Capturing the Ripples: Addressing the Sustainability of the Impact of Social Marketing

Published in the Social Marketing Quarterly (Volume 13, Issue 4, pages 84-107), this article explores the development and implementation of a social marketing campaign that was designed to address the interactions between employment seekers and employment providers in the Republic of Maldives. Editor's note: the Related Links section, below, provides access to a detailed summary of the "Yes...Because you can" campaign, which involved engaging people through a toll-free telephone hotline, a website, and career counseling. It was "implemented in an environment of negative mindsets among young people toward skill-based training and occupations. This in turn has resulted in employers preferring an expatriate workforce, leaving large numbers of Maldivian youth unemployed. Social marketing was used as a device to valorize the notion of work and career by promoting affirmative and positive attitudes toward work. A part of the overall strategy was a career counseling program which followed the campaign to build on this valorizing effect and provide a contextually grounded structure and system for making effective career choices."

Here is an excerpt from the Conclusion section of the article:
"...It is the combination of a social marketing initiative and a career guidance intervention employed in tandem with each other that has had the strongest impact on the attitudes targeted. One without the other seems not to have had as significant an effect...Going back to the social marketing model of a marketing mix, the "Yes" campaign promoted a positive and affirmative image of work and drew the attention of the target audience to the product of the program, namely, career counseling. In this context, career counseling was, in effect, a standard career development program that had been adapted to map onto the "Yes" vision....[I]t is in the reciprocity of the interactions between a promotion and a product that the potential for long-term sustainability could lie.

...We use the constructs of 'valorization' and 'surplus value' to discuss the dynamics of the interaction between the social marketing and the career guidance intervention....Valorization is a French word that means 'to make useful' and 'add value'. 'Surplus value' is value created that is beyond the cost of the effort which was invested to create that value. The "Yes" campaign...did not stop merely at valorizing career development. In creating an ambience of affirmation toward self-mediated career development, the campaign brought forth 'surplus value'...[which] provided a 'setting' for a systematic career guidance program to be perceived not only as something attractive but also as a necessary and useful service...

We propose, therefore, that social marketing is most effective when it has a 'partner intervention' that can 'capture' the 'surplus value' created by social marketing and thereby achieve the momentum that is necessary to effect sustained change. We further argue that it is not merely the coming together of social marketing and a 'partner intervention' that effects change. It is in effect the smooth implementation of a mechanism, whereby a social marketing promotion is so designed that it fully primes a 'partner intervention' to carry the effort forward toward sustainability in the long run....Social marketing's contribution would culminate with the baton being passed on as it were, to the partner intervention..."

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