the last 7 years. This model has been successfully applied to a diverse range of fields including health, environment, sustainability, road safety and crime prevention.

Whilst unions may be addressing some of these factors in their workplace campaigns, it’s quite likely that most unions would not be addressing all of these factors.

How this model could apply to workplace campaigns

Specialised workshops to put theory into practice

Social Change Media runs a series of specialised social marketing workshops, The Enabling Change series, to provide the skills, tools and strategies to people who run behaviour change campaigns. This series of specialised workshops will show you how to put theory of planning behaviour change campaigns into practice. The series is made up of the following workshops:

• Practical Program Design & Evaluation
• Best Practice Community Engagement
• Making Persuasive Messages

To register

You can register online for these workshops or call 1300 720 349.

In-house option

We also offer these workshops as a customised, in-house option to organisations that want to workshop a particular issue or train a group of people. Contact us if you would like a quote.

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Last Modified: Wednesday, 04-Apr-2007 12:31:36 EST