This document proposes a research agenda for social marketing. It identifies five potential areas for research: (1) developing social marketing specific theory, (2) studying campaign failures, (3) analyzing competition within social marketing, (4) understanding the politics of social change, and (5) examining relationships in social marketing. The document discusses each area in more detail and suggests next steps like conducting a Delphi panel to further develop and prioritize the proposed research agenda.

1. The Antipodean Agenda
Future directions from Australian Social Marketing
(re)Ignite the Fire VII
@stephendann
Stephen.dann@anu.edu.au

2. This is an industry paper
My industry happens to be academia

3. Dr Stephen Dann
• You may remember me from…
• Dann, S. (2010). Redefining social marketing with contemporary commercial
marketing definitions. Journal of Business Research, 63(2), 147-153.
• Dann, S., Harris, P., Mort, G. S., Fry, M. L., & Binney, W. (2007). Reigniting the
fire: a contemporary research agenda for social, political and nonprofit
marketing. Journal of Public Affairs, 7(3), 291-304.

4. The Objective
• Develop a series of research artefacts
• Three Criteria
• A stated domain of interest,
• Yet to be resolved to the satisfaction of others
• Capable of divisible research
• Develop an agenda
• Qualified, quantified, prioritised

5. These are not ten word answers
• Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They're the tip
of the sword. Here's my question: What are the next ten words of
your answer?
• "The West Wing" Game On (2002)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745624/quotes

6. Methods*Madness
The Procedure
• Observation
• WSMC15
• ANZMAC14
• Social marketing conversations
• Aggregation
• Literature Reviews
• Depth interviews
• Integration
• This project
Personal Sources
• Academic Interviews
• Research Masters, PhD
• Lecturers, Senior Lecturers
• Associate Professors
• Professors, Directors of Centers
• Synonymized for the ethics
• A Senior Research in the Field of
Social Change from regional National
University

7. Problematic Ethical Considerations
• Project has been almost blocked three times
• Researcher is known to the sample
• Reputation is what opened the doors for the interview, reputation is what nearly left the
project in dry dock
• Cohort is too small for anonymous / synonymous responses
• There’s 43 universities, with less than 43 marketing schools, with less than 43 research
clusters…
• Transcriptions*
• Somebody’s RA leaked something important to the press OR
• Legal discovery was used on transcript data
• Not that I’d worry about ‘Big Industry’ reading my notes, but hey…
*This nearly sank the boat. Entirely. A flat refusal by my ethics committee to release funds for the study because interview transcriptions may exist. There goes the method…

8. Why the academy?
• This is for the supervisors
• Honours, research masters, PhD
• This is for the ECRS
• Problem solvers
• This is for the Academy
• Solve a problem, build a solution
• Pure Academy
• Develop a foundation for the applied
Pure
Academic
Applied
Academic
Applied
Industry

9. Research Agenda
(Draft)

10. Five Items for Consideration
• Agenda A:The Need for Social Marketing Originated Theory
• Agenda B: The Composition of Failure
• Agenda C: Competition/Competitor Analysis | The Boundaries
• Agenda D: The Politics of Social Change
• Agenda E: The Relationship Question

11. Agenda A: What do we call our own?
• Social marketing specific theory
• What wicked solutions are unique to us?
• What steps have been taken to identify, claim, and resource a school
of marketing thought from within social marketing?
• Does a distinct cohesive scholarly body of authors, theories and institutions
exist within the global pool of social marketing knowledge?
• Does a fundamental truth of social marketing exist?
• Are the histories of social marketing being adequately documented?

12. An awkward question(because none of us are getting any younger, and some of us don’t practice what we preach)
Are we preparing for the collective loss of institutional social marketing
wisdom that time and inevitability are bringing towards us?
Retirement | Death | Selling out to the Corporate dollar

13. Agenda B: The Composition of Failure
Where are the campaign autopsies? We know more than we need to
know about aersol cheese, everyone can tell you about the flaws of the
“New Coke” and commercial failures of long dead airlines. Why do we
know so little about the social marketing that didn’t fire?
• Commercial and Practitioners acknowledge failure
• This is an area on non-adoptive behaviour
• We don’t need to fail fast and often, we need to document with the same rigor whether
it’s success or failure

14. Agenda B: Chasm between Practice and Publish
• Academia doesn’t want to know
• Academia likes
• success stories,
• feel good findings, and
• correlations with pretty letters.
• Big puffy charts
• Hypotheses that pan out
• Failure provides none of the above
• Practice needs to know.
• Practice wants
• Benchmarks
• Warning signs
• Explanations
• Diagnostic tests
• Support to explain what happened
• Failure provides all of the above

15. Agenda C: Competition/Competitor Analysis
• Three tiers
• competitive pressures facing
• social marketing (Discipline, domain, journal outputs)
• Social marketers ($, grants, eyes of the ministers)
• Social marketing offers (offer versus alternatives, inertia, commercial and spinwash)
Specialist Field (tax accountants within accounting)
versus
Generalised Field (The 1980s “Communications is Marketing”)

16. Agenda D: The Politics of Social Change
“Social Marketing as means to translate the intention of policy in actual behavioral
change”
When the Government said they wanted less regulation interfering with people’s
lives, we never thought they meant social marketing campaigns for healthy eating
would be withdrawn...We thought they just meant stuff about the banks.
Are we seen as Agents of the Crown?
The Nanny State?
Big Brother?

17. Agenda D: Understand the political implications
• Surely this is a libertarian government’s wet dream – the “self service
individually responsible societal change” is justifying placing all of the
blame on the consumer, and requiring none of the government
spending on support.”
What are the consequences of social marketing for political agendas if
we are all of the social change agenda?

18. Patrol the Boundaries
Commercial
Marketing
Greenwash
Corporate
Social
Marketing
Evidence or
Ideology driven?
Social change
or
political campaign?Freedom to comply
or
free choice?
Who takes the claim?
Who wears the blame?
What ideology
is not compatible
with social marketing?

19. Agenda D: Emergent outside of social marketing
• Discussions of the role of the state
• Discussion of nudge
• Mols, F., Haslam, S. A., Jetten, J., & Steffens, N. K. (2015). Why a nudge is not
enough: A social identity critique of governance by stealth. European Journal
of Political Research, 54(1), 81-98.
Where does the state draw the line on intervention?

20. Agenda E: The Relationship Question
• Part A: Big Data, Big Society, Big Problem
• Yes we can, no we shouldn’t, and before somebody does, we really need to
talk about why big data predictive social change is that stuff the dystopian
novelists write about.
• “Hello, we’ve detected from your Amazon Kindle reading material, Tindr and
Facebook activity that you’re 56.7% more likely to require an STI screen… Mrs
Robinson. Please confirm your check up date from the range of free times
we’ve observed in your weekly FitBit routine.”

21. For every sufficiently advanced
dystopia, there’s somebody looking
misty eyed into the distance saying
“I could make that nightmare into a
reality, and it would be glorious…”

22. Agenda E
• Part B: Relationship Marketing
• Trust
• Does social marketing violate the principle of trust?
• Commitment
• Do we provide committed resourcing when developing a social marketing programme?
• Do we expect commitment from the end-user?
• Reciprocity
• Where does the invisible hand scratch itself?

23. Steps from here
• Delphi Panel (Europa)
• Hi
• Delphi Panel (Oceania)
• Later.
• Confirmatory Study
• The Mixed Industry and Academy Survey

24. A Prioritization
• Understand the political implications of social marketing
• Neutral toolkits with ideological underpinning
• Why should the state intervene to save the individual from themselves?
• Why should the individual intervene to save the state from themselves?
This is a discussion that needs to be open, brutal, factionalized and an
accelerant for the evolution of Social Marketing Schools of Thought

25. (re)Ignite the Fire