12 BANDT.COM.AU OCTOBER 30 2009 We’re about to renovate the office, and it has got me thinking. Agencies spend a lot of time and cash making sure their physical environments look, feel and are creative. We all want our offices to be spaces that feed the inquiring mind, inspire thought and innovation and encourage collaboration. But as I sat contemplating carpet samples, paint swatches and schematics to reshape our new environment around the organic flow of a lotus leaf, I started to think about the shape of a couple of other things. Namely creative teams. In the beginning they were teams of one. The writers cracked the idea solo then slipped the copy under the door of the art department and had a fag while they waited for the ad to spit out. Bill Bernbach revolutionised all that, bringing writers and art directors together some 50 or so years ago. And that’s how it’s pretty much stayed. Teams ‘owned’ clients or jobs. That’s how they built their reps. Built their agencies. Got famous. Some specialised in generating ideas above-the-line, some below, and – more recently – some in the digital space. Now it’s time for things to change. And it’s probably going to scare the crap out of lesser teams. Because now, once a team gets a great idea, they have to share it round. And where two has always been company, now we need a crowd. The reason? No surprises here. Category defining ideas aren’t just ads any more. They’re not websites. And (despite what many award entry films in the last year would have you believe) they’re not a few mentions on Facebook or Twitter either. The ideas that are going to generate paradigm shifts in consumer behaviour tomorrow require the highest levels of expertise and understanding in all of the above. And probably a lot more new channels we don’t even know about yet. For great ideas to achieve their potential and truly surround their targets, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s more than a two-person job. A quick look at the long list of credits next to benchmark campaigns in award annuals will show you want I mean. Amazing ideas will still spring from the individual brilliance of unique creative minds. It’s been that way in every human endeavour since time immemorial. And it’s why we do what we do, and clients don’t. But it’s what happens next that will define amazing campaigns – and agencies. Truly creative people have always understood that the more ideas you give away, the more you get back. Well, their time is here. The age of true, selfless creative collaboration has arrived. Generally speaking, the term ‘social marketing’ refers to the application of commercial marketing practices to the not-for-profit world of government, trusts and charities. A core objective is changing behaviour for the social good, and practitioners have enviable marketing metrics to work with. How many of us in the commercial sector can boast that our marketing efforts have actually helped save lives or make the world a nicer place? There’s a good deal of documentation on the effectiveness of campaigns encouraging Australians to give up smoking, stop drink-driving and so on. Social marketers get to play with the 4Ps of the old-school marketing mix. Their Product is behaviour – what they’re ‘selling’ is a behaviour change, like slowing down when driving, covering up in the sun, or making a donation. Price is the cost to the citizen of changing (or not changing) behaviour, and this can range from painful death to mild guilt, depending on the issue. Place is about the influence of physical location on behaviour, as anyone living in a bushfire zone would be able to articulate very clearly. And Promotion comes down to classic marketing practices. Nielsen’s latest report on top advertisers has government as the biggest spender on traditional media, once federal and state government spends are combined. So that’s how social marketers roll with the traditional 4Ps. But social marketing is special – they have a marketing mix with two extra 6Ps, namely Partnerships and Policy. Partnerships is about working collaboratively with other organisations. With limited budgets and resources, partnerships can be critical to success. The other extra P of the social marketing mix is Policy. This is where politics comes in and where connecting different policy agendas can maximise the overall impact of a social marketing campaign. World Vision is Australia’s largest charitable organisation and its core mission is to tackle global poverty. Poverty has many different causes and they all link into different aspects of the policy agenda – employment, education, health, housing. In recent years World Vision has connected the policy areas of climate change and global poverty, and in doing so has been able to increase financial donations from individuals and governments to fund new projects. So they are the 6Ps of the social marketing mix. If you disagree or think there should be other Ps, please comment on the B&T Blog. comment CREATIVE FENG SHUI NOT A SOLO EFFORT THE SIX Ps OF SOCIAL MARKETING TO MAKE A COMMENT EMAIL [email protected] Nick Condon Managing director, DDB Melbourne Adam Joseph Insights manager, Herald Sun BT.OCT30.PG012.pdf Page 12 22/10/09, 2:04 PM