If I had nine lives...

This week, my friend Emily pointed out to me that I have become a social worker in Romania. I told her I realized that and in addition I had become my friend Stacy (a marketing major in college who has just started her own business) while remaining partially myself. That sentence makes very little sense but hang with me and I will work it out. To start I have to say when I see pictures or Facebook statuses of my classmates in MECO (another option I had for my summer where I would have done extensive shadowing in an Iowa hospital) learning to cast, stitch, and deliver babies I get extremely jealous. On the other hand, I do know that I will have those experiences someday and the experiences I’m having this summer would be much less likely in the future. I think if I had nine life-times I would be able to do all the jobs I am interested in, but sadly I am only given this one. I completely understand when peoples’ interests are so numerous they don’t know what to do with their lives. What I can’t and will never understand are people that have no drive. How can nothing in this whole big/wonderful/terrifying/thrilling/changing world grab your attention?

If I had nine lives I would spend one being a social worker, one being a social marketer, one being an epidemiologist, and then probably a few being the several different medical specialties that interest me. Thank goodness I had almost that many roommates, who are doing some of the jobs I wish I had time to do, so I will be able to live vicariously through them. This week, I’m working on writing interventions based off data from a children’s sun-exposure study that was performed before I arrived. To do this job my mentor, Andra (whose birthday is today: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!), gave me a few books and websites on social marketing. Now social marketing isn’t talking about facebook or twitter if the word social is really jumping out at you, like it did to me. What it is essentially is using the principles of marketing in social sciences, such as in public health initiatives. The people of the world today do not sit back and get told what to do, they search things for themselves and if you want an initiative to work today you have got to sell it to each specific person. Thirty or so years ago, people went to their doctor and asked what was wrong and what to do. Today people google their symptoms, go to the doctor, tell the doctor what is wrong with them and then sometimes present treatment plans they agree with and want for themselves. In the same manner, people don’t just listen to public health messages today. How many studies have been published with results citing the benefits of getting childhood vaccinations? But, the parents of today all too frequently listen to Jenny McCarthy or other googled articles instead of the so called ‘experts’ and decide vaccinations aren’t for them. More studies citing positive outcomes aren’t likely to sway these parents. Instead we need to research what motivates them to change their opinion and use that in the formation of new initiatives. Marketing is all about discovering what the customer wants and making the services satisfy the customer. Social marketing is about making what is healthy for the public the fun, easy, and popular choice by selling it to each demographic.  

 Think about this. If you asked anyone in the world today if smoking was bad for them, the answer you would get would be yes. Therefore, ads that continue to tell us that smoking is bad for us and nothing else are not effective and limited in value. The ads are answering a question that already has an answer. So what are the questions to ask? Perhaps:

·         What are the barriers to smoking cessation in over 50 year old males?

·         What are positives and negatives towards smoking cessation for 18-25 year old females?

Social marketers ask these questions and then produce initiatives that have incentives for positive choices while reducing the barriers to making the positive choices.

Like I said above, I am not business minded, but social marketing has got me really excited about a topic so outside of my expertise and something I would have likely never learned much about if I had taken this internship. I hope I didn’t butcher the explanation too badly. I think working on understanding social marketing has made me a combo of my old roommates Emily (an MSW student at Wisconsin) and Stacy. It also made me think of a YouTube video Stacy showed me over Spring Break this year. It is about marketing in a commercial sense, but I think it can also be stretched to encompass the social marketing I talked about in this blog. To check out an intriguing video about the youth of today go to: http://stacyrust.com/2011/03/17/if-youre-in-marketing/.  

Well now I must be off to bed as tomorrow will be a long day. I am off to work in the morning and then to Barcelona in the evening! I’m not taking my computer so check back on Monday for my post about Barcelona!!!

Ciao