marketing social missions—adopting social marketing for social entrepreneurship? a conceptual...
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International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector MarketingInt. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark. (2012)Published online in Wiley Online Library(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nvsm.1434
Marketing social missions—adopting socialmarketing for social entrepreneurship? Aconceptual analysis and case studyJudith Madill1*,† and Rafael Ziegler21Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada2GETIDOS, University of Greifswald, Institute of Ecological Economy Research, Berlin, Germany
� In aiming for voluntary behavioral change, social marketing may be particularly attractive for social
entrepreneurs, but conversely, they may not have the resources or knowledge for conducting full-blown
social marketing campaigns. In response to the growing importance and role of social entrepreneurship
in tackling social problems and the lack of research concerning how social marketing may play a role
in such organizations, the purpose of this paper is to develop a deeper conceptual understanding of how
social marketing may be of use to social entrepreneurial organizations. The research reports on a case
analysis of One Drop and its Aqua expo and the utilization of social marketing in pursuit of its goal to
achieve water conservation in the Northern Hemisphere. The research shows the adoption of elements
of social marketing but not a conscious adoption of social marketing as a strategy.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords: social marketing, social entrepreneurship, case study, water conservation
Introduction
Social marketing appears to offer potential for socialentrepreneurship. Consider, for example, Ecotact andits chief executive officer David Kuria, a social entre-preneur with a mission to improve access to publicsanitation in East Africa. His considerable success hasgained him Ashoka and Schwab fellowships as wellas a UN-Habitat best practice award.1 This success is
*Correspondence to: Judith Madill, Telfer School of Manage-ment, University of Ottawa, 55 Laurier Ave E., Ottawa, Canada.E-mail: [email protected]†Professor and Holder of the Desmarais Professorship in Marketing1Ashoka is a global association for the promotion of social entrepre-neurs. It seeks to identify and promote individuals with “systems-changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems”,www.ashoka.org, Accessed 11 May 2012. The Schwab foundationfor Social Entrepreneurship works at the regional and global level tohighlight and advance leadingmodels of sustainable social innovation,http://www.schwabfound.org/sf/index.htm, Accessed 11 May 2012.The research of Dr. Ziegler has been supported by a grant of the Stif-tung Mercator.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
partly attributed to “effective social marketing strat-egies to promote usage and understanding of cleanwater and sanitation’s value.”2 Yet, Ecotact doesnot have a unit for social marketing nor staff withformal training in social marketing. The exampleillustrates what to our knowledge holds true of muchof social entrepreneurship: there may well be use forand of social marketing—and, perhaps, even someespecially innovative social marketing—however,we may observe different degrees in the formality ofsocial marketing as practiced in such organizations.In aiming for voluntary behavioral change, socialmarketing may be particularly attractive for socialentrepreneurs, but conversely, they may not havethe resources or knowledge for conducting full-blownsocial marketing campaigns (Madill, 2010; Madill
2http://www.globalwaterchallenge.org/programs/projects-detail.php?id=814, last accessed 27.05.2011.
Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark., 2012
DOI: 10.1002/nvsm
Judith Madill and Rafael Ziegler
et al., 2010). Rather, they may well be drawn toadapt elements of social marketing in the pursuitof their visions. Thinking about their work in termsof social marketing might be a novel perspective for(some) social entrepreneurs and offer them ways toreconsider what they are already doing or not doingin their efforts to achieve social transformation.Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to con-
sider the application of social marketing in socialentrepreneurial organizations (SEOs). Specifically, weconsider conceptually how social marketing may beof use to social entrepreneurial organizations and thenreport on qualitative empirical case research designedto further our understanding of the role and adoptionof social marketing practices in such organizations.This paper will introduce the social marketing
approach, review briefly the literature on socialentrepreneurship to clarify our use of the term andprovide a context for considering whether socialmarketing might be an approach to be adoptedand/or adapted by social entrepreneurs, introduceour case study, One Drop, and explore what (if any)elements of social marketing it utilizes.
Social marketing and socialentrepreneurship: a brief examination ofthe literature
Social marketing
Current definitions of social marketing suggest that itseeks to influence social behaviors “not to benefit themarketer but to benefit the target audience and thegeneral society. Social marketing programs, then, bydefinition, are generic marketing programs carriedout to change behaviors that are in the individual’sor society’s interests” (Andreasen and Kotler, 2003).Social marketing is “the application of the marketingdiscipline to social issues and causes,[that] providesa framework for developing innovative solutionsto social problems that have long perplexed andfrustrated us” (Lefebvre, 2009: 143).Andreasen (2002) proposes that the benchmarks
for identifying an approach that could be legitimatelycalled social marketing include the following:
• Voluntary behavior change is the goal• Projects consistently use audience research• There is careful segmentation of target audiences
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
• The central element of any influence strategy iscreating attractive and motivational exchangeswith target audiences
• The strategy attempts to use all four Ps (product,price, promotion, and place or distribution) ofthe traditional marketing mix; for example, it isnot just advertising or communications
• Careful attention is paid to the competition facedby the desired behavior
Andreasen (2002) points out that programs do not
have to have all elements to qualify for the label“social marketing.” However, campaigns that arepurely communication campaigns are not socialmarketing. Hastings (2003) and Desai (2009) pro-pose that just as relationships have become criticalin developing strategy for generic and commercialforms of marketing, they are a critical feature forsocial marketing.Social marketing has been applied in a wide variety
of situations; however, “. . . and leaders of the fieldremain concerned lest the upward movement shouldplateau prematurely before social marketing’s fullpotential is realized” (Andreasen, 2002:3). Conse-quently, the critical discussion of the context of socialentrepreneurship is of both theoretical and practicalinterest.
Barriers to the adoption of social marketing
Andreasen (2002) writes that many practitioners andmanagers are unaware either of social marketing or ofits potential for organizing and implementing majorsocial change. Because of this lack of awareness,promising potential campaigns such as those thatmight be undertaken by social entrepreneurs maynot use social marketing approaches. Andreasen(2002) also notes that because there has been insuf-ficient documentation of success stories, potentialadopters of this approach may not be aware of itspotential in achieving large scale social change. Lastly,Andreasen (2002) notes that social marketing maybe perceived as manipulative and not “community-based.” The latter is a trait that would be of consider-able concern to many social entrepreneurs. Insummary, social marketing research suggests thatalthough the potential for social marketing is con-siderable, a number of barriers exist to the adoptionof social marketing.
Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark., 2012
DOI: 10.1002/nvsm
Marketing social missions
The academic literature appears to be silent onthe question of whether people can do “socialmarketing” without having been exposed to theacademic discipline or at least know the term.Given that the field of marketing is very applied,it is likely that a number of practitioners may haveintuitive understanding of approaches to strategythat the academic marketing field has labeled(e.g., the 4P’s). Such practitioners may indeed beengaging in marketing or social marketing practiceswithout labeling them as such or in fact evenknowing that they are utilizing marketing or socialmarketing practices—rather, they are just goodpractices. In a related vein, Friestat and Wright(1994, 1995) show that lay people and advertisersmay not know the names of academic theoriesbut still have their own theories of persuasion andconviction that, in many cases, line up with theacademic ones. Accordingly, it is possible that socialmarketing may be utilized among practitioners whoare without acquaintance with social marketingacademic terminology. Such lack of awareness, inline with Andreasen’s barrier analysis, may preventa systematic adoption of social marketing as astrategic approach.The next section moves to an introduction and
examination of the concept of social entrepreneur-ship and considers adoption of social marketingfrom the social entrepreneurship perspective.
Social entrepreneurship
The term “social entrepreneurship” is used todescribe activities that combine “social” goals with“entrepreneurial” approaches. For many, the firstimpression is paradoxical: social entrepreneurshipfocuses on achieving both societal goals and makingprofit? Discussions and disagreements over the“meaning” of social entrepreneurship abound inthe academic literature. A key contestation concernsthe role that business approaches play in socialentrepreneurship. In a survey article on conceptionsof social enterprise and social entrepreneurship inEurope and the United States, Defourny and Nyssens(2010) distinguish an “earned income” school ofthought from a “social innovation” school of thought.According to the first school, an earned-incomestrategy is an essential feature of the definition along
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
with a primary social mission. For example, it is oftenheld that at least 50% of incomemust bemarket-basedfor an organization to qualify as a social enterprise.According to the second “school”, social entrepre-neurship is distinguished by the carrying out of novelideas for societal change. According to this school,earned income is not an essential issue, rather socialentrepreneurship is “a process of change in thedelivery of public goods and social or environmentalservices” (Nicholls, 2010, 16).There are arguments in favor and against both
“schools”. We note that the “social innovationschool” resonates with the terminology of socialentrepreneurship as coined by Ashoka: “Socialentrepreneurs . . . are ambitious and persistent,tackling major social issues and offering new ideasfor wide-scale change. Rather than leaving societalneeds to the government or business sectors, socialentrepreneurs find what is not working and solvethe problem by changing the system, spreading thesolution, and persuading entire societies to take newleaps.” (http://www.ashoka.org/social_entrepreneur,last accessed 26.05.2011). The social innovationapproach is understood to require the carrying outof new ideas (Swedberg, 2009). “Carrying out” canbe understood in an ambitious sense as “systemschange” at the societal level. Contributors from socialentrepreneurship theory and practice frequentlyemphasize change that is “large scale” and that elimi-nates the underlying causes of the problem. In a moremodest sense, “carrying out” can simply mean theimplementation of more incremental ideas and/orthat the idea can be sustained. In this paper, wefollow the social innovation approach to socialentrepreneurship. Adopting this approach focusesattention on the possible links between socialmarketing and social entrepreneurship as both areseeking solutions to society’s most pressing problems.Accordingly, we offer the following propositions toguide the research:
Proposition one: In aiming for voluntary behavioralchange, social marketingmay be particularly attractivefor third-sector actors: they do not have the coercivepower of the state and cannot legislate behaviorchange, and they typically do not have the monetaryresources of business actors to develop and markettechnological consumer products. Rather, a keyresource is inspiring social and ecological goals.
Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark., 2012
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Judith Madill and Rafael Ziegler
Proposition two: Becausemany social entrepreneur-ship organizations typically lack the resources for afull-blown social marketing campaign (for example“audience research”) and because we expect thatmost social entrepreneurs are not knowledgeableor trained in social marketing, we would expectthem to adopt elements of social marketing ratherthan implement full-blown campaigns or, in lightof proposition one, to be intuitively drawn to adoptsuch elements. The case will examine which ele-ments of social marketing appear to be adopted bythis social entrepreneurship organization and howthey are utilized.
Methodology/One Drop selection
Because there is a dearth of research with respect tosocial marketing in SEOs, it is both appropriate andnecessary to undertake qualitative research, in theform of case research, in order to build understandingof this phenomenon and to begin to develop theoryin the area.
Selection of the case: One Drop
We selected One Drop as our case study because itmeets the concept of social entrepreneurship asdeveloped previously:
(1) An organization with a primary societal goal—inthis case, the global transformative goal: “Waterfor All”
(2) An organization that gives primacy to this societalgoal (rather than to private interest): our casestudy focuses on a not-for profit, a foundation(although one with close links to the corpora-tion Cirque du Soleil)
(3) An organization that pursues an innovative wayof achieving its societal goal—the Aqua Expodeveloped for the North will be introduced indetail in the succeeding text
(4) A nonessential but frequent element: an organi-zation with an entrepreneurial person as founder(i.e., a feature strongly emphasized by organiza-tions such as Ashoka and the Skoll foundation);here, Guy Laliberté, not only a founder of OneDrop but also a successful business entrepreneur(founder of the Cirque du Soleil).
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We wanted a case study for which the concept ofsocial marketing is likely to be relevant. “One Drop”is a nongovernmental organization founded by GuyLaliberté in October 2007 in Montreal with themission: “Water for all, all for water: To fight povertyby providing access to water and raising awarenessamong individuals and communities about theneed for mobilization in order to make safe wateraccessible to all, in sufficient quantity, today andtomorrow” (homepage: http://www.onedrop.org/en/DiscoverOneDrop_Canada/MissionAndValues.aspx).Friends convinced Laliberté that one of the most effec-tive ways to fight poverty would be to improve accessto drinkingwater and sanitation and to this end foster aglobal sense of responsibility of “water for all”. Thismission motivates One Drop’s two main fields ofaction: (1) integrated water and sanitation communityprojects in the global South, and especially in LatinAmerica and (2) what it calls “social mobilization”around changing water consumption and pollutionbehaviors in the global North, and especially inCanada. In the case study of One Drop, we have anorganization that in the global North seeks to not onlyeducate people but to inspire them to act. In thispaper, we focus on the activities of One Drop in theNorthern Hemisphere and their flagship product“Aqua” that is described in the Findings section.
Case study methodology
In our case studymethodology, we utilized qualitativemethods to explore the conceptual approachoutlined earlier: conducting interviews with keypersonnel at One Drop (all interviews were taped,transcribed, and analyzed), participatory observa-tion of Aqua as well as content analysis of the OneDrop and Aqua website, and Facebook pages and avariety of background materials and documentsincluding evaluations of Aqua provided by One Drop.The interviews were open ended and includedquestions and discussion around such topics as themeaning and purpose of social mobilization, thegoals of One Drop and Aqua, whether consumerbehavior change is a goal, whether changing policies,cultural norms is a goal, issues around the targetmarket and strategies developed for reaching andattracting that market, issues around evaluationand follow up with consumers.
Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark., 2012
DOI: 10.1002/nvsm
Marketing social missions
After the data were collected and preliminary con-clusions reached, the work was presented to fourkey members of the One Drop team on 2 August2011 (i.e., those mainly responsible for social mobili-zation in the North). We received feedback and clarifi-cation regarding observations and conclusions fromthis group. Social marketing was explicitly discussedat this meeting. The discussion confirmed that thegroup was unfamiliar with formal social marketingapproaches and training. The group also noted thatthe social marketing approach might be quite helpfulto them and had some similarity to the social mobiliza-tion concept used by One Drop. Insights from allthese data collection opportunities were utilized inthe findings and discussion concerning this case study.
Findings: One Drop
Purpose of One Drop
According to Nicole Ollivier (director of the SocialMobilization program), One Drop seeks to “movepeople, [to] touch them starting from the arts.” Thegoal is not to shock people but “to inspire them. Wewant them to fall in love with water and to get outof our show: “Wow, water is beautiful, water isprecious, I want to take care of it. . .we want to getthem engaged.” “Social mobilization” for her is athreefold approach using arts to entertain, to educate,and to inspire for action in order to conserve andprotect water resources. She also noted that “. . .weare building tools, activities, campaigns, regardingwater issues, but always trying to use arts andculture,” and “We want to inspire people.” Thesequotes support proposition one suggesting that thisorganization is consciouslyworking to inspire change.
Description of Aqua and its target group
One Drop has pursued it goals through the creationof an Aqua exhibition—a multimedia event in whichparticipants are “actor and spectator”.3 The firstAqua expo took place in the Montréal ScienceCentre (May 2009) and attracted 95,000 visitors. Itwas then moved to the Canadian Museum of Nature
3All quotes in this section are from the content analysis of the OneDrop Aqua homepage: http://www.onedrop.org/en/projects/projects-overview/AquaNorthProject/Aqua/Experience.aspx
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
in Ottawa (22 May to 6 September 2010) where itattracted a further 65,000 visitors. (It was movedto Quebec City for the period 27 October 2010 until10 April 2011, but these exhibition numbers are notavailable to us for this paper). The expo is targetedto children between 10 and 14 years.4 Accordingto Ollivier, the role of children as multipliers moti-vated the choice of the target group: “. . .when youcatch a teenager, the teenager will talk to their olderpeople and so on.”So how does Aqua entertain, educate, and inspire
this target group to act? Participatory observation inthe Aqua exhibition (Ottawa, Canada, September2010)—we conducted repeated and independentvisits—show the expo to be effectively a journeythrough three rooms:
Room 1: The first room serves as a gathering room.In the dark, participants pick up a “drop” (an illumi-nated, blue water drop). The atmosphere is playful(screens with films of children jumping into water)and a bit mysterious (image of the “blue planet”behind a water fall). The visitors pass through thiswater fall into the second room.
Room 2: This room is also in semidarkness and isshaped like the arena of a circus. Participants areguided to a water pump in the middle of the room.While water is flowing from the pump, a voice tellsthe participants that if they believe, then their dreamscan come true. Then the water flow from the pumpstops, and the circular walls of the rooms becomethe screens for a story aboutwater: from “water is life”and the water cycle around the globe to the humanuses of water and the final, illustrated observation thatevery 8 seconds a child dies from diseases linked tocontaminated water. Here, all the participant’s waterdrops switch off simultaneously—to switch on againonly when the water from the pump returns in themiddle. “You can make a difference”, the voice says.
Room 3: Following the dramatic finale in the secondroom, participants are guided to computers wherethey can register individual profiles (email andaddress) and commit to one concrete action froma selection of eight possibilities presented to themon the computer screens:
4Interview Ollivier.
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“I will get involved in my community” (10,105commitments5)“I will use both sides of sheets of paper”(26,076 commitments)“I will cut back on bottled water” (30,515commitments)“I will return unused drugs to the pharmacy”(10,226 commitments)“I will use environmentally friendly hygieneand cleaning products” (16,417 commitments)“I will swap a meat meal for a vegetarianmeal” (12,922 commitments)“I will install a device to reduce toilet water”(10,105 commitments)“Another way I am preserving water” (no dataare available).
Cutting back on bottled water, using both sides ofsheets of paper as well as using environmentallyfriendly hygiene and cleaning products are the mostpopular behaviors committed to by the Aqua con-sumers. These are very specific behavior changesand together account for 73,000 commitments tochange. At the exit of this third room, participantsare told about the One Drop Homepage and receivea final stamp on the hand: a drop.
Analysis of expo with a focus on socialmarketing and social entrepreneurship
(1) Does One Drop through Aqua attempt toachieve behavior change? It appears thatboth awareness raising and behavior change areintended. Both researchers noted during theirrespective participant observation visits to Aquathat the awareness-raising has a very thin cogni-tive dimension. It was observed that Aqua com-municates only very few facts about water—andfocuses strongly on telling a story that taps intoemotions and imagination. This observation isfurther supported by interviews with the OneDrop Aqua team. As Ollivier (interview) puts it,“creating a fantasy story and experience linkedto a social message; and that will lead to, we hope,to behavioral change. . .that’s our pari [bet]”. And
5Numbers from One Drop Homepage, 20.04.2011.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
to this end, Aqua offers in room 3 concreteoptions for behavioral change in the form of theaforementioned listed commitments.
(2) Does One Drop conduct audience research?Aqua has established a target audience and aswell as collecting web statistics on the behaviorcommitments (cited previously); it is also inter-ested in learning about and has conductedresearch concerning the results of its expo. Animpact evaluation conducted by consultinggroup Réseau Circum, retained by Aqua Expo inOttawa, asked 750 visitors at the entrance of theexpo and 750 visitors after the expo regardingtheir intention to commit to the behavioralcommitments suggested in room 3 (RéseauCircum, 2010). Their survey finds a statisticallysignificant increase in the intention to commitacross all seven behaviors (27% for goal 1, 21%for goal 2, 56% for goal 3, 9% for goal 4, 16% forgoal 5, 13% for goal 6, and 14% increase for goal7). It also asked an independent control group(i.e., not attending the audience) the samequestions, which demonstrated no significantdifferences in the control group and the groupsurveyed before the visit regarding their atti-tudes. The fact that Aqua Expo managementconducted such an evaluation suggests interestin behavior change (and also resonates well withthe “sense of accountability to the constituenciesserved and for the outcomes created”, anessential aspect of social entrepreneurship(Dees, 2001). The evaluation provides evidencethat Aqua achieved a strong short-term effect inthe intention to commit to behavioral change. Asecond evaluation conducted 4months latersuggests that the organization has not been ableto succeed in a concretization of these commit-ments (Réseau Circum, 2011, 3). It is in thisrespect also noteworthy that the organizationhad intended to send positive follow-up emailssomemonths after the expo visit but has not doneso yet. It therefore remains to be seen how theorganization learns from the expo experiences inMontreal and Ottawa for its next expos.
(3) Segmentation of target audiences and selec-tion of target market: It does not appear thatmarket segmentation was conducted by OneDrop. No evidence from any of the backgrounddocuments or interviews showed that a formal
Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark., 2012
DOI: 10.1002/nvsm
Marketing social missions
segmentation analysis was performed. However,a youth (age 10 to 14) target market was selected(as noted in the interviews and stated in theteaching support documents produced by OneDrop as a companion document for teachers toassist in teaching the selected target market aboutwater issues). During selection of this targetmarket, evidence suggests that there was con-sideration of the advantages and disadvantagesof selection of this market. As stated by SylviePaqueret (One Drop Scientific Committee inter-viewed 8 August 2010) when asked if a targetmarket was selected: “Yes, youth. Which is forme ambivalent target, because I’m sometimesconflicted—there are two general apprehen-sions on that: that we change society by youngpeople, but the other is that we cannot alwaysput our responsibility on the children. And itcould be that making the issue of water aneducational one, could have the secondaryeffect of depoliticizing the question. Oftenwhen we take a question to education, the con-sequence is to depoliticize the debate and I’mnot sure that in the long term it’s a good ideato depoliticize the water issue.” The rationalefor selecting this target market was stated byNicole Ollivier (Interview 21 August 2010):“. . .when you catch a teenager, the teenagerwill talk to their older people and so on.” Theimplication of these quotes is that the groupgave careful consideration to the selection ofthe chosen target audience but that marketsegmentation was not done.
(4) Creating an attractive and motivatingexchange with the target audience? Theexchange created by One Drop through itsAqua exposition is one where consumers arebeing asked to change behaviors regardingwater consumption and pollution (e.g., drinkless bottled water). In return, they gain a worldwhere water is a beautiful aspect of our sharedworld. This exchange is shown artistically inthe second room of the Aqua exposition thatshows the beauty and use of our world’s waterresources and then moves to show throughimages, lighting, and sound what happenswhen they are threatened through neglect andpollution. Finally, room 3 asks for commitmentsto behavioral change.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Aqua does seem to serve as an attractive trig-ger for the “intention to commit”, and via thedevice of using the third room to register onlineprofiles (“drops”) with the foundation, it hasalso created the possibility of a longer term rela-tionship using internet and social media. How-ever, evidence is weak that One Drop seeks tosustain a long-term relationship focused on thebehavior commitments. The Facebook page,“liked” by some 19,000 users (by 18 April2011), is used mainly by One Drop to postvideos, news about One Drop in general andAqua in particular as well as news about waterissues and by users mostly for emotional sharingof feelings of injustice and empathy, as well as tothank One Drop (76 posts of this type in 2010).Facebook is used for posts about Aqua (14 posts
by One Drop about Aqua in 2010) and by users toexpress their feelings and thoughts about Aqua. Inthis sense, there is a living link between the expoand “social media”. However, Aqua, in general,and the action commitments, in particular, arenot “the” prominent functions of the One DropFacebook site. Rather, the focus is on postingand commenting on projects, that is, mainly theprojects in the South. There is arguably the senseof a weak community of solidarity regarding wa-ter issues manifest in these exchanges, but callsfor actions are more targeted on fund-raising forprojects in the South and general consciousness-raising rather than reinforcing the behaviorchanges sought via the Aqua project.
(5) Does the strategy attempt to use all fourPs? Overall, One Drop appears to be utilizing allfour Ps that would be traditionally employed in amarketing strategy. It has developed what appearsto be a novel product in Aqua—an interactive,touring expo that attempts to raise awarenessand knowledge levels and encourage visitors tocommit to behavior changes.It must be recognized that there are several ways
of looking at Aqua. Is Aqua the One Drop productor is it promotion? The major goal for One Drop isto inspire target consumers to take care of waterand change their behaviors with regard to bothwasting and polluting it. A strong argument forconsidering Aqua to be a product is that thecreation of the Aqua exposition makes this goaltangible. As stated on the website, the goals of
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Judith Madill and Rafael Ziegler
Aqua are to “raise awareness of water-relatedissues and increase understanding of the scopeof the problem, inspire participants to getinvolved in the cause of ‘water for all’, andinform everyone of the urgency to act.” Somemight argue that this Aqua exhibit is not aproduct but a means of promotion between OneDrop and its consumers. However, in the wordsof the director of Social Mobilization (interviewwith Nicole Ollivier):
. . .our goal was the same as I was discussing
with you: We want to, I would say, interest
people, but engage their brains, their hearts
and their guts. . . The parting point for people
when they get out of the experience is, they
know something about water and they want
to do something.
As this quotation suggests, the respondents inthis social entrepreneurship organization appearto consider the Aqua expo to be a product in asimilar way that the performances in Cirque duSoleil are considered to be products. The expo isa way to engage the brain, especially the heartand then the hand to inspire behavior changes.Further, the website AQUA webpage providesconsiderable detail on the production team, thetechnology, and experience—all suggestive ofthe view that Aqua is seen as a One Drop product.The price component of the strategy requires a
differentiated perspective. Firstly, there is theprice of the invited behavioral commitments atthe end of the expo. The price of the commit-ments Aqua requests consumers to make appearsto have been well considered and developed bythe Aqua team (although it is clear that they donot use this language)—some are higher andmany are lower in price, but generally, the priceappears to be reasonable for the target audience.If adopted by many, these individual changes canhave large-scale effects, but each change doesnot have high prices at the level of the individual(for example, using both sides of paper andswapping a meat meal for vegetarian). Thus, thecosts tend to be those associated with agradualist change of everyday action, and thevariety of options allows the audience to select acommitment according to their context. The key
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
exception is “I will get involved in my commu-nity”, which leaves very many options open andpossibly entails very high costs. Notably, it is alsothe commitment most directly related to socialaction rather than the “individual change”(Andreasen, 2002, 3) typically associated withsocial marketing. We will return to this exceptionin the final section.Secondly, price also encompasses the entry ticket
to the exhibition—this is set by the museumswhere the exhibition is set up and viewed by thepublic. (Aqua targets large natural sciencemuseums, which themselves tend to target schoolaudiences; there is a fit here between the Aqua goaland that of the partner. This approach, however,has a limitation in that the size of the exhibitionrestricts the target to large naturalmuseums). Lastly,the Aqua exhibition is rented to the museums,and this is the third component of price that mustbe considered and controlled by One Drop:
Our challenge is the size of the exhibition. The
exhibition can only go in a big museum. They
cannot travel everywhere in Canada. So that’s
why we’re working now on another strategy
for small cities even in Canada or U.S. neighbor.
But the thing is that the exhibition sometimes is
in a city at the [. . .], where it’s not school-time.
So how it works is that we rent the exhibition
to the museum. The goal is not to make money
with this exhibition, because it was paid totally
by Guy Laliberté, but on our mandate is not
to lose money (Interview with Nicole Ollivier,
21 September 2010).
The promotion of Aqua is shared with thescience museums hosting the expo who placenewspaper advertisements announcing it as a spe-cial exhibition in the museum and through itspublicitywith Schools. OneDrop promotes the ex-hibition through its website and Facebook pages.Finally, in terms of place, the expo so far has been
hosted by science museums. This strategic choiceappears apt in that it fitswell in attracting the targetmarket—their families and schools. As noted in thequotation from the aforementioned interview, thesize of the exhibition influences the strategy ofwhat science museums can actually rent the prod-uct, and this is well recognized by the Aqua team.
Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark., 2012
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Marketing social missions
(6) Is careful attention paid to the competitionfaced by the desired behavior? The design ofthe Aqua expo explicitly examines the competi-tion in that the screens in room 2 show the resultsof how current polluting behaviors engaged in byboth individuals and companies have resulted inugly oil spills, as well as garbage floating in theworld’s oceans and streams. It goes further inshowing how continuing such behavior will re-sult in further devastation. In keeping with thissocial entrepreneurial organization’s desire tocombine theater and art in attaining its goals, thisis all performed using images and music as op-posed to talking about such behaviors and results.However, One Drop so far has not developed astrategy to follow-up this competition after thevisit (e.g., there is so far no social media strategythat would continually engage visitors further), asurprising point given that One Drop has obtainedthe visitor profiles. When this research was con-ducted, One Drop acknowledged that they hadnot yet found the right strategy for such follow-up, that is, to inspire and engage after the expo.
Discussion and conclusions
In considering the research propositions, we showthat this social entrepreneurship organization intui-tively found the social marketing approach to be anattractive approach for achieving social goals. Weobserved that One Drop appears to be utilizing manyof the elements that would be part of a social market-ing campaign. The case shows that lay people in theform of social entrepreneurs adopted a number ofsocial marketing tools and approaches to changepeople’s opinions and behaviors regarding wateruse. However, it must be said that the organizationitself does not use that term, it has not consciouslyset out to conduct an innovative social marketingcampaign to achieve its objectives. Rather, it appearsto be relying upon its roots in the circus to create acampaign to achieve its social goals.6 Using such
6Andreasen’s point noted earlier that market language can beperceived as a barrier for community actors also holds moregenerally in the sense that in francophone Québec, there isfrequently an uneasiness or even direct criticism of “Anglophone”marketing and foundation language in contrast to “social mobiliza-tion” and “collective action”. Professor Paquérot has helped usbetter understand this point.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
an approach is quite different from the majority ofsocial marketing that often relies more on cognitive/reasoning approaches. As noted in many sectionsof the findings, One Drop combines its creativetraditional strengths as well as many of theapproaches used by social marketers to achievebehavior change around water consumption in theNorthern Hemisphere.In support of Andreasen (2002) and others in the
social marketing literature, the One Drop team hadalmost no knowledge about social marketing(meeting with One Drop team, 2 August 2011), sothey did not consciously develop a formal social mar-keting campaign. However, they did adapt elementsof social marketing and use them to achieve theirgoals. This finding suggests that practitioners withoutformal academic knowledge of social marketing maybe utilizing elements of it without understanding thetheoretical background or even the definitions of theconcepts. As Andreasen (2002) argues, lack of knowl-edge of social marketing may be widespread, but thiscase suggests that lack of knowledge may not be astrong barrier to adoption of aspects of social market-ing that may be intuitively adopted by social entrepre-neurs without this formal academic knowledge.Although many elements of social marketing were
adopted without conscious recognition that theorganization was doing social marketing, it mustbe noted that a social marketing strategic viewappears to be missing. Although One Drop intui-tively utilizes many of the tools and approachesassociated with social marketing, they do not strate-gically think it through. This raises the question ofhow important that overall strategic view is whenconducting social marketing? One might argue thatan organization can, in fact, be conducting socialmarketing without utilizing the term, but one mightalso argue that an overall strategic view for accom-plishing behavior change is an important part ofutilizing social marketing (Donovan, 2011)—suchan overall social marketing strategic view is missinghere. Perhaps, adoption of that strategic view wouldresult in even better results in terms of achieving thedesired behavior changes.Particularly interesting here is the link between
social marketing and what One Drop calls socialmobilization. One Drop views social mobilizationas including both the behavior changes committedto by the Aqua attendees as well as attempts to
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7The idea to explore social innovation as a new combination ofcapabilities is explored in more detail in Ziegler (2010).
Judith Madill and Rafael Ziegler
change policies, laws, and culture around water us-age. Although traditional views of social marketinghave focused on individual behavior change, recentconceptualizations have recommended that “upstream”
approaches must occur—that is, it is critical tochange aspects of the society in which consumerslive (such as infrastructure, laws, cultural norms) toease individual behavior change (Lefebvre, 2011). Itwould therefore appear that social mobilization maybe closely linked to this view of “upstream” socialmarketing—One Drop’s endorsement of the call forand implementation of the human right to water isevidence for that. However, at the more concretecommunal level of Aqua and its users, One Drop hasnot found a distinct strategy yet. A first step is theaforementioned commitment “I will get involved inmy community”, and it shows the difficulty; unlikethe other commitments, it is not specific at all, andaccordingly, its cost is very open.In fact, the analysis may suggest a deeper tension
between social marketing and social entrepre-neurship. As Andreasen (2002) highlights, “socialmarketing is, at base, a brand of individual behaviorchange.” To be sure, newer thinking in the socialmarketing field focuses upon the notion of co-creation of value as a defining trait of behavioralchange (Hastings, 2007; Lusch et al., 2010; Lefebvre,2011). At the same time, social entrepreneurship iscommitted to transformative social change and this,or so the case study suggests, is not or at any ratenot exclusively a matter of voluntary individualbehavior. For example, the human right to water isa collective issue (it requires states for implementa-tion), and its aim is regulation not voluntary action.Therefore, the question emerges whether andhow social entrepreneurs are able to exploit thistension between social transformation and individualgoals as a fruitful opportunity. Perhaps, socialentrepreneurs should drawonly on elements of socialmarketing? Put differently, only if they keep boththe individual and the social or political goal inmind is transformative social change possible. Socialmarketing as part of a larger mission may well be ofstrategic use to improve the potential of socialentrepreneurial organizations (as was in evidence inthe way in which One Drop welcomed the formaldiscussion of social marketing).At first sight, Aqua is a new combination of
capabilities—emotion, play, and participation—put
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
together in an innovative way via a multimedia jour-ney.7 Yet, with regard to achieving behavior change,consumer creation of a personal profile in room 3results in behavioral commitments being made “to”a computer. Such commitments may not create thesame kind of engagement as commitments made toconcrete others—there is a need for future researchon this point. To be sure, One Drop links the expoto the possibility of an extended relationship withvisitors via email and then also its social media toolssuch as the Facebook page. However, at this point,both the organization and participants show littleevidence of using this space to reinforce and sustaintheir commitments or to develop a collective willfor political action. The case research suggests thatif One Drop is serious about obtaining behaviorchange with regard to obtaining target group com-mitment to the changes suggested in room 3 of Aquaexpo, then the lessons of social marketing may be ofuse. In particular, they ought to pay more attentionto developing and maintaining relationships—whathappens after the expo and make more use of Face-book and their website to sustain the commitmentand nurture a sense of community.In conclusion, we found evidence in this case that
social entrepreneurs may find social marketing to bea helpful tool which they may be utilizing in spite ofnot having formal awareness or knowledge aroundthe concept and its approaches. In spite of this lackof formal awareness, the Aqua team combines thecreativity inherent in the roots of the organizationwith quite a number of approaches that could belabeled social marketing.Future research is required to expand the insights
gained through this case study (the authors areworking on these and encourage others to do so also)to understand the work of other social entrepreneursin terms of adoption of elements, as well as in termsof adapting elements to their transformative goals.Here, we view the intersection of voluntary behaviorchange, and social or political goals typically endorsedin social missions by social entrepreneurs as particu-larly interesting for further study. Also, research onthe use of social marketing in social enterprises isneeded to understand the issues involved in adopting
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Marketing social missions
social marketing approaches in such organizations.Whereas in social entrepreneurship, the main focusis on the link between the innovation—in our caseAqua—and elements of social marketing; for socialenterprise, the main focus would have to be howsocial marketing may help to achieve social orenvironmental goals with business models, or so, wesuggest as a question for further research.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank ONE DROP for thetime and information staff and advisors provided tomake this research project possible.
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