I brought advertising concepts, both good and bad, into my new life. One of those I must confess, for both better and worse, was the concept of branding. We create brands in advertising to make it easy for people to purchase the very product they hear about or see advertised. We often create brands in social marketing to make it easier for us to get organized, to publicize our own efforts, and simply because social marketing is based on advertising which is based on the concept of branding.

Branding is the shorthand that makes advertising possible. Investing brands with powerful images and words over and over again gives products meaning; the brand becomes the stimulus, our purchase the response. When there is no easy-to-see product difference, branding can just about be the product. There are places where branding works wonders in social marketing. But if not judiciously applied, it can also be a big mistake. I know of no worse culprit in this branding business than myself in those younger years. As an advertising man, I was, after all, a born brander. A brand name not only helps move a product; a brand is something everyone can be proud of, whether you're a client or an advertising professional.
For years one of the first things I would look for in a first planning meeting with a client was the opportunity to package and then brand the social marketing product. Your job as an advertising professional is to take something very complex, or at least what the client perceives to be complex, and make it simple. After years of struggling to develop a health program, get it through the planning process, get physicians, administrators, managers and front line providers in line, and finally turn on the lights, you want to see something for your work. Advertising makes this possible, and the brand makes it easy.

Often in these early days there was an audible sigh of relief from those collected around the conference table as I made my presentation. It was as if I were performing a miracle. The baby had a name. And I showed how it looked applied to a wide variety of print and broadcast materials. Finally, after endless planning documents, here was something solid: a cohesive image, a mark applied to letterhead, posters, signage. And an advertising campaign to extend that mark. We exist.

The Positive Side

Branding can work wonders in outreach programs like AIDS testing or prenatal care. You have a supportive message, a receptive and easily defined audience and a phone number attached to a brand. Once you have the delivery system in place, the brand begins to mean something, and the phone number becomes a big front door. This is a perfect job for branding: a friendly and familiar mark under all kinds of simple, warm messages, and a place to go for care. If what you have is good, trustworthy and helpful; if people want it; and you can afford to get the word out, branding is just the ticket. If you have or want the backing from the private sector, branding can be crucial. People like to see their name attached to something that works. A brand that works and is well promoted can be a symbol that represents standards, provides a sense of ownership and rallies others to our cause. "Baby Arizona," "Baby Your Baby," "RiteStart," "Project Hug" and others have helped make prenatal care a public issue that's accessible and understandable to the women they need most to reach.

The Other Side

But branding has a darker side. It centralizes authority; it facilitates an accumulating, centralizing mindset. It can create a slow and bulky organization. This organization has to be tended and fed. After a while, the organization can start to come between its mission and it audience. People begin to accumulate in the board room and forget why they're there. They begin to spend a lot of time in meetings, they have a conference, and begin traveling to others far and wide. All this activity can point outreach in the wrong direction and, at its worst, turn it into inreach.

Just as the advertising art director has a natural tendency to create a cohesive image and visual presentation, ambitious project managers tend naturally to think in terms of line extension. If you've invested energy and dollars in your prenatal care brand, why not use it to promote a related service like family planning? Or so the thinking goes. The problem develops when you use your established prenatal brand with teen audiences; you're suddenly perceived as encouraging teens to have babies. Brands have their limits, and you have to know what they are.

If you now create a new brand for family planning, you're also creating your own competition for your audience's interest and attention. Too many brands spoil the marketing stew.

The Wrong Message

The brand can come to represent a problem that's being taken care of; so while more and more people are involved, less and less may actually be getting done. The people on the sidelines may be wooed into the feeling that they can stay there; the brand says it's being taken care of, even when it's not. Helping the homeless or mentally ill, for example. I have friends who don't give to people on the street or through other charities because they assume it's being taken care of by United Way. It may not be.

A brand can draw fire, especially if it works. Some of the issues we need most to deal with will likely conflict with one side's political philosophy or the other. Social marketing is a public event held in a public place with everybody's money. Sometimes for social marketing to be any good at all, it must cause trouble. A brand gives somebody, often budget cutters, something to shoot at.

And branding our social marketing messages may not be one of the best ways to reach kids. While teens have been known to kill for a certain brand of sneaker, sunglasses or warm-up jacket, this probably will not be the case with our branded social marketing message.

In California, we're working to promote ENABL, that state's already successful Teen Sex Awareness campaign. The brand is an acronym for Education Now and Babies Later. Key to the program is the involvement of volunteers, participating schools and community-based organizations. The ENABL brand has helped us raise awareness of both the issue and the program to these crucial audiences. But the ENABL brand has, wisely, been deleted from the television commercials targeting the young teens who will ultimately benefit most from the program's adoption. In this case, some of the people we need most to reach are authority adverse. They can't always hear the message, for the sender.

No Easy Solutions

Branding is one of the building blocks of advertising. But like so many of advertising's principle forms, it does not always fit a social marketing model. It can make life easier, I must confess, for people like me. Perhaps some of the behaviors we need most to change are our own behaviors, especially those based on what we've learned from advertising. Social marketing is nowhere near as easy as the success of advertising would have us believe.