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?
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Because Florida has such a large population of Hispanics, I’ve been thinking about the “macho” culture. It seems to me that now the macho image is of a man who does not care for anyone but himself. I think it would be possible to turn that completely around and make the “macho” man the one who takes care of his woman. Not only does he not put her in danger (STDs) but it is his mission in life to protect his woman. By “his” woman, I mean the woman with whom he is having sexual relations. A social marketing campaign could address who is more macho: the man who protects others or the man who cares only for himself.