Procter and Gamble Teaches Social Marketers How To Sell Soap

According to this New York Times article “Diseases and disorders caused by dirty hands — like diarrhea — kill a child somewhere in the world about every 15 seconds, and about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap, studies indicate. But getting people into a soap habit, it turns out, is surprisingly hard.”

The story reports on the use of marketing techniques to encourage the use of soap in African villages. It details what social marketers learned from the Procter and Gamble marketing mavens about how to be more effective in getting consumers to change their behavior. “Our products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns,” said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. “Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives, and it’s essential to making new products commercially viable.”

While the New York Times is in the reporting business, New Routes has more in common with marketers than with journalists. We are in the social change business, using media as marketers might, as a tool to help change health practices.

The way we judge the strength of our program is by the impact it has on the community, not by the production value of the media we produce. Our question is: will behavior change happen as a result of our immigrant-produced media efforts? What I’d love to see in two years is a New York Times Story focusing on the success our grantees are having in helping immigrants live healthier lives right here in the United States.