Five Steps for Deal Making in the Social Marketing Context
Step 1. Talk to the intended audience
Seriously, just talk. Ask the target audience about what they do that you’re looking to change. What do they like about the behaviour? What don’t they like? What would they do differently if you gave them a chance? What do they think you can do to help them change?
Step 2 Forget “health” as a benefit.
Nobody cares about health. You don’t buy a box of unhealthy at the drive-thru – you buy convenience, flavour and instant gratification. Appeal to those options before you appeal to the generic “health” option.
Step 3 Make an offer. Then get ready to start the negotiations.
Put the offer on the table and see what the market thinks. Remember, this is a negotiation process – this is the deal making, haggling and bargaining. If their offer won’t achieve your goals, it’s not that much use. But if your offer isn’t accepted by the market, you’re not getting closer to the goal anyway. Compromise where it helps, hold the line where it doesn’t and strike a deal. You can always make another later offer .
Step 4: Don’t cheat
Don’t cheat. If the market doesn’t like your offer, go back and make a better deal. Don’t force change with law if you’re not making headway by making deals. It’s cheating, and the market feels cheated. You’re saying that “if you won’t play nicely, we’ll force you to play”. If you must, just take your bat and ball and go home. Otherwise, go back to step 1, and start the process again to find a better offer for them.
Step 5. See it through for the long term
Social change campaigns take time, effort and a willingness to get things wrong along the way. Commercial marketers do not have immediate, automatic and market dominating success any more than social change campaigns ever do. Take a lesson from Apple. It took seventeen years, hundreds of different offers and a totally unrelated product to their computer line up to create the iPod success. So take an iPod social change approach – look for success after refining the offer again and again until you strike a sweet spot with the consumer with the right deal.
After all, you want them to do something for you, the least you can do is give them something they want in return.
