The ethical dilemmas in social marketing

When we discuss social marketing we must take into consideration differences between traditional and social marketing. Social Marketing is the application of specific tools in order to achieve social changes. Different to marketing which focuses on selling products and services, social marketing sells ideas and behaviour to promote and influence the audience to social change. It was first started being used for health issues but rapidly expanded to education, energy, philanthropy, environment, and corporate social responsibility.

In a society that increasingly prioritizes social issues, organizations that want to be competitive need to understand this change to engage publics in an effective manner. The communication between organization and publics should be based in cultural context; organizations must apply effort to understand the society it wants to reach.  It’s important to have specific dialogue which would be appealing and impactful to society, helping improve the relationship between organization and publics and building the companies social reputation.

Influencing an audience to change their behaviour, also called intelligent influence, has its challenges. Behavioural changes based on voluntary actions rather than legal, economic or coercive forms of influence are difficult to achieve because you require the audiences accept. Society needs to believe the efforts applied for the change will be beneficial in a long term. The process of change in society occurs when:

-          Accept a new behaviour,

-          Reject a potential behaviour,

-          Modify a current behaviour,

-          Abandon an old behaviour.

The main problem is that sometimes organizations slightly distort facts with the purpose of having greater impact and increasing persuasion in society. These methods of persuasion are usually “forgiven” since they are being used for a noble cause. For instance campaigns aimed the reduction of energy consumption. Usually these campaigns are directed to the consumer, making them believe that their individual’s efforts can actually make a difference, when in the reality they cannot! 

Furthermore we face ethical dilemmas dealing with services and products that are controversial and not well understood.  For instance creating a blood donation campaign in the era of AIDS could be challenging in the sense other values ​​and beliefs must be demystified for to achieve an effective campaign.

Organizations and agencies working with social marketing should be aware and constantly self-critical of their role in society and what they want to achieve, their purposes. The balance between ethics and effectiveness, being honest and at the same time powerful, is the important boundary that should be taken into consideration in any social marketing campaigns. 

How some PRs still don’t get it? Spin can easily destroy your reputation.

In my last posts I talked about the importance of trust in the PR industry and how companies can achieve it through engagement, transparency and shared value approaches. In this post, unlike the previous ones, I’ll discuss how some PR practitioners haven’t yet understood the importance of trust in our industry and unfortunately keep practicing and reinforcing unethical behavior.

Spin is a term used in the PR industry that describes communication’s strategies heavily used through actions or events in order to boost its clients’ public image. It means controlling the news agenda to suit client’s needs, even if it becomes necessary to distort the truth. “Spin doctors”, is the term used to describe PR professionals or specialists that spin situations. The practices have been used so widely that the PR industries credibility is now suffering as a result.

It is usually associated with politics and political issues and as examples I can cite among others professionals: Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Karl Rove. For instance Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s ex-spokesman who worked for the British Government during the Iraq war was responsible for distributing “fabricated documents” related to the invasion of Iraq in order to gain public support. Some practicioners justify these practices by stating that customer satisfaction is most important.

Unfortunately this practice isn’t exclusive in the political arena and has been rapidly spreading to other segments as well. Some organizations have been implementing actions to make their publics believe in their products & services or their context no matter what it takes. During crisis management we can see many examples of companies spinning stories to help them mislead the media and publics’ attention. However manipulating media and public opinion is a false notion of power. In the era of digital media PR professionals and agencies are taking big risks by taking these types of approaches. As Edelman said, “Thanks to robust mainstream and social media, there is immediate damage inflicted to the reputation and the license-to-operate of any company, brand or PR firm folly enough to distort the truth.”

Some PR practitioners state we are advocates of our clients, so it’s our job to defend their statements and actions no matter what. I agree! That’s why I believe that propagating and reinforcing the truth we aren’t exposing their reputation and credibility in the future. Good PR professionals are always thinking in a long term. Our main purposes are protecting and guarantee our client’s reputation and honesty is the best policy for it.

Let me know what you think, don’t be shy J

See you next time!

How NGOs build credibility

In my last post I talked about the importance of public’s trust in an organization and why observing NGOs practices can be a helpful guide to achieve a high level of trust. As mentioned in my last post companies should work with NGOs as partners and understand better their practices to gain the trust of society. Below I am going to talk about how these practices are used by NGOs and how business organizations can apply them to their business model.

NGOs usually achieve a high degree of public trust, which is essential to any kind of business today driven to delivery on their goals. The value motive is the guide for NGOs. An NGO main goal is to help society better understand the transformations that are taking places nowadays. The purpose of an NGO isn’t to sell products; they promote what’s called “industries of conscience”. Meaning they get involved in policy and social issues in order to influence transformation in society. Their business’ purpose is always transparent and clear in relation to what they intend on achieving.

According to the annual  Trust Barometer report by Edelman in 2011 the Trust Architecture Factors changed. The report is a summary of what societies in 23 countries considers main requisites for trusting a corporation. The report among other interesting finds mapped the main attributes that make a business reliable in the eyes of society.

As we see the old trust architecture was replaced by a new model. The new model has a requisite of trust that NGOs implement well on a daily basis:  performance with purpose. Allowing its publics to be aware of its shared value is essential to bridge the gap between the organizations intent and societies perception of it. Align profit and purpose for a social benefit, also referred to as social purpose, is the new and most important feature that companies must apply in their business, followed by transparency and engagement.

 It means generate profit to further social and/or environmental goals. NGOs despite not been driven by profit, understand pretty well the importance of pursuing some sort of public interest rather than individual or commercial interests. In my next post I will discuss unenthical PR practices.

What we can learn from NGOs

The approval, respect and credibility of its publics are the main goal of any business. If the services your company provides affects society in a positive way the chances your business achieves success are much higher. Respect and credibility in the business environment can be translated into trust. Being a reliable organization is the boundary line that divides companies that are developing and growing and the ones that are only surviving.

As PR professionals our scope of work is defined and constantly pursued through the meaning of this simply but powerful word: trust. How to gain the trust of society? Is there any guide or instructions for it? And most important, how to maintain it after we achieve? Questions that can appear difficult to answer but if we take a closer look at our surroundings we observe the answer pretty quickly. There are organizations that have been applying these principles for decades and as a result have been able to garner the public’s trust: Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

These organizations are also called Third Sector and are mainly driven by a value motive. They embrace different sectors of society: charities, social welfare, religion, and foundations among others. The limited resources surrounding these organizations don’t affect them in becoming powerful agents of change in society. According to Richard Edelman, President and CEO of Edelman, NGOs are the most trusted institution in nearly every market.

PR practitioners are constantly seeking to build relationship with their publics. However a long term relationship can only be strong enough to survive through an essential element: trust. Therefore instead of perceiving NGOs as a threat to your business, PR should perceive and engage these organizations as helpful partners. I believe when we start to create alliances and try and understand their “business model” great changes and developments will take place in our field. Thus we have lots to learn from NGOs! In my next post I plant to discuss how NGOs gain trust from society. If you have any thoughts please comment below or write me an email. See you next time!

The key role of any PR campaign

An important concept for PR campaigns and strategies is the importance of understanding and defining publics and stakeholders.  Our strategies of communication should be related to our target audience. Know your public and understand their expectations are the first step to achieving a good communication campaign plan. As a result different segments should also have differentiated communication strategies. To help identify and understand different groups that are relate to the company I’ll explain them through the stakeholder and situational theory of publics.

First of all let’s understand the definition of audience. Mass communication is intended towards a general audience. Traditional mass communication has been targeted towards a large number of unorganized, anonymous and isolated groups. First this source of media was seen as a source of manipulation and targeting of ideas and information. The receiver wouldn’t challenge or critically think about the message being transmitted. The information was only to sell and disseminate ideas. At this time Edward Bernays, considered the “father” of public relations, started to use communication as a form of control and manipulation of public opinion. Some of Freud’s techniques of subconscious notions were applied. Bernay believed that giving the power of decision to the public was dangerous to society. So Bernay would make the public think that their decision was due to their individual needs, when in fact it was the result of a manipulation and control of their desires.

The century of the self by Adam Curtis. BBC

John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, declared: “It’s occasionally indicated to us that we are setting out to give the public what we think they need – and not what they want – but very few people know what they want and very few what they need”. The expression articulate very well the perception mass media had of their audience at the time.

However nowadays society has sustained important changes and the concept of active audiences has gained increasing strength. Opposite of passive, the active audience take responsibility for their choices. They decide what to consume, where and how. Today companies need to adapt their business and communication towards their audiences’ particular needs. According to the Reception Analysis study the public is also the creator of the messages meaning. They discuss together with the organization the meaning that the message should have. 

For PR professionals these audiences are mainly based in stakeholders and publics. The different concepts between both aren’t sharp and some theorists in the field still mix them up. The organizations’ stakeholder, a term originated in political theory, are the group of individuals that influence or are influenced by the company. Publics are stakeholders that faced a problem or issue related to the company. If the PR department know and understand the different stakeholders the company relates with, these stakeholders might never become publics. The mapping of stakeholders is essential to cement a communication strategy and it’s primarily based on the power and interest of the stakeholders towards the organization. If the stakeholders have high level of power and interest they are key in the organization survival and should be seen as essential by the company. If they have power but the interest is low, the organization should try to keep them satisfied and it shouldn’t require too much effort. However if the stakeholders have little power but there interest is high the organization should keep them informed.

Stakeholder theory

If the relationship between companies and stakeholders are manageable the company wouldn’t have to worry about them becoming publics, which could result in them organizing themselves against the organization. The situational theory of publics elaborated by Grunig and Hunt (1984) predicts some actions that can help strengthen the relationship between publics and organizations. According to Grunig and Hunt the publics are divided in latent, aware and active. The latent publics are the groups that have an issue/problem against the company’s action but they haven’t recognized it yet. When the group recognize the problem exists they are known as aware publics and when they start to organize to discuss and act against the problem/issue they are called actives.

Understand different concepts of audiences, stakeholders and publics are essential to create an influential PR campaign. As I said before, without knowing who you’re talking to, the strategies can’t be defined and efficiently implemented. However it’s important to make clear that in today society these concepts are much more complicated. It’s harder to frame in pre-set concepts. However it’s our job as PR professionals or academics to adapt the changes and reformulate theories in terms of today’s society. Always seeking to understand the role that different groups have in organizations plays an important role in defining our campaigns. 

Use social media and come out of the dark