The Marketing Book 5th Edition

706 The Marketing Book

benefits are intangible and relevant to society
rather than the individual (as with CFCs in
aerosols), social marketers must work much
harder to generate a need for the product. This,
they argue, is the hardest type of behaviour
change, as the benefits are difficult to personal-
ize and quantify.

Challenging target groups

Social marketers must often target groups
whom commercial marketers tend to ignore:
the least accessible, hardest to reach and least
likely to change their behaviour. For example,
health agencies charged with improving pop-
ulation health status must, if they are to avoid
widening health inequalities further in the
general population (Whitehead, 1992; Smith,
1997b), target their efforts at those groups with

the poorest health and the most needs (Hast-

ings et al., 1998b). Far from being the most

profitable market segments, these groups often

constitute the least attractive ones: hardest to

reach, most resistant to changing health behav-

iour, most lacking in the psychological, social

and practical resources necessary to make the

change, most unresponsive to interventions to

influence their behaviour and so on. This poses

considerable challenges for segmentation and

targeting, as discussed later in the chapter.

Case 3 illustrates the problem vividly.

Greater consumer involvement

Marketing traditionally divides products into

high and low involvement categories, with the

former comprising purchases for items such as

cars or mortgages which are ‘expensive, bought

Case 3 Cervical screening: barriers to segmentation in social

marketing

A public health department wishes to encourage women within a certain age range in the health

authority area to attend for cervical screening. There are a number of possible ways in which this

population can be segmented, including:

 socio-demographic (social class, education, income, employment);

 psychographic (beliefs regarding preventive health, fatalism, attitudes towards health services);

 health behaviour (smokers/non-smokers etc.);

 previous usage behaviour (attendance for screening); and so on.

From available secondary research into the characteristics of attenders and non-attenders for cervical

and other screening (e.g. Thorogood et al., 1993; Austoker et al., 1997; Sugg Skinner et al., 1994), the

public health department could make certain assumptions about the women most likely to respond

positively to the programme: ABC1, well educated, in work, positive beliefs about ability to protect

oneself from cancer, favourable attitudes towards health service and so on. If the screening programme

were to be run as a profit-making service, this would be the segment to target. The screening agency

could develop messages consonant with these women’s beliefs, deliver them through workplaces at

which the women are most likely to be employed, utilize media most likely to be consumed by them, and

so forth. However, the health authority’s objective is not to run the most profitable screening service

possible, but to make the biggest possible impact on public health by reducing incidence of cervical

cancer. To do this, the screening programme needs to reach those groups with the highest risk of cancer

• the groups who, the same research shows, are the least likely to attend for screening.