While several family planning or even health campaigns have been effectively launched in Pakistan, they have sometimes faced unexpected opposition. The polio eradication campaign, for example, was banned by extremist elements in several parts of the NWFP last year
Spreading knowledge about different circumstances and their impact on the lives of people around the world is an intrinsic feature of the media revolution. Gradually, media tools like advertising and marketing have also been adapted to address varied social development issues, particularly over the past two decades. This adaptation has its benefits, as well as shortcomings, in helping deprived segments of society.
The origins of concepts like social marketing as a discipline can be traced to assertions in the early 1970s that marketing techniques can potentially be applied to many other sectors besides business. Professionals working in the non-profit sector were initially hesitant to waste public money on marketing which they considered to be too intrusive and manipulative for social causes.
It took about twenty years for social marketing concepts to become widely accepted as effective means to achieve development goals. In the health sector alone, tackling issues such as nutrition, substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, and malaria have since benefited from social marketing.
Advertising can also contribute to promoting economic development, environmental protection and social responsibility due to its specific role in the marketplace. To achieve sustainability through the market, effective competition is essential to promote innovation and efficiency, and more varied choices for consumers.
Competition in turn relies on advertising to bring down the price of goods and services. Advertising does so by indirectly increasing consumer choice through the provision of information about products available in the marketplace.
Besides facilitating pricing and product improvement through consumer choice, there are many opportunities for advertising to promote sustainable development more directly as well. It is not uncommon for product campaigns to often include health education or environmental messages, for example, either as part of corporate or public service campaigns, or else by highlighting the environmental, social and/or economic performance of companies.
However, on the flipside, advertising has been blamed for spreading unsustainable consumption patterns around the world, and for fuelling excessive consumption. Perhaps this is to misunderstand what advertising can and cannot do.
Proponents argue that advertising cannot make people buy things they don’t want or need, nor can it change values or create new values. However, it is very skilled in detecting new values and trends in consumers, and using them as a basis for accentuating product information which imbibe these desired attributes. Therefore, as the recognition for sustainability increases in consumers, they can make more informed product choices on the basis of information provided by advertising.
Development agencies can also undertake public advocacy using marketing and advertising principles to highlight the need for greater corporate social responsibility. Usually, such campaigns are based on research studies on important topics, such as adverse impact of unregulated use of groundwater by bottled water companies, which can exacerbate the groundwater scarcity for local farmers.
Clearly the development value of social marketing or advertising is not only theoretical but has also been put to practice within numerous rich and poor countries alike. For instance, using social marketing, a non-profit organisation called Population Services International has implemented innovative youth-oriented programmes in Cameroon, Madagascar, and Rwanda to prevent unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections among young adults.
In addition to advertising products like contraceptives, which is a common feature of social marketing campaigns concerning family planning, this organisation has used a creative mix of commercial marketing and interpersonal approaches to motivate behaviour change, or else seek medical treatment, if required. The formulated campaigns were informed by research concerning the specific barriers facing the intended target audiences.
Rather than adopting a preaching mode, the mass media campaigns initiated by this project used the television, radio, print media, and peer educators to treat the targeted youth as savvy consumers and portrayed safe behaviour as a socially acceptable choice for them. Resultantly, this effort paid off by bringing about measurable changes in youth perceptions and behaviour in countries where HIV/AIDS is a serious problem.
Population Services International has also worked in Pakistan with a local partner organisation to help curb unsustainable family sizes in the country. The campaigns devised for Pakistan successfully began to target men in their family planning campaigns in order to motivate them to take their responsibility for family planning more seriously.
In the mid-nineties, these efforts were funded by the German Government Development Bank, which enabled the initiation of the fifth largest (out of more than 50) social marketing project in the world. In 2003, two other bilateral donor agencies, along with the United Nations Population Fund, began contributing resources in social marketing programmes of Green Star to reach women in the semi-urban and rural areas of Pakistan, and offer them a wider range of options, better information and closer linkages with service delivery outlets. Measures such as these have played a significant role in curbing the population growth rate of Pakistan over the past decade.
While several family planning or even health campaigns have been effectively launched in Pakistan, they have sometimes faced unexpected opposition. The polio eradication campaign, for example, was banned by extremist elements in several parts of the NWFP last year. Even more recently, the office of an internationally reputable reproductive health and family planning NGO was brutally attacked in Mansehra.
While such instances of retaliation are not really provoked by social marketing campaigns, these campaigns do often challenge social values and can cause offence if handled insensitively. Also media and advertising campaigns can be better used to counter the criticism on ground, subsequent to identifying the underlying reasons for it.
Moreover, social marketing or advertising must remain focused on their message and its intended audiences, and try to avoid placing organisations and individuals in the media spotlight, which does no more then undermine genuine public appeal.
Thus instead of having spending millions on billboards, or on buying prime airtime to inform urban listeners of radio channels like FM 89 about the need for educating children, media pundits should have taken their awareness raising message to the streets of areas with low literacy rates. Failure to effectively reach out to the masses obviously dilutes the intended impact and turns social marketing into nothing more than a mere publicity stunt.
SOURCE:www.dailytimes.com.pk
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