Hmmm That Did Not Work As Planned

So this past Monday I thought I had a good grasp on my Marketing Objective and Source of Volume for my project. I had decided that I would focus on Acquisition - Stimulate Demand because SADD would be looking for more people to listen to their message/educational materials (acquisition) and they would not want to steal consumers from other groups with similar messages (which might be unethical) - instead looking to bring more people into their category (stimulate demand). Sounds good right?

This all changed during class on Monday, where I learned that I had made a basic mistake, the marketing plan is for SADD to help students change drinking behaviors, not to increase their membership or people who see their educational message. Once it became clear I wanted to affect a behavior I had to revisit all of my decisions in a nice large chart our professor provided to help guide us through these situations. Now whether I believe this plan is looking at Acqusition or Retention Marketing Objectives will drive the category I focus on and in turn my source of volume could lead to different slants for my marketing plan. For example, if I kept an Acquisition / Stimulate Demand view, my category would be "responsible drinking" but I would be looking at growing the responsible drinking pool by bringing in people who do not currently drink and having them drink responsibility. (not exactly what I was looking to do) If I switch to a Acqusition/Steal Share view, I could focus on "responsible drinking" as well but here I would be looking to bring in folks who are not currently responsible drinkers (non-drinkers, binge drinkers, alcoholics. (sounds pretty close to what I want to achieve!) On the other hand I could look at these choices with a Retention Marketing Objective, but my concern here is that I would be focusing then mainly on current drinkers or current responsible drinkers, which kind of misses the point I'm trying for in the marketing plan. Confused? Yeah that kind of sums up the last two days for me. :)

Right now I'm shooting for Acquisition / Steal Share with the focus on "responsible drinking" but I'm not setting in stone anything until I take another crack at this spreadsheet the professor gave us. Have any opinions or ideas? I'd love to hear them!

Core Competence and Goal

Now that I've settled on SADD working to minimize occurrences of binge drinking as the focus of my marketing plan, I've started to look at the core competence of SADD and what the goal for this program would be. Here are some thoughts in both areas...

Core Competence - After reading up on SADD on their website (http://www.sadd.org) I think that SADD's core competent lies in being able to Education and Information dissemination to help young people deal with the dangers of substance abuse and other difficult situations they may face. It became clear from reading SADD's mission and reviewing literature about them that, while they do some fundraising its clear their focus is on helping young people through educational efforts and programs. SADD leverages their competence by having chapters throughout the country in various educational institutions that are run by students. Students can identify with the pressures and temptations their peers face, and are best suited to help educate other students about the potential dangers and how to face difficult situations.

Goal - The goal of this program would be to reduce the amount of of college age students who partake in binge drinking behaviors by 50% in five years. The percentage will be measured through surveys of college age students, and while SADD could perform these surveys, it is likely that there are other organizations that could perform the surveys or at least partner with SADD on the surveys (e.g. the National Institute of Health, the CDC or some college education accreditation group?). The 50% reduction is an auspicious goal, but considering the detrimental effects of binge drinking in both the near and long term it is in line with SADD's mission and goals. The five year time frame may be a little short, but it would be the minimum acceptable, considering that in five years allows students who have just entered college to be fully exposed to SADD's program throughout their undergrad years (usually 4-5 years).

I'm spending the next few days working on the next part of the Big Picture for the marketing plan, the marketing objective and the source of volume.

Topic Selected!

So after some thinking and preliminary digging through the net, I've decided on SADD and Binge Drinking on College campuses as my topic for the marketing plan. I almost went with the American Cancer Society or a political campaign, but SADD presented some interesting concepts with regards to identifying the benefits of such a campaign.

My goal now is to nail down the first few steps of the marketing plan: Fundamental Entity, the core competence of the entity and the goal of the entity through the marketing campaign by Wednesday. The entity and goal seem to be a little more straightforward than goal right now, since I have to make sure the goal has measurable metrics, a time frame attached to them and thats its achievable.

Working on a Topic for the Marketing Plan

After Monday's class I'm working on a couple of different ideas for the Social Marketing Plan. I started out with a wide swath of ideas and I'm down to 4 now.

1. SADD and Binge Drinking on College campuses - Looking at Students Against Drunk Driving and seeing how they can work on reducing binge drinking levels on campuses. Pros are that the benefits should be interesting to identify and metrics should be reasonable to calculate. Cons are that I need more research on SADD to understand how they work. One interesting idea is to have them work with a for-profit firm (MillerCoors?) as part of a CSR effort.
2. American Cancer Society - Looking at how the ACS can turn their efforts to early detection campaigns in either lower income (working the base of the pyramid concept) or college settings. Both provide interesting cases for identifying the benefits and it would be interesting how you can promote cancer screening in an area where students dont see cancer as a potential issue (college age students) or where medical care is not a given (lower income areas).
3. The Olympics - Sounded really interesting in scope and concept especially in looking at how it can affect social economic change, but a classmate sounded like he wanted to use it, but I keep it as an option for now.
4. Political Advertising - Looking at how a political issue group can market a concept for the public good. Interesting ethical issues involved. Also interesting to see how you handle one party promoting an idea as a good while others may not see it as such.

I have a couple of more days left, but I think I'll try to submit one of these ideas tomorrow and see what the professor has to say. If I had to pick right now I'm between options 1 and 3, but let me know if you have any ideas or comments!

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