Steve Macaulay
Paul Baines
Steve Macaulay
Paul Baines
Steve Macaulay
Paul Baines
Paul Baines
We are going to examine the issue of public sector marketing. This is in the context of public sector marketing budgets being slashed considerably.
Now we have got somebody in the studio today – Paul Baines – who is an expert in political marketing. Paul, how do people with that kind of limited budget now, get the message over and spend their money wisely?
Well, just to give some understanding of how limited that budget is the
Central Office of Information – the government body that deals with advertising and develops the budgets for public sector advertising – has slashed the budget by about 90%. So what we are seeing is a substantial reduction in the amount of money made available by government to support effectively social marketing initiatives.
These social marketing initiatives range all the way from encouraging people to eat five vegetables and fruit portions per day, to encouraging safe driving – not using mobile phones or not speeding – and that sort of thing.
So these cuts in budgets are designed, of course, to help the coalition claw back and pay off some of the deficit and that is understandable. But at the same time, there is probably a lack of recognition in my view that actually some of that money is incredibly well spent.
So things like encouraging people to have flu injections, for example?
Yes, health promotion is a component of social marketing. The thing about social marketing is it is all about driving behaviours; so it is about changing target audience behaviours, getting them to do something different from what they were doing before. A good example, and this is an area that has been refunded, I was saying that the budget has been cut by 90%, this particular area still gets its funding and that is the Department of Transport’s Think Campaign, which is designed to encourage safer driving behaviours.
Now, people do genuinely die if that money is not spent because the accidents and so on that occur would, to some degree, occur any way in some cases, but wouldn’t occur in other cases because people have watched the video material or seen the adverts in the newspapers or magazines and so on, and changed their behaviours as a result.
So the key thing about these social marketing campaigns is that they change behaviours, not attitudes – and that is fairly fundamental. The problem is that many of these behaviours are entrenched and it is quite hard to change them with just a piece of advertising; but stopping the advertising or the promotion altogether is probably the wrong move.
So, if we get down to basics then, and you were advising these people with a much reduced budget, what do you believe they should be doing?
Well, what they should be doing is planning their campaigns a lot better.
The problem that many marketers have is that they put a lot of money into communication and very little into the research associated with that communication. So they tend to underspend on research and spend much more on the communication. That is a bit like shouting, Steve. So you www.cranfieldknowledgeinterchange.com
July 2011 1

Steve Macaulay
Paul Baines
Steve Macaulay
Paul Baines don’t know whether your message is quite right, but yet you put it out and you get to lots of people and you get the right times and so on, but are you saying the right thing? Well, you only know that if you use research to determine that.
So I think measuring the effectiveness of marketing communication is fundamental in this new environment – absolutely fundamental. It was always important, but now it is fundamental. So I would say, spend a little bit more on the research side and reduce the amount of budget proportion on the communication.
But what I would also say is it important to have a process for measuring out what behaviour it is that you want to change; understanding up front what that behaviour is that you want to change. And having some sort of hypothesis for how that behaviour, of how your intervention of the communication what impacts that will have on the behaviour and monitoring that along the way. I think that is absolutely imperative.
So I started off by saying how do you spend money wisely? That is target it carefully, do your homework and then spend that very carefully and monitor the results.
Yes, but also have some idea about this behaviour that it is you want to change. So how is this behaviour – it is usually a negative behaviour in social marketing, so in the health promotion side it is eating too many fatty foods or eating too much more generally, not exercising enough. The behaviour there that you are trying to change is not exercising enough or eating too many fatty foods, so how do you change those behaviours?
What messages do you need to get across to people to get them to change those behaviours? So doing that research up front is absolutely fundamental so that you can then change that behaviour rather than just the attitude.
A good point; thank you very much, Paul.
Thank you. www.cranfieldknowledgeinterchange.com
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