What Causes Social Marketing Programs to Fail? A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Background: This paper addresses the key factors that cause social marketing programs (typically consisting of discrete programs or interventions, but also including broader-scale initiatives) to fail. It argues that understanding these failures offers greater insight to researchers and practitioners than publications solely focused on successes. Focus: Our paper discusses the causes of the failure of social marketing programs, an area that has largely been ignored in extant research. Research Question: What causes social marketing programs to fail? Importance: As the majority of practitioner-oriented social marketing research focuses on how to develop a successful program, we identify a tendency to ignore failed programs. We suggest that both researchers and practitioners can arguably learn more useful lessons from failures rather than successes. Thus, this paper contributes to social marketing literature by exploring the key causes of social marketing failures. Methods: We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with social marketing practitioners recruited using a purposive sampling technique. Results: We identify four elements responsible for the failure of social marketing programs, each centered on the planning and implementation stage. Firstly, formative research at the earliest stages of program planning is often neglected, resulting in a limited understanding of the target audience. Relatedly, extant research is frequently overlooked during this early planning stage, and this failure to use available social marketing theory and frameworks can result in program performing poorly. Thirdly, for a program to be successful, it must be congruent with the goals of the wider environment and infrastructure within which it is situated; adopting too narrow a focus can also result in a limited impact or program failure. Lastly, we found a common issue relating of stakeholder mismanagement, specifically around issues of power imbalance and mismanaged expectations resulting in social marketing program failing to launch. Researchers and practitioners must acknowledge that social marketing programs do indeed fail but recognize that in these failings lies insight into how to enhance future practice. Recommendations: We suggest that more attention is required from social marketing practitioners during the early design stage into understanding the target audience in detail. We suggest drawing upon extant social marketing frameworks and research to inform the planning and development of social marketing programs. We demonstrate how implementing these changes in the earliest stages of program designs would reduce the chance of program failure. Further, we suggest that adopting a more systems-level approach or critical approach would additionally benefit program outcomes. Limitations: A relatively small sample size could be considered a limitation of the study. Similarly, our focus on practitioner insights may limit the scope of the findings. Future research could advance the current findings by incorporating the views of a broader range of stakeholders, including the target audience themselves. We also suggest future research consider integrating the analysis of failure into the social marketing process to encourage practitioner reflection and inform and improve future practice.

Social marketing at 50: towards an epistemological expansion of the discipline to embrace diversity. A Viewpoint

“…However, this may be an artifact of the western-oriented and English-language publication bias that exists in academia (Gordon et al , 2016), which perpetuates the “false perception that social marketing practice is less prevalent in the non-Western world” (Deshpande, 2019, p. 236). Further, the academic publishing landscape in general features fewer publications by practitioners, who face their own set of challenges inhibiting publication (Akbar et al , 2021a; Deshpande, 2019; Mlinarić et al , 2017), regardless of location. Finally, many of the factors linked to these publication biases are also bound up in systemic issues tied to global inequities such as access to resources and training (Davies et al , 2021).…”

“…Strategies and solutions Acknowledge the role of politics, religion and external forces that disproportionately affect social marketing practice in the Global South and influence how "social change" is defined Increase visibility of "hidden" social marketing efforts through academic-practitioner partnerships and the chronicling and publication of successes (White, 2018) as well as "failures" (Akbar et al, 2021a;Cook et al, 2020Cook et al, , 2021 Increase the use of the label "social marketing" to describe efforts that meet the criteria for social marketing practice (Deshpande, 2019;Kassirer et al, 2019;Lee, 2020) as outlined by iSMA (International Social Marketing Association, 2017)…”

Examining 50 years of social marketing through a bibliometric and science mapping analysis

“…How can we effectively communicate information and get campaigns and messages integrated across all platforms and devices? From the analysis perspective, future research should explore further the use of different models to contribute to the field of social marketing. Consumer satisfaction with CSR programs, and the effectiveness of these programs, should be analyzed (Akbar et al , 2021; Saini et al , 2021). Several additional topics could be modeled from a social perspective: How do consumers react to surge pricing in alcohol and tobacco?…”

Social Marketing for Social Change: The Case of Egyptian Social Marketing Campaign in Educating Positive Parental Behavior

“…Besides the difficulty of accepting changes in existing behaviors, many of these campaigns worldwide lack sustainable strategy. There is a major gap in the discipline's progress when it comes to openness and critical reflection on social marketing projects that do not provide the expected results [25].…”