Strategies for marketing reform programmes: The tertiary education perspective (II)
Place
“Place” describes the way that the product reaches the audience and fits its lifestyles. For a tangible product, this refers to the distribution system – including the warehouse, trucks, sales force, retail outlets where it is sold, or places where it is given out for free. For an intangible product such as a reform, place is less clear-cut, but refers to decisions about the channels through which consumers are reached with information or training about the reform. This may include the minister’s office., lecture halls, mass media vehicles or in-school demonstrations. Another element of place is deciding how to ensure inaccessibility of the offering and quality of the service delivery. By determining the activities and habits of the target audience, as well as their experience and satisfaction with the existing delivery system, researchers can pinpoint the most ideal means of distribution for the reform programme.
Promotion
Finally, the last “P” is promotion. Because of its visibility, this element is often mistakenly thought of as comprising the whole of reform marketing. However, as discussed above, it is only one piece. Promotion consists of the integrated use of advertising, public relations, promotions, media advocacy, personal selling and entertainment vehicles. The focus is on creating and sustaining, demand or acceptance for the reform. Public service announcements or paid ads are one way, but there are other methods such as coupons, media events, editorials, workshops, symposia or conferences. Research is crucial to determine the most effective and efficient vehicles to reach the target audience and increase acceptance. The primary research findings themselves can also be used to gain publicity for the programme at media events and in news stories.
The media often plays a large role in shaping how people think and behave. Also, the media can be used to encourage positive behaviours as well. According to Farrior (2008), four communication strategies – public education, social marketing, media advocacy and media literacy – can be used to influence community norms, increase public awareness and attract community support for a variety of public policies and programmes. These strategies are most effective when coupled with more potent prevention approaches, like policy, enforcement, education and skill building.
Public education: Of the four communication strategies, public education is probably the most common (Farrior, 2008). The goal of public education is to increase knowledge and awareness on a particular public issue. This awareness can often support the development and success of programmes and policies that address the problem. Public education can also be an effective way of increasing awareness about a new or existing law, publicise a community-based programme and reinforce instruction taught in schools or community-based organizations. Multimedia social campaigns typically combine public service announcements on television and radio with billboards and posters. Research shows that these campaigns are often the most cost-effective ways to reach large groups of people. However, they are not an effective way to change individual behaviour (Flynn, 1995).
Social marketing: Through social marketing techniques, government uses advertising principles to change social norms and promote healthy behavours. Like public education, social marketing uses a variety of media channels to provide a message to targeted groups of individuals. Yet, social marketing campaigns do more than just provide information – they try to convince people to adopt a new behaviour by showing them a benefit they will receive in return (Kotler and Reoberto, 1989).
Media advocacy: Media advocacy involves shaping the way social issues are discussed in the media to build support for changes in public policy. By working directly with local newspapers, television and radio to change both the amount of coverage the media provide and the content of that coverage, media advocates hope to influence the way people talk and think about a social or public policy.
Simons-Morton, Donohew and Srump (1997) argue that there are two primary ways to think about media advocacy. One way is to see it as a set of guerrilla activities designed to draw the attention of the media to issues of community concern. The second way is to develop long-term relationships with local media and identify ways to constructively engage them in your prevention efforts. In all these approaches, understanding the mission and culture of media is the first step toward constructive engagement. With this understanding, government can, in effect, work as a social marketer and position its reforms as a resource to the media, as opposed to a situation where it only wants media coverage.
Media literacy: Media literacy is a newer communication strategy aimed at teaching young people critical-viewing skills. However, this strategy can still be extended to general public by teaching them how to view, read or listen to various media messages so that they can assess and understand the messages in order to achieve an effective campaign. No any communication can succeed if people are reluctant to patronize it. For example, the educational reform programme can be effectively communicated to students and lecturers through internet if there is adequate knowledge and access to this medium among staff and students.
Furthermore, Weinreich (2008) proposes four additional “P’s” that are used by social marketers in their social campaign operation viz- Publics, Partnership, Policy and Purse strings. They are briefly explained as below.
Publics – Social marketers like government often have many different audience that their programme has to address in order to be successful. “Publics” refers to both the external and internal groups involved in the programme. External publics include the target audience, secondary audiences, policymakers and with either approval or implementation of the programme. All these need to be “communicated with” for the reform to be successful.
Partnership – Public issues are often so complex that one agency can not make a dent by itself. You need to team up with other organizations in the community to really be effective. You need to figure out which organizations have similar goals to yours, not necessarily the same goals and identify ways you can work together in order to achieve the desired objectives.
Policy – Social marketing programmes can do well in motivating individual behaviour change, but that is difficult to sustain unless the environment they’re in supports that change for the long run. Often, policy change is needed and media advocacy programmes can be effective complements to a social marketing programme such as the Nigerian education sector reform.
Purse strings – Most organizations that develop social marketing programmes operate though funds provided by sources such as foundations, governmental grants or donations. This adds another dimension to the strategy development-namely, where will you get the money to create your programme. As a major financier, the government has the wherewithal to fund the programme in addition to the grant from other donor agencies.
In addition, while corroborating with the public communication strategies discussed earlier in the paper, Carbanero Verzosa (2000) opines that managers contemplating reform should begin the process by developing a communication strategy to help build their understanding of the political, social and cultural environments in which they are working and to guide strategic operational choices that will help build understanding and support for the new initiative. This, she says, calls for making five management decisions in form of the following questions:
1. Which audiences need to be reached?
2. What change in behaviour is required?
3. What messages would be appropriate?
4. Which channels of communication would be most effective? And
5. How will the communication process be monitored and evaluated?
Audience
It is imperative to identify and disaggregate all the audiences involved in the education.Reform programme: They will vary depending on which stage of reform is being undertaken in the education reform, many more actors become involved – the Presidency and cabinet, congress, public, bureaucracy, the judiciary – educational institutions, unions, political parties, the media, state and local governments and the private sector. The political costs escalate as institutional changes directly and permanently affect specific segments of society such as organized labour, academic, communities, students union, government, parents and employers of labour. Communication programmes attempt to reach these multiple audiences in some sequence.
Behaviour
Behaviour is a specific action, performed toward a target, in a given context, at a specific time. For example, in educational programmes specific behaviours for each target audience can be promoted. Thus, legislators may be encouraged to pass authorizing legislation, media professionals persuaded to produce a balanced coverage of the issues, union leaders asked to participate in consultations and citizens motivated to engage in constructive dialogue and monitor implementation of the reform overtime.
Identifying the behaviour the programme would like to influence enhances awareness of environmental factors that influence audiences’ willingness to adopt these behaviours. Reform leaders and programme managers can then reduce perceived barriers to adoption of the new behaviour while increasing perceived benefits. Managers can make services and products affordable and accessible as well as influencing social norms, making these behaviours acceptable to the society.
Message
A message is the target audience’s response to the message put out by the communicator: It is what the audience hears versus what the communicator says. Good take-away messages focus on the stakeholders’ needs, not the organisation’s desire to communicate a message about its programmes. To be effective, a take-away message targets stakeholder beliefs or opinions and answers the question. “What does this have to do with me?” Messages should drive the desired behaviour change in the specific audience being addressed. Similarly, take-away messages must be culturally sensitive, memorable and concise such that the recommended behaviour results in benefits claimed by the programme.
Channels of Communication
There are various means of relaying messages, conducting consultations and engaging groups in public debate. What is important is to consider which channel of communication is the most credible to the specific target audience addressed. A determination of access to the media is critical in trying to reach the general population.
Television may not reach the poor who live in isolated villages with no access to electricity, but may be critical for certain urban elite audiences. Print materials will not be useful to those who are unable to read. Radio signals may reach a community, but people may not have batteries available all year round to operate their radios. Community gatherings and face-to-face communication may be the main channel of communication for reaching the poor and marginalized. However, programme managers must ensure that field workers are themselves adequately briefed about education reform and are able to articulate the relationship of economic reform to people’s daily lives.
Evaluation
How will the success of marketing communication about education reform be evaluated?
Ultimately, reform managers would like to be able to answer the question; are target audiences changing knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours as intended?
Education reform is such a dynamic and long-term undertaking that it will be almost impossible to identify a clear relationship between the communication component and the “success” of education reform just as it is difficult to apportion the success of an advertising campaign to a unit of product. The practical approach is to assess whether the audiences targeted are becoming better informed about the issues and whether attitude shifts have occurred which will likely support the behaviour change goals identified for each of the target audiences (Verzosa and Mitchell, 2002).
Tracking studies which will assess levels of knowledge and determine attitude change will therefore be helpful in projecting whether these audiences are increasing their readiness to engage in the new behaviours that will lead to the success of education reform. Managers with solid information about the motivations, perceptions and actions of key target audiences are better able to refine, enhance and sustain the reform programme.
Conclusion
The paper has argued that marketing is a critical factor in the successful design and implementation of public reform programmes. It explains that the process of developing education reform programmes must begin with understanding stakeholder groups (their motivations, perceptions and aspirations); and that designers of reform programmes should focus on positive behaviour change. To this end, it can be concluded that the current education policy on the carrying capacity of polytechnic admission which stipulates 70 per cent and 30 per cent for science and non-science programmes respectively lacks marketing orientation. It clearly fails to understand the demands and motivations of the stakeholders particularly the educationally disadvantaged states. It is expected that the government should have conducted a research to determine the ratio of science versus non-science students that finish secondary school annually to see if there is a match or mismatch before introducing the policy.
In essence, it is supposed to start with the assessment of the need for the reform, in which area and how can it be successfully communicated to the target public.. Thus, marketing becomes the method to reach potential and existing target audience with the reform programme. It is a vital part of education change management and can be done effectively and well, with sophistication and tact or it can be done poorly in a loud, crass and intrusive manner. Hopefully, this paper has given the basics for the former rather than the latter.

Concluded