what role does “culture” have in social marketing?

One of the basic principles of social marketing is that you must “know” (and communicate with) your audience. This is one of the implications of targeting. “Culture” is a broad and amorphous concept, typically meaning an assemblage of knowledges, practices and discourses that are constructed, negotiated and contested on an ongoing basis.

When devising a social marketing campaign, it is necessary to ask: what are the attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviors of the target communities? What are their cultural priorities? On what bases do they envision their participation in a community? Is it some combination of family constitution, ethnicity, national origin, particular modes of gendering, sexuality, geographic/neighborhood affiliation, educational level, socioeconomic status, and/or language use? How do individuals in these communities locate, assess, test construct and communicate knowledge? How is new knowledge received from “outside” the community? Who are the legitimated bearers of new messages; are they elders, mothers, men, youth, local educators, church representatives? 

In his article “Culture as an Object of Ethical Governance in AIDS Prevention,” Adam M. Geary points out how “culture” can become, in the minds of public health administrators and policy-makers, the obstacle to healthy living. If, for example, “machismo” in some cultures discourages the use of condoms (because condoms may signify the male’s inability to control his sexual performance, or because they may actually impede his sexual performance), then the broader culture that “supports” a “macho” form of male gendering comes to be viewed as suffering from a pathology. The perceived pathology is machismo and if, for example, the goal is to address through social marketing campaigns the disproportionately high rates of HIV infection among Latinos and African Americans in New York City (compared to Caucasians and Asians), then particular aspects of particular cultures become targets for self-directed “ethical governance.”

Similarly, in her article “Culture as Cure,” Vilma Santiago-Irizarry discusses, in part, the flip-side of recognizing cultural difference: to reify or essentialize culture as an immutable identity and medicalize it. These are the implications of the label “at risk.” The implicit statement in the phenomena detailed by Geary and Santiago-Irizarry is that “culture” may, unfortunately, be regarded as the “blame” for poor health or whatever “social problem” a social marketing campaign purports to address. 

Given these complexities, how can “culture” be accounted for without becoming a perceived pathology or source of blame for the “social problem” in question?

what is social media?

Social media are characterized by the principal of participatory culture. They are media content providers and services that allow for horizontal, or peer to peer, communication, production and distribution of content. In some cases, the platform itself is open to lateral forms of participation. That is, users have input in the structure and affordances, not just the content, of the social media. Cellphone texting to Twitter, YouTube to Seesmic, Facebook to Second Life, Blogging to Newsvine and other social journalism sites…these are all social media that emphasize the relationality among users, rather than a “top-down” one-way distribution channel. The question is whether or not media has always been “social”? Indeed, greater emphasis on user participation, or active consumerism, has emerged in recent years. However, it may be possible to say that consumers have always been active; despite more limited entry points and freedoms, consumers have always “decoded” (to use Stuart Hall’s name for it) media content and reproduced it socially, at will.

what is social marketing?

Social marketing is the use of marketing strategies to produce social change. Social media are technologies, services and platforms that enable horizontal, nonlinear community-based communications and information management. This course teaches students how to design and execute effective social marketing campaigns that use high-impact market strategies and the latest innovations in social media to influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of select communities and populations.