Social marketing - it's been around longer than you may think!

An anti-drug campaign that started up in my hometown of Milwaukee in the 1990s used an approach that we today call 'social marketing.' Read on...


I first heard about social marketing when I took a graduate school course at the University of Wisconsin in 2003. The class challenged students to look at how outreach campaigns to, for example, protect the environment actually work on the ground. It was really compelling to learn about a new approach called “social marketing” that starts with finding out what people do and why they do it, and then uses that data to design an informed outreach campaign. By the end of the class, I remember thinking What a great new approach!

Likewise, through my work over the last year and a half with a number of social marketing projects, I have learned that this ‘new’ approach is catching on. More and more government and non-profit organizations are taking this approach to encourage safe, healthy and pro-environmental behaviors.

So, when I organized a presentation session for a conference this September about social marketing, I figured all of the speakers would talk about projects from at most 5 or 10 years ago. It was eye-opening to realize that an anti-drug program that started in my hometown back in the 1980s used a social marketing approach, even if they didn’t call it “social marketing” back then.

This happened because Professor John Korso of Western Washington University graciously agreed to talk about his work at the session I organized. John worked back in the early 1990s to promote anti–drug attitudes among youth when he worked with Milwaukee’s Hang Tough program.

I hail from Milwaukee and had heard of the Hang Tough campaign, but it was a new idea to think about how it follows a social marketing approach. John showed a video of skits that kids created to share how they would say ‘no’ when offered drugs. By showing these videos to youth groups, Hang Tough encourages youth to say ‘no’ to drugs. The Hang Tough program was establishing just saying ‘no’ as a norm, a behavior people see as a normal way to act in their community. Social marketing researchers know that establishing a norm is one of the most powerful ways to encourage lasting change in behavior.

Also, I never knew that the program got its name because a number of kids talked about ‘hanging tough’ as part of their message about how to say no to taking drugs.

The conference was hosted by the Society for Human Ecology and was held at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. The Society for Human Ecology is an interesting mix of folks who think about how humans affect their environment and vice-versa. This includes phenomena from how humans protect or pollute the earth to how the amount of natural light coming into people’s offices affects their productivity. For me, someone who has focused on environmental protection, it broadened my ideas about studying ecology!

The conference was great forum for exchanging ideas with other researchers, educators and people working in the field to understand people’s behaviors. SHE is an international organization that promotes using an ecological perspective in research, education, and real-world projects. The theme of the SHE conference was ‘Integrative Thinking for Complex Futures’ and researchers from around the world attended.