The private sector has been under increasing pressure to address social problems in emerging markets that have traditionally been addressed by governments and NGOs.
Corporations have responded, in part, by creating Corporate Social Responsibility programs for which marketing has become an important tool.
Multinational companies have worked on many projects that benefit both the environment and the community, while providing a significant return in terms of profits.
In this win-win situation that implies social responsibility, corporations are mounting social behavior change campaigns to improve health and quality of life, which is called "social marketing".
Although multinational corporations have proven to be powerful agents of social change, through the creation of new products and services, few have confronted the magnitude and complexity of social problems such as the challenge of universal literacy or childhood obesity.
The analysis of these experiences reveals that the marketing tools applied by companies to their social initiatives can contribute to overcoming social problems and lay the foundations for important sectors of the community to achieve a better quality of life.
The definition of social marketing, according to Andreasen, is "the use of marketing principles to influence the voluntary human behavior of target audiences in order to improve health or benefit society," which is very different from traditional or "private" marketing in the sense that its central purpose is not to generate direct profits for the company by increasing sales, but to achieve this by improving social or environmental conditions through behavioral change.
Specifically, social marketing campaigns have addressed social issues such as not littering, driving within the speed limit, responsible consumption of alcoholic beverages, healthy diets, and HIV prevention.
Successful social marketing campaigns use a variety of tools to influence behavioral change, including education, marketing, and policy.
Although social marketing has a long history, however, social marketing campaigns are usually sponsored by governments or nonprofit organizations, and rarely by corporations.
To put into context this new trend in CSR, such as the use of marketing tools by corporations to address social problems and achieve individual behavioral change in members of a population, we offer the example of two companies that successfully took up the challenge.
At Coca-Cola, a recent decrease in the Community Relations department's budget led managers to review their social initiatives and choose to focus resources on a single type of program. The Community Relations programs selected should have far-reaching impact and benefits.
Possible areas of opportunity for targeting community relations initiatives included sports, health, environment and education.
A recent survey of the Costa Rican communities in which Coca-Cola operated reported that education remained a local need and priority; therefore, programs in this area were considered to be consistent with public opinion and expectations.
Through qualitative studies, Coca-Cola's Community Engagement Department found a lack of interest in reading on the part of students and parents in the most economically disadvantaged and socially at-risk regions.
In this context, Coca-Cola developed the "Reading is Magic" campaign to reposition libraries as places of entertainment and learning and to support reading in schools and students' homes.
There was a donation of more than 40,000 books, improvement in the library infrastructure, which consisted of furnishing new desks, chairs and study rooms for students, as well as painting the previously dreary walls.
study rooms for students, as well as painting the previously dingy walls.
Finally, Coca-Cola involved the Ministry of Public Education to institute a policy to develop and reinforce reading as a habit, so that an initiative was implemented to dedicate ten minutes of each Spanish class to the reading of a book chosen by the students themselves.
Eighty schools have participated, benefiting 65,000 Costa Rican schoolchildren and 135,000 other people including teachers, librarians, parents and community members.
The problem of obesity is a public health issue that is affecting many Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Chile, which are seeing how their populations are worsening their diets -increasing their consumption of products high in fat, sodium and sugar- and at the same time leading a sedentary lifestyle. In Chile this phenomenon has been dramatic, as it is one of the countries with the worst obesity and overweight rates in Latin America.
Tresmontes Lucchetti, in Chile, a company in the food industry, characterized by its commitment to corporate social responsibility initiatives, decided to focus on the issue of health as part of its community relations programs.
It did so by addressing the problem of childhood obesity. The intention was to determine the evolution in the prevalence of obesity in the same children over a three-year period. They analyzed more than a thousand students from several schools; a nutritionist, physical education teachers and surveyors were included.
The results were very satisfactory, since the prevalence of obesity was reduced by 50% in children (from 21.6% to 12.2% in men and from 19.4% to 8.7% in women) and overweight was reduced by 25%.
In view of the success achieved, Tresmontes Lucchetti has continued to replicate the program for the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity in other communities in the country, and the company's example has led to the creation of the NutriRSE project, an initiative led by Acción RSE, a business organization that promotes good practices in corporate social responsibility and understands CSR as a management model that can also contribute to solving the country's social and environmental problems.
The success of the project carried out by Tresmontes Lucchetti allows us to be optimistic that the partnership between the public sector, private enterprise and the community will be able to overcome the scourge of childhood obesity using the available tools of social marketing.
Like these two examples, there are many more that companies can adopt as part of their social projection, a fundamental element in the market to find success in business.
Excerpt from the article "Corporate Social Marketing", published in the magazine INCAE Business Review.
