At the heart of community marketing is understanding. What makes the community tick. What its core purpose is. What binds it together. How the community sees itself. What change it does or doesn’t want. Who or what influences it, and so on.
In the past communities have grown around a natural or man-made feature such as a river crossing, an estuary or road junction. The need to survive and prosper bound them together and communication was by word of mouth.
Such geographical boundaries continued to provide one definition of a community – even as townships grew and fractured into smaller ‘communities’.
Faith, work, race, nationality or ethnicity have also provided labels to identify a group that have been viewed in some way as a community. For example during a recent meeting the term ‘the Polish community’ was used to describe a group that the speaker felt had specific needs in terms of both access to support – and communication issues. It is worth noting that the labels may not always be helpful and the group perceived as community may not share that view. That is – they may not see themselves as a community even if a third party does.
Having started with seeking some clarity about a particular community, how we reach and engage that group becomes the explicit purpose of community marketing. Word of mouth, newsletters, an array of traditional marketing tools and techniques have been used in the past. Today’s communication channels have broadened along with changes in technology and have opened up new possibilities for supporting groups that at one time might not even have been considered a ‘community’. For example, drug users may find themselves talking to each other about the issues they face in accessing appropriate support services within a particular geographic area. They may do this through an online forum. They may or may not see themselves as a community as such but they have started to organize themselves and communicate between themselves very much as an established community would do.
The diverse groups that can be termed communities have a different type of requirement in terms of ‘marketing’. Social marketing has become something of a buzzword in an attempt to formulate a process for changing behaviours targeted at specific groups. Psychologists have proffered differing thoughts about tackling behaviour over the years and social marketing has grown up around some of the advocated theories. Some organisations have been practicing what has since become termed ‘social marketing’ for many years.
The question I pose myself and others is this. “Is social marketing a singular solution for reaching, engaging and driving behavioural change amongst any perceived community group”?
Graham Mallinson
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