Stakeholder Capitalism and Social Marketing
The Internet company Livedoor has been setting its sights on acquiring various media companies in Japan. The Wall Street Journal on March 24, 2005, compared its activities to the AOL takeover of Time Warner.
What caught my attention in the WSJ article was this graph:
The battle also highlights the shift in Japan from what is known as stakeholder capitalism, under which the interests of a company’s employees, business partners or managers were often given higher priority than increasing the company’s bottom line. Taking its place is an increasingly Western approach in which companies are under pressure to think first about their shareholders.
This puts into context something many social marketers confront everyday: the program design debates are more often not about the audience, they are about the stakeholders! I often find as a consultant that one of my major roles is that of the audience advocate. Whether it is working with representatives from within an agency or representatives from across different agencies, when program objectives and design issues come into play the conversations and decisions can usually be parsed into stakeholder issues versus audience ones. For example, We need to target this audience because that is what our funder wants. Our program needs to include this because that is what [the funders] look for.
Social marketers need to be especially sensitive to the notion that stakeholder capitalism, whether nuanced or not, can be the seed bed for ineffective programs. In many cases, their funding depends on what you do. Think for example:
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How does the finding agency frame its objectives and scope of work for its projects?
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What are the outcomes measures for a program?
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What is the funding stream for a particular initiative?
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Who receives the results and what are their implications for future programs?
In the world of publicly financed programs, accountability and transparency are important goals. But should they be at the expense of programs that consider and address the realities of the target audiences rather than those of the stakeholders? In another time, the Consumer-based Health Communication Model talked about the need to blend what we called scientific fact with consumer reality. It is time to consider a three dimensional model when we design social marketing programs. It is taking current knowledge of scientific facts, blending it with our understanding of our target audience, and mixing in the expectations of our stakeholders, that give us a better understanding of what a social marketing program aims to achieve [and BTW, starts looking at the political end of these programs]. The classic definition of marketing is achieving organizational objectives by meeting consumer needs. Because social marketing works in a more public, as opposed to commercial, context, we need to take a 3-D perspective and always consider [as consultants, clients, and audiences] what inputs and outcomes we should consider in improving social health and welfare.
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3:55:21 PM 
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