The Hindu Business Line : Rewarding good behaviours

This is how a blood centre made the first experience a pleasant one for the donors: “Volunteers are the first and last persons a donor sees, and their sincerity is clear. After giving blood and sitting with a cup of juice and a cookie, donors a re asked by volunteers whether they want to set up the next appointment, usually two months later. A reminder call or e-mail is placed the week prior to the next appointment.”

Thus reads an example in Social Marketing,’ third edition, by Philip Kotler and Nancy R. Lee ( www.sagepublications.com). Marketers generally tend to be social, but what is ‘social marketing’? The authors define the phrase as “a process that applies marketing principles and techniques to create, communicate, and deliver value in order to target audience behaviours that benefit society as well as the target audience.”

The most challenging aspect of social marketing, and also its greatest contribution, is that it relies heavily on rewarding good behaviours, the book explains. And rewards do work, as the blood centre would affirm, with an impressive 50 per cent ‘customer retention rate’.

Messages of social marketing can travel through non-traditional media too, the authors note. For example, “Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus, created by Click Health in 1995, is a Super Nintendo video game designed to improve players’ asthma self-management… To win the game players must keep their dinosaur’s asthma under control while also saving their planet from deadly dust clouds.”

The game has been used successfully in homes, hospitals, clinics’ waiting rooms, and asthma summer camps, the book notes. “Studies found that young people with asthma who had the Bronkie video game available to play at home reduced their asthma-related emergency and urgent care visits by 40 per cent on average.”

Highly educative read.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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