“The Lifeblood of Tourism is Marketing.”

In my blog on municipal marketing I discussed the importance of marketing as an important function for governments , particularly cities.   Clearly in an  era in which governments need to be more responsive and accountable to the needs of the public, marketing can help governments accomplish this goal. With governments spending significant dollars delivering programs and services, especially in the area of tourism promotion there is a need for increased efficiency, accountability and transparency . With the managerial shift of the public sector to mirror a business-like approach, the adoption of marketing and related managerial practices can serve as a key component in strengthening accountability in public sector operations

I also pointed out that in recent years many cities and regions have chosen to market themselves in one fashion or another.  Such marketing initiatives characteristically suffer from a lack of creativity and innovation and tend to be out of the box campaigns , and therefore fail to benefit from the lessons that decades of marketing experience in the private sector have taught managers in business. Such difficulties can be minimized, however, with overall expert marketing oversight and approach.

One area where cities spend lots of money is in the tourism area. Tourism marketing is a challenging  area of marketing and requires a strong  marketing and branding strategy. Let’s take Ottawa for example.  Ottawa is a superb tourism destination. It must  be, because visitors still continue to show up even though this city traditionally does a terrible job of selling itself.

Noel Buckley, the president of Ottawa Tourism,  states that “The lifeblood of tourism is marketing.” So you would think that the city would have a great marketing strategy!

I recently noted in an Editorial in my local newspaper (The Ottawa Citizen November 14, 2009) that my home town actually had a branding strategy. I was impressed until I actually read  the key elements of the  strategy .

Ottawa Tourism’s branding strategy is based on   “four pillars” :

• Ottawa as a capital city (Parliament Hill and environs);
• Ottawa as a cultural centre (our museums and galleries);
• Ottawa as a place to enjoy nature (the Gatineau Hills and green space);
• Ottawa as an urban experience (restaurants and shopping).

This is it … the branding of the capital of Canada.  How did they come up with these “four pillars”. Is it based on marketing research?   Are the messages in the tourism marketing being picked up by recipients of these messages.  I actually checked a few web sites to see how Ottawa is described. For brevity I will just describe the Yahoo site. ( many of the other sites were not much different)

This is how Yahoo describes Ottawa

The capital of the second biggest country on the planet, OTTAWA struggles with its reputation as a bureaucratic labyrinth of little charm and character. The problem is that many Canadians who aren’t federal employees – and even some who are – blame the city for all the country’s woes. All too aware of this, the Canadian government have spent lashings of dollars to turn Ottawa into “a city of urban grace in which all Canadians can take pride” – so goes the promotional literature, but predictably this very investment is often resented. Furthermore, the hostility is deeply rooted, dating back as far as 1857 when Queen Victoria, inspired by some genteel watercolours, declared Ottawa the capital, leaving Montréal and Toronto smarting at their rebuff.

In truth, Ottawa is neither grandiose nor tedious, but a lively cosmopolitan city with a clutch of outstanding national museums, a pleasant riverside setting and superb cultural facilities like the National Arts Centre, plus acres of parks and gardens and miles of bicycle and jogging paths. It also possesses lots of good hotels and B&Bs and a busy café-bar and restaurant scene – enough to keep the most diligent sightseer going for a day or three, maybe more. Here too, for once in English-speaking Ontario, Canada’s bilingual laws make sense: Québec’ is just across the river and on the streets of Ottawa you’ll hear as much French as English.

I guess you will find the “four pillars” in this description but is this how the folks responsible for tourism in Ottawa want their city to be described?

The editorial in the Citizen goes on to say:

In many ways, the national capital ( which is what Ottawa is sometimes called when it  includes the Quebec side.) is not a very visitor-friendly place. The signage is weak. Visitors staying downtown will often have no clue how to find the ByWard Market.

“We need to direct people better, and that means big signs pointing to the major sites. Instead, we opt for subtlety. We’re so subtle that some sites are almost impossible to find. It’s amazing that we all aren’t stumbling across people driving Edsels still trying to locate the west end of the Ottawa River Parkway.

Our main tourism information bureau is located across the street from Parliament Hill. That’s nice, but most other cities — even ones with a much smaller tourism industry than Ottawa’s — know that tourism information booths need also to be on the edge of town to catch motorists. This is especially important for the capital region because most of our visitors arrive by car.

Tourism has a central role to play in the economic future of this city — a city whacked by the decline in high tech. It’s fortunate that Ottawa has a good product to offer, but as the folks at Ottawa Tourism are trying to convince anyone who will listen, even the best products need to be vigorously marketed.’

Well  maybe  the folks at Ottawa Tourism should consider a strategy and messages that will generate some excitement about this wonderful city. The “four pillars”  reinforces the perception that Ottawa is a tired, old bureaucratic city with “little charm and character”. Maybe the good folks in Ottawa Tourism should  take a trip to Montreal to see how you market a city .(yes I am originally from Montreal)

Perhaps we need a fresh approach on how we market this city. Ditch the pillars and start thinking like a marketer rather than a bureaucrat.  Only bureaucrats would come up with “four pillars” .

On another note I am pleased to be included in the new edition of ‘Effectively Engaging People’. The original version, produced to celebrate the first World Social Marketing Conference in September 2008, showcased a diverse range of social marketing opinion. But while many of the world’s top social marketers took part in the conference, there were some notable absences. This edition showcases opinions for top social marketers from around the globe.

Professional Certificate in Public Sector and Non-Profit Marketing: 2110

Professional Certificate in Public Sector and Non-Profit Marketing

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• Do you work in the government, a crown corporation/agency, a non-profit organization or an association?
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• Do you want to gain value-added skills to improve your expertise in marketing and communications?

The Professional Certificate in Public Sector and Non-Profit Marketing offers in-depth, advanced-level training in core areas that are critical for marketers in these sectors to excel in their positions. The program provides intensive training of two days per month over a six-month period.
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Are Health Communicators getting a “Bad Rap” on H1N1

Sometimes I wonder if public sector health marketers are being made to look like a bunch of incompetents ( “keystone cops “). H1N1 communications, at least in Canada, has been an unmitigated disaster and the big question mark is why is this happening? Many of the public health communicators I have had the opportunity to work with over 25 years are the best communicators you will ever meet. They are extremely professional, very experienced and are excellent communicators. Add to this that public health departments across Canada at all levels of government have been planning for this pandemic for close to three years. How with all this experience and planning can we have one of the worst communication screw-ups in the history of the public sector?

Was it a coordination problem? Do we have too many levels of government involved in public health who speak a different language… is this our “Tower of Babel’?  Did the public health administrators responsible for H1N1 overrule communication advice from their communications people.  Did the political folks at all levels of government get involved in and refuse to take advice from their communication experts in public health? This will not be the first time this has happened. Did the media overplay the H1N1 story and panic Canadians unnecessarily? Did the original pandemic communications  plans and strategies get overtaken by panicked officials who over reacted to the situation?

Did the local public health administrators underestimate the potential for a larger population wanting the vaccine , even if they were not in the priority group? ( I won’t go into hockey players and people with money jumping the queue.).

 

 

Understandably a mass vaccination of this type has never happened in anyone’s lifetime. The closest comparator is the polio epidemic in the 1950s where schools were the chief locations for inoculation. The target groups were school-age children not the general population. This  was a relatively easy task compared to H1N1.  However, there’s a lesson to be learned from polio inoculation… implementation was highly decentralized. Today, people are being funneled into too few spots as in a traffic jam when the on-ramps feed into a narrower highway. Where were the computer-modelers and experts  when we needed them?

 

Some people suggested that the military should have taken over this operation as they are renown for handling crisis with precision and more important they have a chain of command. Yes a “chain of command” is that what’s missing in public health? Did it occur to us that maybe Canada with its layers of bureaucracy  is  not set up for managing crisis and emergencies.

Our Auditor General states in her most recent report that the federal government  has not moved quickly enough to get ready for pandemics, natural disasters and terrorist attacks that can cause major damage to the country.  She states that  the government still reacts to matters such as the H1N1 pandemic or major blackouts on a “case-by-case basis,” eight years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States highlighted the need to prepare for emergencies. She states the Department of Public Safety, created in 2003 to co-ordinate how different branches of the federal government work together in emergencies, has not carved out the appropriate leadership role.”Canada needs to have a planned and coordinated approach in place so that federal, provincial and municipal agencies know what part they will play in managing a crisis. AMEN!!!

A report of the National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health October 2003 in response to  the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS] provided a “third party assessment of current public health efforts and lessons learned for ongoing and future infectious disease control.”

Here is what the report  said 6 years ago:

“The Committee sees an urgent requirement for multijurisdictional planning to create integrated protocols for outbreak management, followed by training exercises to test the protocols and assure a high degree of preparedness to manage outbreaks ( That’s a mouthful). The SARS experience highlights the need to mobilize selected groups of skilled personnel into epidemic response teams . Last, the Committee determined that neither Health Canada nor most jurisdictions and institutions have developed sophisticated frameworks for risk communication during a public health crisis. The CDC has a comprehensive crisis communications training program that, in our view, bears close study and early adaptation by Canadian governments and institutions.

A key requirement for dealing successfully with future public health crises is a truly collaborative framework and ethos among different levels of government. The rules and norms for a seamless public health system must be sorted out with a shared commitment to protecting and promoting the health of Canadians. Systems-based thinking and coordination of activity in a carefully planned infrastructure are integral in public health because of its population-wide and preventive focus. They are also essential if we are to be effective in managing public health emergencies. Indeed, Canada’s ability to contain an outbreak is only as strong as the weakest jurisdiction in the chain of P/T public health systems. Infectious diseases are an essential piece of the public health puzzle, but cannot be addressed in isolation, particularly since in local health units, the same personnel tend to respond to both infectious and non-infectious threats to community health. The Committee has accordingly recommended strategies that will reinforce all levels of the public health system as well as integrate the components more fully with each other.

So after the SARS epidemic and a significant  report with many recommendations, did we learn anything? Keep in mind that this report was responsible for the creating of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

As usual I would love to hear from readers of this blog.

H1N1… an example of how not to do effective health communications

As someone who spent a quarter century in the health communications and social marketing field, I am flabbergasted on how ineffective the communications coming out of health authorities is on H1N1 /Swine flu.

One thing seems clear and that is the compelling need for reliable information, to understand the risks this virus presents, what to do about it and who to go to for help and advice.

Yes there is the WHO, many levels of government and others who are providing news and information via many channels: television, radio, toll-free phone numbers, the web, printed material, etc. Much of that information, though, is contradictory, inconsistent, and hard to understand and, in some cases unreliable. There are so many sources you don’t know who to believe. For example today I heard a news clip that many health professionals will not be taking the vaccine. What message does this send to the public? If health workers won’t take the vaccine … why should I?

Marguerite Wente in her article yesterday in the Globe and Mail states “swine flu overkill (SFO) is a serious illness caused by saturation media coverage and repetition of the word “pandemic.” I’m not one to minimize the horrors of the H1N1 virus, which can be unpleasant and even fatal. But please, people. Can’t we get a grip? The CBC has been covering swine flu as if it were the biggest natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina. The newspapers have been full of drama about whether there will be enough vaccine, whether it’s arriving fast enough, and if not, who’s to blame. Ordinary citizens are feverishly researching the ins and outs of adjuvants, and wondering if they should drive to the next town so their kids can be vaccinated right away. Meantime, a lot of people have said the hell with it. It’s hard to blame them. Ever since the spring, when the World Health Organization declared swine flu to be a “pandemic” – after just 144 deaths – SFO has been running rampant. Ordinary pandemics kill at least a million people worldwide. Swine flu has killed around 5,000 people, including 86 in Canada. Worldwide, ordinary seasonal flu kills 700 to 1,400 people a day.”(According to the World Health Organization, fewer than 5,000 people have died around the globe from this variant of swine flu. In any normal year, influenza causes between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths worldwide.)

In the Southern Hemisphere, the winter flu season is now over. In spite of dire predictions, only 185 people died from swine flu in Australia – considerably fewer than the roughly 3,000 who succumb to seasonal influenza in that country each year. And no, it wasn’t because the population was immunized. Australia’s vaccination campaign against swine flu took off last month. Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama declared swine flu a national emergency after about 1,000 Americans died. Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control, roughly 50,000 Americans die every year from seasonal flu – without any politician paying much attention.

So, is this an example of overkill? Is it a case of “the boy crying wolf”. When a  real pandemic hits, which could happen, will people listen? Is the SFO responsible for half of our population saying they won’t take the vaccine? Sometimes “over-communications” can work against the health communicators who day after day are “hammering out” the message. And the more they hammer the less confidence people have towards the vaccine. Is this effective “crisis or risk communications?

As Wente states “everybody loves a good health scare. Remember BSE? Infected cows were going to turn our brains to mush. Then came SARS. In 2003, one widely quoted British expert predicted that it could turn out to be more lethal than AIDS. The final death toll from SARS was 774 – about one day’s worth of flu victims. Then came deadly birds. In 2006, David Nabarro, a top WHO official, warned that avian flu could kill 150 million people. The White House’s avian flu response plan projected that as many as two million Americans might die and one leading influenza researcher warned that a pandemic might kill half the human population. To date, the worldwide death toll from avian flu is 262 ( Wente dd not mention West Nile Virus and the Ebola-virus.)

Are we blowing the H1N1 out of proportion? I also wonder if the health authorities have a Marketing and Communications plan that comprehends the need not to over communicate and ensure that everyone in the health field is on the same page and that we get consistent messages that don’t contradict each other. Where is the coordination between federal province/state and municipal/regional governments not to mention others in the health field? Ironically, the more the public hears about how important it is to get the shot, the more skeptical it gets. According to sources, in the U.S., only half the population plans to get it, according to surveys, and a third oppose it for their kids. In Canada, 51 per cent of us are saying we won’t bother – up from 38 per cent in July.

Wente points out that “all these health crisis  have a lot in common: a legitimate concern that’s blown wildly out of proportion by various interest groups, including scientists and public-health agencies, whose warnings are then amplified by the media. Politicians have no choice but to respond in kind, just in case. This outbreak has followed the usual course. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recently predicted that there might be 30,000 to 90,000 U.S. deaths from swine flu, peaking in mid-October. (That would be a week ago.) To date the U.S. death toll has barely reached a thousand, but the President has declared a national emergency anyway.”

Our organization is presently involved in working on an Immunization program where we are trying to convince parents to immunize their children. You wouldn’t believe, all the anti-vaccinationists, including a former Playboy bunny, who are trying to convince parents not to immunize their children.   – People who believe that vaccines cause autism or brain poisoning. The H1N1 epidemic of coverage also feeds a growing sense that the risks are overblown and these anti-vaccinationists are coming out of the woodwork and spouting their nonsense to a gullible audience who does not know who to believe.

Also have you tried going to a website from a health authority to download credible information on H1N1 flu. Good Luck.

As Wente states in her article: “As for me, despite my SFO, I’m definitely going to get the shot. Although I’m in a low-risk group, the last thing I want to do is wind up in hospital, where MSRA, C. difficile, and other hospital-acquired infections kill around 8,000 Canadians a year. My advice is that whatever you do, stay out of the hospital – or you might get really sick.”

If you are a health communicator or marketer, I would love to hear from you. Oh yes I will get the flu shot, something I have done for the past 5 years.

.

The Public Sector … Differences between Americans and Canadians

As a Canadian who is in the public sector marketing business , I have paid close attention to what is happening in the USA recently. I am quite concerned by the perception of many Americans about their government and its capability of delivering programs and services to the American public.

As Andrew Cohen points out in yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen

“The political atmosphere in Washington has become unhinged. Just look at the hysteria unleashed by the president’s health care reform. Like citizens of every other industrialized nation with public health care, Canadians do not know what the fuss is about. It is sad to hear the falsehoods about Canadian health care. Lord knows, our system is flawed, which is why we discuss it ad nauseam. But we’re comfortable with interventionist government. American conservatives — who loathed the regulation that gave us the banking collapse — are not, and they are apoplectic about an expansion of the state. Hell, these folks would have opposed the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s.”

Cohen also raises concerns about the way Government and politicians are being portrayed in the USA. He states “In a polarized politics with a shrinking centre, Americans are no longer able to have a civilized conversation. We see this in the undercurrent of violence directed at Obama during those infamous town hall meetings this past summer. ( e.g bringing a gun to a political town hall meeting).  The anger at Republicans rallies were appalling. They speak of Obama’s “legitimacy,” as if he has no mandate to champion health care reform. To his critics, Obama is everything from a Marxist to a Muslim. They say he wasn’t born in the United States. They carry banners crying “Don’t Tread on Me,” as if this were 1776. Inflamed by right-wing talk-show hosts, playing to a society that has gone to the extremes, abetted by a culture of rudeness, a congressman can call the president “a liar” during a speech and his constituents applaud him. So hostile to Obama’s success that they  cheered when Chicago lost its bid for the Olympics last week.”

The reason we are concerned in Canada is, as Cohen puts it ” there are no more similar peoples in the world than Canadians and Americans”.  We share more than we admit. It is why we can only admire the excellence and ambition of America, and the epochal ascent of its new president.”

The discussion between the differences between Americans and Canadians is not a new one.

In the late eighties in the book Continental Divide Seymour Martin Lipset returned to a topic which had fascinated him since early in his long and distinguished career as a political scientist: the similarities and the differences between the United States and Canada. Lipset’s main thesis was that the differences between the United States and Canada can be traced to their founding. The United States, the revolutionary nation, was founded on the principles of  “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In contrast, the “Fathers of the Canadian Confederation” were seeking  “peace, order, and good government.” Lipset focused on the values of the two societies–the United States prizes individualism; Canada, collectivism.

Michael Adams in his book Fire and Ice also wanted his readers to know that there are some very fundamental differences that have developed between Canada and the USA. For example, he refers to the ‘revolutionary tradition’ in the U.S.A as opposed to the ‘counter-revolutionary tradition’ in Canada, the contrasting attitudes Americans and Canadians have towards the roles of government, and the quite different beliefs they have about the role of religion in their daily lives.

With respect to the public sector  in the USA, we hear critics of government stating that we don’t want government to take over our health system. A question nobody seems to ask is: what is wrong with  having government taking over health care. This is how it is done in every other industrialized country. Is the private sector sacrosanct? Most of the health insurance has been managed and run by the private sector for the past few decades. Now if they were doing such a splendid job I might understand the reluctance to have government involved in the health care system but the opposite is true. As stated in previous blogs:

The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. 10% of Canada’s GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 % of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. Is this a record to be proud of ???

Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services. What the American taxpayer may not realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly. Also the spending gap between the two nations is almost entirely because of higher overhead. Canadians don’t need thousands of actuaries to set premiums or thousands of lawyers to deny care. Even the U.S. Medicare program run by the government has 80% to 90% lower administrative costs than private Medicare Advantage policies. And providers and suppliers can’t charge as much when they have to deal with a single payer.

Philip Kotler and Nancy Lee clearly demonstrated in their book Marketing in the Public Sector that there are many government programs run quite well. They offer dozens of marketing success stories from agencies of all types–from around the world.

Yes, there are many government programs poorly run but the view that the government is not to be trusted to run any program is quite doctrinaire. Was it not the financial companies in the private sector in the USA responsible for the financial mess we have worldwide? These were not government run operations. What about General Motors, Chrysler which have received large bailouts in the USA and Canada . Were these companies run by the government?

I can go on but you get my point.

As usual I would love to hear from any of the readers of the blog to provide me with their comments.

Are Universities Failing Our Students

I wrote a recent blog quite critical of academic institutions as it relates to Marketing.  As I pointed out  business schools are different than other faculties.  Professors should be obligated to work in business for a number of years before becoming academics in a business school… especially teaching marketing . All the academic research and learning won’t be of much use if you have no experience working in the “real world”.  I feel it is extremely important that the professors have a basic understanding of the “real world.” Although theory is important, the ability to apply the theory to real-life situations is equally important.

We have so called business courses that teach a multitude of theories , many useless,  but very very few  actually provide useful information that could be used by business students once they graduate. Why are students forced to take a whole bunch of courses especially in the first few years that are for the most part useless. While courses which would help them immensely are rarely taught and in most cases are optional programs. The two courses that every business student should be forced to take is 1. Business writing/communications and 2. Presentation skills.  Frankly I don’t care how well you do in your undergraduate business/marketing program if you can’t put your thoughts down on paper and/or can’t present them to clients or management your chances in making in business/marketing are pretty slim.

On the topic of universities, a recent article by Peggy Wente at the Globe and Mail on September 19th was quite controversial and provides some perspective and incites on some of the challenges at academic institutions, particularly undergraduate programs. Her major criticisms include: most students take courses from “itinerant graduate students”, large classes especially in first and second years are not supportive of learning, and use of  multiple-choice tests instead of essay questions is the trend in universities. ( Note I understand why professors with very large classes use multiple choice but professors with small classes should absolutely refrain from using them to evaluate students)

Wente points out that “the  dropout rate at universities in Canada is at an all-time high (56 per cent finish their degrees within six years)”. Universities according to Wente “are rewarded for getting bums in seats, not for educating and graduating them. Educating undergraduates is just about the last thing most professors want to do. They’d rather not have the students around, because they’d rather do research.”

She points out that universities are unaccountable for results, if, by results, we mean successfully educating students. In the reward system of universities, it’s research, not teaching, that matters. Professors are rewarded not for turning out high-quality graduates, but for turning out books and papers – even if they are unread. ( As I mentioned in my previous blog, much of the research in the field of marketing is irrelevant according to some experts).  This perverse system stubbornly persists, despite the fact that everyone knows it’s absurd. Some research, especially in the sciences and medicine, matters a great deal to the advancement of society. But a vast amount of it does not.”

Richard K. Vedder professor of economics at Ohio University and an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and  a leading U.S. critic, has argued that “the higher education system has pawned off the responsibility of educating students  in favour of pursuing a whole lot of self-interested research. Their job is now done by an itinerant class of ill-paid academic serfs, who cobble together a living teaching sessional courses as they strive to churn out yet another scholarly article that might help them land a steady job. But the full professors whom they subsidize have a very pleasant life. “

Wente points out “that professors typically devote only 40 per cent of their time to teaching. And the effectiveness, efficiency and productivity of that teaching are almost an afterthought. Funding and incentives need to change so that departments are rewarded for graduating students efficiently and fast and not producing journal articles that nobody reads” (except other academics) .

“Publish or Perish” is often heard in the halls of academia. Deans want to know your publishing records although in recent years student evaluations of professors are being used to evaluate professors. But as one professor mentioned to me the professors who might have poor  evaluations may be the best teachers as they may be tougher on the students don’t hand out A’s and are very demanding (a recipe for poor student evaluations )

Richard Vedder argues that we should spend less time worrying about university access for all, and more time on the “scandal” of the billions we waste on unsuccessful efforts to educate students who fail to graduate. “The focus of higher education reform should be on increasing the quality of our college graduates,” he writes. And that will never happen until students count for more than articles in unread quarterlies.

So what are we to deduce from all this:

Universities pay scant attention to the needs of the undergraduate students who typically are their bread and butter. This is especially true in business schools where MBA and other Graduate programs tend to get a much higher priority .

Students  need knowledge and skills more than ever, but alternative forms of providing those skills, such as community colleges and on-the-job training are often superior and lower cost options. At least students learn stuff that is practical. For example, a trend in marketing is for students taking courses at a  community college after they graduate university to pick up hard skills that employers require. Most of these skills are not taught in universities.

Finally, we spend a heck of a lot of money on universities, but you really have to wonder what we are getting for our return on investment.

“Are universities failing students?”

“Should we be rethinking how universities are run”?

“Are business schools doing a good job teaching marketing”?

What do you think?

Tips on How to Develop a Successful Social Marketing Campaign

In my most recent social marketing workbook , I have a section that gives readers

a few  tips on how to develop a successful social marketing campaign. Hope you find this  useful.

Messaging:

• Specify the desired objective.
• Specify the desired action required (call to action)
• Focus on personal relevance of issue to each member of audience.
• Adapt creative style to specific audience.
• Communicate benefits & focus attention on immediate, high-probability consequences of positive behaviour.
• Portray people with which members of target group can identify.
• The messenger in many cases can be much more important than the message.
• Celebrities and popular spokespersons can be effective to change social norms ( however you need to be careful as there can be unforeseen risks)
• Positive reinforcement can be effective.
• More emphasis is needed in creating a climate conducive to social change.
• “Blame the victim” approach hurts credibility of social marketing.
• Upstream approaches and strategies help credibility of social marketing.

Emotions:

• Play on emotions.
• Do not be moralistic. Guilt messages work less well, however can be effective in certain circumstances
• Pity appeals and altruistic appeals do not work well
• Humour can be difficult. Use it with caution

When speaking to youth:

• Do not highlight that communication came from an authority.
• Do not present adult viewpoint, or lecture.
• On line communications ,  especially social media key tactic and approach to reaching audience .
• Use self-confident, attractive actors in  television advertising  that look a few years older than the target.
• Do not show high-risk youth in negative light.
• Do not talk over youth heads or talk down to them.
• Make sure you communications is honest and unbiased; this will lead them in making informed decisions

Demonstrate the desired behaviour:

• Showing the desirable behaviour serves as a guide to appropriate behaviour.
• Promote alternative behaviours as substitutes for undesirable present behaviours.
• Examples: designated driver in drinking and driving campaigns, or suggesting daily actions as ways to be physically active (use stairs, not elevator) sell benefits of mass transit rather than car.

Multi-Year Consistency in Theme:

• Consistency is required to move target audiences through the various “stages of change”.
• Variety in creative approach from one period to the other and one group to the other is required to keep the attention grabbing power of the campaign (however message has to be consistent)

Additional tips:

• Formative research and tracking are essential
• Strategic alliances are extremely important, but you must have guidelines and policies
• With rare exception only long term multiyear campaigns can produce measurable changes…but management/funders want immediate results
• Social Marketing campaigns need to achieve a high status on the media, political and social agendas creating a favourable environment for social change.
• Educational products, proactive media relations need to be integrated into marketing campaign

Web 2.0 revolution is turning public sector marketing landscape upside down

We now live in an era where the communications and marketing landscape has been completely turned upside down in both the public, non profit and private sectors. Organizations  do not have  full control of their messages/brands. The whole Web 2.0 revolution has resulted in the democratization of the web. More important it has changed marketing and communication in ways that in my  wildest imagination I never dreamed could happen .

Its impact is enormous and will have major impact on how we do our marketing and communications work in the next few decades. The major difference with social media is it’s about engagement and dialogue as opposed to one-way communication. The technological barriers that have restricted the “one-to-many” model of communication are no longer present. Now anyone can start a blog (yes that includes me) , post a video, write a review,  join a social network, start a podcast (in seconds), and have their content viewed or heard by millions at virtually no cost. Yes I said no cost.

The next generation of marketing and communications  will not require major advertising and marketing budgets but learning how to use the new social media marketing technologies that are available.  There are over 200,000 new blogs started every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second. Facebook has surpassed 200 million users! Twitter, a public short messaging platform, is used by 14 million people at any given time… that’s communication power. Would you believe that there are more podcasts than there are radio stations in the world! The topics cover every niche imaginable. Niche marketing has been given a new meaning and we are only at the beginning of this marketing communication revolution.

The questions organizations should be asking themselves (and know the answers to) are: “What are people saying about us/our services?” and “How can we get engaged to make a favourable impact in this rapidly evolving world of social media, before our existing communications become largely ineffective?”

Consider these stats: in the month of March, 2009, Canadians alone performed over 31 Billion searches on Google. According to Comscore, Canadians show highest usage of social networking sites. Online video popularity has grown 30% over the course of the last year and YouTube alone has over 336 million daily users.

It is predicted that more than 70% of Canadians will have mobile phones with Internet Access by the end of 2009. Most youth 18-24 already do. This will give marketers an incredible opportunity to develop customized applications geared at the popular open platforms developed by Blackberry , Apple, and now Google. With the advent of Web 2.0, there has been a birth in something called the “Social Media Press Release” geared at influential bloggers that have the ability to reach the people that you want to target. These bloggers can be easily identified through “Social Media Monitoring” techniques. Essentially this is a Press Release stripped of any bias and packed with rich media (videos, pictures, audio, quotes, etc…). It is targeted at social media influencers (mainly bloggers) and has proven to be a highly successful way of reaching target audiences using the “conversational” as opposed to “communication” approach. This press release can be posted as a link on your website or sent directly to bloggers with whom you have an established relationship already. For more information on social media releases go to the Canada News Wire site.

Feeling intimated , why not consider some training in social media marketing or in public sector marketing

Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing announces new workshops and courses.

New Partnership and Workshops!

The Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing is happy to announce a new working relationship with the Centre of Excellence in Communications (CEC). Through this partnership CEPSM will be offering workshops more frequently and in a variety of geographical locations. Our first workshop, Social Media for the Public Sector, is at the beginning of October with Mike Kujawski, visit the CEC website to learn more!

Professional Certificate in Public and Non-Profit Marketing

This certificate is brought to you by CEPSM in partnership with the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University. Participants will gain skills and knowledge that are critical for marketers in the public and non-profit sectors. We engage all participants in a rich learning environment that reinforces theory with practical, real-life examples based upon the extensive experience of our instructors.

To get more info go to Sprott School of Business Professional Programs

Are Business Schools Losing their Relevance for Marketers?

Well it is that time of year. School is about to start. As a practitioner who has spent close to 25 years teaching in business schools I thought I would reflect on my experience teaching marketing at two business schools . Business schools are different than other faculties. Professors should be obligated to work in business for a number of years before becoming academics in a business school… especially teaching marketing . All the academic research and learning won’t be of much use if you have no experience working in the “real world”. I feel it is extremely important that the professors have a basic understanding of the “real world.” Although theory is important, the ability to apply the theory to real-life situations is equally important.

“If the institution places research-focused faculty or graduate students in front of students, and the students lack any perspective gained through experience, the outcome will do little to enhance the managerial skill sets of the graduates.” states Lisa Marks Dolan, a business school dean, who also feels that much of the problem lies in the way teachers are trained. She states, “We’re being asked to produce graduates who can integrate, adapt, manage global diversity, work in teams, and bring out the best in others, yet these are not the skills that most doctoral candidates are asked to master as part of their training.”

Currently, most promotion and tenure decisions at Universities depend on articles published in leading journals and, to a lesser degree, on teaching and service.  Shouldn’t promotion and tenure  decisions also take the contributions to the advancement of marketing practice into consideration. If it is accepted that part of the purpose of business schools is to advance the  practice of business and marketing, including its impact on business strategy, business success, and society’s ability to address its challenges, this should be part of the consideration for tenure, salary increases, and recognition. But rarely does this happen. In fact , the opposite is true.

Most of the doctoral marketing programs today provide rigorous training in research methodology and theory.  Candidates must declare which track they are in i.e. behavioral or quantitative, not the substantive issues they are addressing, and then dive deeper into their respective disciplines. This provides a good foundation for conducting research. “What is of concern is what is missing—namely, marketers’ problems and the understanding of and passion for business.  Little, if any, time is spent on understanding the context of business and the day-to-day and strategic issues confronting managers.”

I cannot tell you how many times I have been told by students how surprised they are by the amount of theory they have to learn in business school but rarely take courses that actually deal with business. We have so called business courses that teach a multitude of theories , many useless,  but very very few  actually provide useful information that could be used by business students once they graduate.  I was once told by a senior academic that Universities are not Colleges where practical skills are taught.

My favourite example of the lack of practical information for business students was an incident I experienced a few years ago. I was assigning a case to my non profit marketing class and decided to assign them the The Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada case. One of the major challenges that my fourth year business students had with the case was that virtually none of the these students knew anything about  mutual funds, many never even  heard of mutual funds… all of these students had taken courses in Finance. Hard to believe but true.  This begs the question , what do students learn in Intro Finance aside from  mathematical formulas? Are these the same mathematical formulas that brought Wall Street and the world economy to its knees in the past year?

JEFFREY E. GARTEN,  former dean of the Yale School of Management, says he does not think business schools are doing a good enough job. Here are excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Garten, who became the dean after a career on Wall Street specializing in debt restructuring abroad and a stint as under secretary of commerce for international trade. (Issue Date: ARMCHAIR M.B.A., Posted On: 6/19/2005)

I think the current model of business school education needs to change dramatically. I think there should be different criteria for tenuring faculty. Right now, a professor would get tenure on the same qualifications as he or she would if they were in a department of economics or a department of history. What business schools need to do is add some criteria for promotion. One of them should be some real-world experience, in the same way that a doctor teaching at a medical school would have had to see patients.

Q. What percentage of business school professors have had experience in real companies?

A. I would say it’s minuscule. This is a very radical proposal. But let me give you a second. Business schools need to have a two-track faculty, with the second track being a clinical faculty, that is, people who may not have the academic qualifications to get tenure or even do real academic research, but who would bring into the classroom the world of practice and experience.

Yes practical experience. But what happens is the exact opposite. For example, if a business school is looking to become accredited the main criteria for its teaching staff is the amount and quality of its PhD’s , not the teachers who are practitioners with  practical experience.

Most professors , in my experience, focus their efforts not on teaching students but on academic research ( this is why many of them become academics and how they get promotions. i.e. publishing in prestigious journals.) But has anyone ever asked if any of this academic research is relevant?  According to Wharton professors David J. Reibstein, George Day, & Jerry Wind in their Guest Editorial: Is Marketing Academia Losing Its Way? (Journal of Marketing (01-JUL-09) “There is an alarming and growing gap between the interests, standards, and priorities of academic marketers and the needs of marketing executives operating in an ambiguous, uncertain, fast-changing, and complex market-space.

They go on to say “Why do marketing academics have little to say about critical strategic marketing issues and emerging issues, such as the impact of networked organizations, the impact and marketing of emerging technologies, the value of open innovation, the blurring of value chains, unethical marketing practices, the role of brands in global markets, the role of marketing when the customers are empowered, and the constant struggle of marketing practitioners to get a seat at the corporate strategy table? (see my previous July 28th 2009  blog Marketers Gets No  Respect)

The authors “contend that the gulf between marketing academics and senior marketing and corporate officers has widened. Academics are not listening to marketers’ needs and the issues they confront. The number of academics attending chief marketing officer and other chief-executive officer forums or paying attention to the output is  negligible.” ( kind of ironic that marketing academics are out of touch with the potential clients for their information)

Finally they suggest “It would be desirable to solicit input from chief executive officers and chief financial officers as to what they need from marketing that is not being adequately addressed. They  believe that this will yield research priorities that will help advance the discipline and its impact.

Imagine three top academics in marketing from Wharton -a top business school- recommending that it might be a good idea to solicit business people to ensure their research is relevant to the world of business, not to mention marketing in other sectors like non profits and public sector. … breathtaking!!!

I would be interested in hearing from academics, practitioners and yes from students in business schools.

Health Care: Americans deserve better ROI.

What Americans decide to do with their health system should be left to Americans to decide, however when critics smear the Canadian health system unjustifiably, Canadians need to speak up. A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about the misinformation about the Canadian health system and received a significant response, so here comes another blog on the same topic. These blogs are a real departure from my  topics on public sector marketing but knowing that I have a significant readership in the USA, I want to ensure that readers of my blog are up to speed  on the  health care debate as it relates to Canada. Also, when you consider the amount of money Americans spend on health care in the US they definitely should not have a system that is ranked 37th in the world. Americans do deserve better and congratulations to Obama for trying to improve the present “clearly broken” system.

As Bob Rae from the Liberal Party of Canada points out, the questions are simple.

• “Should anyone be denied health care because of their income, disability, or illness?
• Should patients be able to choose their doctors, and advocate for speedy, effective treatment?
• Should insurers, taxpayers, and premium payers be worried about how to control costs as an ageing society combines with great technological advance to produce an expensive mix? “

The Canadian health care system should not be included in the debate on health care in the US. Frankly, the US is not really set up to have a system similar to ours. We hope our friends in the U.S. will find answers to the questions that lie at the heart of their health care system.

However, since there is so much misinformation being spewed by vested interests in the US about the Canadian health system and most of it is taking specific situations out of context and providing skewed stats, I will try to provide some clarification about our system as it is compared to the US.

Here are some excerpts from http://bobaagard.blogspot.com/2009/07/health-care-canada-vs-us.html which may help clarify the differences between the US and Canadian health systems.

• “The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead.
• 10% of Canada’s GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 % of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. In essence, the U.S. system is considerably more expensive than Canada’s. Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services. What the American taxpayer may not realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly.

• One of the myths is the Canada’s government decides who gets health care and when they get it.While HMOs and other private medical insurers in the U.S. do indeed make such decisions, the only people in Canada to do so are physicians. In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be. There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don’t get one no matter what your doctor thinks – unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost.

• There are no waits for urgent or primary care in Canada. There are reasonable waits for most specialists’ care, and much longer waits for elective surgery. Yes, there are those instances where a patient can wait up to a month for radiation therapy for breast cancer or prostate cancer, for example. However, the wait has nothing to do with money per se, but everything to do with the lack of radiation therapists. Despite such waits, however, it is noteworthy that Canada boasts lower incident and mortality rates than the U.S. for all cancers combined, according to the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group and the Canadian Cancer Society. Moreover, fewer Canadians (11.3 percent) than Americans (14.4 percent) admit unmet health care needs.

• Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt says single-payer systems are not “socialized medicine” but “social insurance” systems because doctors work in the private sector while their pay comes from a public source. Most physicians in Canada are self-employed. They are not employees of the government nor are they accountable to the government. Doctors are accountable to their patients only. More than 90 percent of physicians in Canada are paid on a fee-for-service basis. Claims are submitted to a single provincial health care plan for reimbursement, whereas in the U.S., claims are submitted to a multitude of insurance providers. Moreover, Canadian hospitals are controlled by private boards and/or regional health authorities rather than being part of or run by the government.”

Here are comments from Michael M. Rachlis a Canadian physician, health policy analyst and author.

• “On coverage, all Canadians have insurance for hospital and physician services. There are no deductibles or co-pays. Most provinces also provide coverage for programs for home care, long-term care, pharmaceuticals and durable medical equipment, although there are co-pays.
• On costs, Canada spends 10% of its economy on health care; the U.S. spends 16%. The extra 6% of GDP amounts to more than $800 billion per year. The spending gap between the two nations is almost entirely because of higher overhead. Canadians don’t need thousands of actuaries to set premiums or thousands of lawyers to deny care. Even the U.S. Medicare program has 80% to 90% lower administrative costs than private Medicare Advantage policies. And providers and suppliers can’t charge as much when they have to deal with a single payer.
• Because most of the difference in spending is for non-patient care, Canadians actually get more of most services. We see the doctor more often and take more drugs.
• The U.S. media, legislators have claimed that our “socialized” system doesn’t let us choose our own doctors. In fact, Canadians have free choice of physicians. It’s Americans these days that are restricted to “in-plan” doctors”.

Here is piece from “former American” newspaper columnist Diane Francis

“Just who is this jerk, Rick Scott of propaganda-mongering Conservatives for Patients’ Rights? He and his group are fabricating negatives about Canada’s health care system and I resent this. I am an American who has lived in Canada for more than 35 years. I can vouch that the system is more than adequate and is not run by civil servants but by doctors who are able to treat everyone, rich or poor. Mr. Scott and other conservatives are against universal health care without any justification whatsoever. Their criticisms are inaccurate.

Here are the facts as to why Canada’s medical system, far from perfect, is dramatically better than America’s:

1.    It is cheaper even though it takes care of the entire population, i.e. 10% of GDP compared with 15% in the U.S.

2.    Canada’s health care system which fully looks after 32 million people costs roughly what the private-sector health insurance companies make in profits in the United States looking after less than half the population for excessive premiums.

3.    Canada’s health care system is cheaper still if the litigation costs of fighting over medical bills are eliminated as it is when the government is the sole-insurer. Estimates are that court costs and judgments add another 2 to 3% of GDP to the total medical tab.

4.    Canada’s health care system enhances economic productivity. Workers diagnosed with illnesses can still change employers and be employable because they are not rejected by employers with health benefits due to pre-conditions.

5.    Outcomes with major illnesses, such as cancer and heart disease, is better than in the United States.

6.    Longevity is better in Canada and Europe than in the U.S.

7.    No emergency is neglected in Canada.

8.    Some elective procedures may take longer if compared to blue-ribbon U.S. health care but that’s not comparing apples with apples. More appropriately, the overall population’s care should be compared and there are tens of millions of Americans who are uninsured or uninsurable.

9..    No one in Canada goes broke because of medical bills whereas ARP estimates half of personal bankruptcies are due to unpaid, high medical bills.

10.    Canadians are able to choose their own physicians and to seek multiple opinions.

11.    Canadian doctors and nurses are better trained than American counterparts and U.S. physicians must study for at least a year in order to qualify to practice in Canada.

12.  Drugs made and invented in the United States are cheaper in Canada, Europe and Japan because our communal health care means volume discounts and savings passed along to society. Americans are overpaying.

13.    Americans are being cheated by a patchwork quilt system where the highest risk people – veterans, the indigent and elderly – are insured by governments but the “gravy” or young, healthy people are handed over to private insurance companies.

Is Canada’s system perfect? No and nobody said it was. The media should stop allowing propagandists to tell lies and any arguments about other countries’ practices should be ignored as totally irrelevant.The United States is a rich and talented nation and it’s very upsetting to me, as an American, that it does not have the world’s best medical care for its citizens instead of one of the worst.
Americans deserve better.”

Well hopefully this will assist those involved in the health care system debate in the US. It is quite unfortunate that health care has become a political football in the US, rather than a debate about improving the health of Americans.

Good health to our American friends and hopefully you will get a health system that is citizen centric.

Diane Francis is right… you do deserve better!!!