The Marketing Mix for Community Support Services
The 4Ps of the Marketing Mix are one of the most well known concepts in business and marketing. They’re the 4 categories of a business that need to be tailored to your customers' needs and preferences.
It’s like baking - Loads of recipes are just flour, butter, eggs and sugar and it’s how much of each, and the way you use them that makes the difference between cake, cookies, pancakes, or scones.
The Marketing Mix is how you tailor your 4 business ‘ingredients’ to offer the right service for your audience.
It’s all about being person-centred, so should be right up our street in public and voluntary services, but it it tends to be overlooked because when we hear about marketing it’s usually for profit-making companies selling tangible products - How can it be relevant for free-to-use, public-benefit services?
Well, here’s a guide…
Product
The “product” part of the Marketing Mix is about making sure that what you’re offering is what your audience needs and wants.
So we might be offering a service, rather than a tangible product, but the question is the same - is it what people need?
There’s a popular quote from the renowned Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt that people don’t buy drills, they buy holes in walls. So you could make the best drill in the world, but if people find another way to make a hole in their wall without buying the drill, that’s what they’ll choose. And the lesson there is not to focus on what you’re offering, but to flip your thinking round to focus on what purpose you’re serving for people - what problem are they looking to solve? And actually, you’ll realise that nobody even wants a hole in their wall, they want to hang a picture, or a shelf!
And that means your product or service can take any form it needs to, to help people achieve that goal. Instead of focussing on providing A Type of Service and making it the best version of that service it can be, focus on the difference your service makes.
Innovation expert Tony Ulwick called this “jobs to be done” - the idea that people buy products because there’s something that needs to be done. You buy a drill because it does the job of helping you put up a shelf. When we’re thinking about this in services, I find it's about the change to be made. What change do people want to make in their life, that they recruit your service to help with?
Then, your product or service is whatever you can do to help people make that change.
And that has a few benefits:
You’ll have a better understanding of the impact you want to achieve, to be able to measure it better.
You’ll have a better understanding of who your audience are, and what problems they’re facing, to be able to engage with them to learn more and even involve them in co-designing your services.
You’ll be focussed outwards on people’s needs, rather than inwards on the service, so you’re more likely to notice when things change in society and people’s lifestyles, to be able to adapt to stay relevant.
“A Job-To-Be-Done is a statement that describes, with precision, what a group of people are trying to achieve or accomplish in a given situation. A job-to-be-done could be a task that people are trying to accomplish, a goal or objective they are trying to achieve, a problem they are trying to resolve, something they are trying to avoid, or anything else they are trying to accomplish”
Price
What price dignity?
If your service is offered for free (or near enough, if you offer discounted or means tested support) it’s understandable to assume this one doesn’t apply to you. But I actually think it’s most important in those kinds of services.
Because ‘price’ isn’t just about money. It means looking at what people gain and lose from using your service. What are the pros and cons? And is it worth it, overall?
While public and voluntary services might be affordable, or even free, we're often asking higher costs in other ways:
Discomfort, in facing up to a difficult problem
Shame, if the problem is stigmatised in our community
Vulnerability, to ask for help
Uncertainty, if we're not sure what kind of help we'll be offered, or if we'll be eligible
So it’s important to consider how these things factor in when people weigh up the value of your service, especially if there are unhelpful or unhealthy alternatives that don’t involve these costs, that you’ll want to compete with.
How people weigh up the pros and cons will be unique to each individual, and might vary depending on their mood and situation. And it’s just like how some people will be less able to afford the financial price of a service, some people will be less able to ‘afford’ the emotional or practical ‘price’.
If you’re already juggling a lot in your life, you might not be able to afford to spend time on the phone trying to get an appointment. If you’re already struggling with anxiety, you might not feel able to afford the uncertainty of waiting to hear if you’re eligible for support.
So it’s helpful to offer free or low-cost support so that money isn’t a barrier to using our services, but are there any other costs of using your service and how can you minimise the barriers from them too?
Promotion
The one most people are familiar with is promotion, or advertising - making sure people know who you are, what you can offer, and how they can use your service if they need it.
This can be difficult in public services especially, because our services need to be available to everyone who needs it. So it's easy to think that means everyone needs to be aware of your service, just in case. But that's expensive, time consuming and unlikely to succeed. Not just because you're trying to reach everyone when only a small percentage will ever need your service. But because only the people who currently need your service will even pay attention anyway.
The human brain has a handy way of automatically filtering out information we don't need. (The Invisible Gorilla is a great example of this, go watch the video if you’re not familiar with it!)
You've probably passed quite a few billboards and posters out and about in the last couple of weeks, and hundreds of online ads - how many can you remember?
If we remember any, it's usually because they were relevant in some way, or sparked a reaction. It's not enough that the ad was there for you to see, it takes a lot for you to actually notice it.
And if the situations your service helps with are the kind of thing people prefer not to think about - those stressful, worrying or even embarassing problems in life that community services often help with, it's extra tough to break through.
So the trick is to find the moments in people's journey with the problem they're facing, when they're ready to ask for help, and be there. That’s essentially the whole concept of the Margareting Model - understanding the journey people take towards your service, so that you can meet them on the way and help them take the quickest and easiest route.
That can be as simple as understanding the moments where people will welcome hearing about your support and be there in that moment. Like how Samaritans work with the rail industry to be there in the right place, at the right time, with the right message.
Or the Stroke Association Connect service, that gets in touch with people as they leave hospital after a stroke, to reassure people they’re not alone and offer support. What I love about this example is that it’s not easily recognisable as ‘promotion’, because it’s part of the way the service is designed. But what is promotion about in community services, except connecting people to the support they need?
Place
The ‘place’ for a Drive-Thru is all about convenience - it aims to be the best option if you’re tired or in a hurry on a long journey.
For commercial products, ‘Place’ tends to be about how you go about buying it - is it online, or in a shop? Do you have your own stores like Ikea or Apple, or does your product sit on the shelf next to competitors in regular shops? Will the shops be on the high street, or in those retail parks you usually have to drive to? Or will your product be in little corner shops, or exclusive boutiques?
If your service doesn’t have a physical place (like a helpline, or an online service, or you visit people in their own homes), or you can’t change much about the place your service is situated in (like a GP surgery, or a college) these questions might not seem immediately relevant, but they are.
There are some common threads that will be important in any kind of service -
Convenience. The question of whether you sell your product on the high street or in a big retail park is largely about whether you expect people to make a particular trip out to buy your product (like furniture in a retail park), or whether they just want to be able to grab it while they’re already out and about (like sandwiches on the high street).
For your service, think about what kind of situation people will be in when they need your service, and how you can make it convenient.
For example a local domestic violence service now uses WhatsApp, recognising that people might not have a private place to call in the moment they feel ready to get in touch, so WhatsApp creates that private space by allowing people to type instead, and not worry about being overheard.Comfort. The question of whether your product will be in exclusive boutiques or corner shops is mainly about the experience people will have when they buy it. If it’s a significant purchase, like a gift, you might want the place to feel special too, which includes that the staff are knowledgeable and attentive. You might feel uncomfortable spending so much money (or tolerating high emotional or practical ‘costs’) if the staff don’t seem to be interested in helping you. Customer service is an aspect of Place that I think is especially important in community services, but I’ve noticed we don’t always prioritise ‘customer service’ as much as we probably should. I think sometimes that’s because more of our interactions with service-users are online, by phone, or self-service, isn’t it? It’s not easy to make a website, or a referral process provide high-quality customer experience. It’s hard to know what that might even involve.
So my tip if your service isn’t a physical place is to try to imagine what a real-world version of your service would look like. For example, instead of a waitlist you have a physical waiting room, so what’s it like? You’ll have experienced enough waiting rooms to know what’s important - were you told when to expect to be called? Does someone check in on you occasionally to let you know you’ve not been forgotten? Things like this are easily overlooked in a ‘virtual’ service, so I find this exercise helps to spot them.
