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Bringing About Better Behaviors Smith Professor is a Natural at Marketing Ideas
The team was working with the National Consumers League to develop a marketing plan for its LifeSmarts program, which teaches consumer literacy to high school-age youth. The challenge they were facing is a common one in nonprofit circles—the product is "not something you can sell for $10.99," Ratner said, as in a more traditional kind of exchange. But if the team was looking for answers to this difficult question, they came to the right place. Thinking about marketing ideas comes naturally to Ratner. She was able to guide the team throughout the semester—and she’ll be teaching an entire course on the subject in the fall. Ratner, who earned a Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton University, said she was always interested in using psychology for social-related causes. "As an undergraduate, I envisioned myself working for an organization like the American Cancer Society," she said. She was fascinated with the idea of using persuasive techniques to help people make better decisions—for example, convincing them not to smoke. While conducting research with colleagues at the Wharton School she discovered how much she enjoyed the more applied contexts of the business school environment. She came to the Smith School in 2005, after teaching at The Kenan-Flagler Business School and serving as a visiting faculty fellow at the University of Chicago. Here at Smith, Ratner—now an associate professor in the marketing department—has taught a number of marketing courses for MBAs, undergraduates and executives, including marketing management, marketing research and consumer behavior. She likes to sneak her social marketing interests into her teaching as much as possible, she said. Undergraduates in her consumer behavior class in the spring, for example, developed ideas for campaigns that would decrease texting while driving. "In my mind, these ideas are not confined to one course," she said. "But at the same time, it’s great to have the opportunity to dive deeply into it." This fall, she will do just that with the launch of her new course, Marketing for Social Value. The course will primarily examine the ways in which private and public sector firms use marketing strategies to engage their stakeholders around social impact. This includes both cause marketing, used by so many companies today to link consumer behavior to the support of a social cause, and social marketing. Ratner finds cause marketing to be an exciting field, with companies like Pepsi (with its ‘Pepsi Refresh’ campaign) raising some very interesting issues. "The central issue for a campaign like this is whether consumers will embrace it or remain skeptical," she said. It’s also interesting, she noted, to see how a company like Pepsi opted to voluntarily lose some control of its brand with a campaign like this, rather than stick with the more traditional, fully-controllable vehicles like Super Bowl ads. Ultimately, her course will emphasize the need to understand what issues resonate with consumers, as well as the importance of building evaluation into the plan from the very beginning. Marketing an idea rather than a tangible product requires some creative thinking about what the four P’s are, she said, but you need to have just as thorough an understanding of who the target is, what resonates with them, and how to measure your impact. Ratner is currently working on several research threads that have potentially important findings in the social marketing arena. Together with a colleague from Harvard, she is examining the current USDA food pyramid guidelines and testing the responses of people to the current presentation of the guidelines, versus a much simpler presentation. What they’re finding is that people respond much better to a more simplified version. In a separate study with Rebecca Hamilton, a fellow associate professor of marketing at the Smith School, she is looking specifically at consumer motivation and how to best present information to motivate a consumer to act in his or her own best interests—for example, to exercise more—in the long term. Whether it’s convincing people to eat better, to exercise more, to smoke less, to stop texting while driving, or anything else, Ratner is clearly at home in the realm of marketing ideas. "I find it hugely satisfying to generate new knowledge—and disseminate knowledge—about consumer psychology and human decision making that can help people make better decisions," she said.
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Rebecca Ratner was wrapping up her first conversation with
the Social Venture Consulting team she was coaching in the
spring semester when she was asked an interesting question: just
how do you go about marketing an idea?
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SUMMER 2010 |