Promo campaigns, experiential marketing do not change consumers’ behaviour – Forum
By Daniel Obi
Commercial campaigns, experiential marketing and engagement through winning propositions do not guarantee a successful change in consumers’ attitude.
This was the assertion of discussants at the first African Social Marketing Forum hosted by EXP, an activation agency in Nigeria, where the Forum agreed that it does not matter how big or how much spent on campaigns; rather, what can help companies achieve their objectives of engaging and making a difference are tactics employed to break down the barriers confronted daily.
David Boon, group director, EXP International, who delivered a paper on ‘Experiential Marketing, Insights, Learning and Best Practices’, said, “From experience, concept of experiential marketing knowledge does not change consumers insight. We do a lot of work across Africa and have seen a trend of opening the corridors of communication and networking, sharing ideas across industries – all with the view to trying to help in learning from each other in making their efforts more effective. Whether we are in commercial marketing or social marketing, or non-governmental organisation (NGO) field, we are all about behaviour change.”
He identified three levels of knowledge which are shared understanding, shared commitment, and unity of action.
Jeff French, a social marketing expert and a visiting professor at Brunel University, in a keynote address entitled ‘Applying Behavioural Theory’, gave insight into what social marketing is and is not as well as why companies need to apply social marketing principles. Using examples from around the world, hr gave suggestions for improving the impact.
“Successfully addressing most wicked problems requires achieving sustained changes in behavior,” French said, noting that the effectiveness of traditional approaches to influencing behavior, such as legislation, sanctions, regulations, taxes and subsidies, may be limited without some additional tools and understanding of how to engage citizens in cooperative behavioural change.
Richard Burns, managing director, Exp Social Marketing Foundation, shared on how he has been able to develop sustainability strategies to enhance reproductive health commodity security in USAID’s reproductive health care programme in Ghana.
Tertius Strauss, regional director, EXP West Africa, noted that EXP has already hosted two very successful forums earlier this year, in Tanzania and Malawi. According to him, EXP’s success story in social marketing has been a result of its proprietary methodology based on an understanding of human emotional behaviour, which triggers using its sixth sense proprietary tool.
