First published on June 1, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

Dr. Carol Bryant was on the ground floor of the USF College of Public Health’s social marketing program when the social marketing field was in its infancy.  She credits Dr. Stan Graven, chair of the Department of Community and Family Health at the time, for the idea of a social marketing conference.

“He asked me to start a conference,” Bryant said.  “He said, ‘I think the field of social marketing has enough popularity and potential.  We need a conference on it.’”

Dr. Carol Bryant

Bryant, now USF Distinguished Health Professor in Community and Family Health, believes Graven’s own conference had convinced him of the viability of conferences in general, and specifically their ability to facilitate broad networking among stakeholders in any given field.

“It’s had a really major impact on his field,” Bryant said of what has become known as the Gravens conference, “so he could see that a conference in social marketing might be able to do the same thing.  He realized that a national conference could bring people together, disseminate the ideas, make a significant contribution to the public health community, and probably be good for branding USF.”

Bryant assented despite never having done anything of the kind or having any real idea of how to go about it.

She enlisted the help of Judy Sommers, who was at that time in charge of organizing COPH events.  She traveled to the nation’s capital to consult with two people at CDC who were well known in social marketing to ask whom to invite to speak.  She even began to think that putting a conference together might not be so difficult, after all.

“We had a really dynamic lineup of all the really active social marketers in the United States,” she said.  “We paid them all for their travel and a pretty good honorarium to come.  We promoted the conference, and we had 71 people.”

So far, so good.  There was just one problem.

“Forty or 50 of them were speakers,” she recalled, “so we lost a bundle of money.”

Bryant concluded then that the inaugural social marketing conference would also be the last, but she had a believer in Graven.

“Stan had the vision and courage to say, ‘Nope, we’re going to do it again.  Only this time, we’re not going to lose money, so let’s see how we can cut back on the budget and do better promotion.’”

Flanked by a cadre of congratulatory colleagues, Bryant (center) received a special recognition they presented her at the 2014 Social Marketing Conference.

The result was a second conference that turned the tide.  Smaller honoraria and fewer speakers fixed the early financial faux pas, along with the discovery within a few years that the honoraria could be dropped altogether.  There was enough interest in social marketing and enough respect for the conference that speakers would pay their own way to take part, and holding it at a beachfront resort didn’t hurt.

“Stan was absolutely right,” Bryant said.  “The conference would take the approach of social marketing and disseminate it in a way we couldn’t just through publications and my flying around and talking about it.”

Still, she said, social marketing’s early days at USF were lean at best.

“The early days were real tough financially,” she said.  “I was pretty terrified, actually, about how to do something like this.  Fortunately, we had good people – first Judy Sommers and then Ginger Phillips, and now Bobbi Rose – to do all the conference planning, but I didn’t realize I could just sit back and let them do that.  In the first years, I felt like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have to learn how to do this.’”

In those early years, the Social Marketing Conference, the first of its kind anywhere, was pretty much the extent of social marketing, said Bryant, who also co-directs the Florida Prevention Research Center, a CDC-funded entity that develops and evaluates a community-based approach to social marketing.

“We did not have what we came to call the training academy yet, or the field school,” she said.  “I think I was teaching an Introduction to Social Marketing course at that time.”

Persistence pays

Bryant’s long-time social marketing partner is also her long-time partner in the bigger sense, her husband, James Lindenberger, director and faculty administrator of the Social Marketing Group.  When social marketing was launched at COPH, Lindenberger was not yet at USF, but was nonetheless a major catalyst in the start of social marketing at the university.  Together, he and Bryant founded Best Start Social Marketing, a nonprofit marketing agency with an innately symbiotic relationship with social marketing at USF.  Lindenberger was its executive director for its first 15 years.  He also is founder and former publisher of Social Marketing Quarterly, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to social marketing.

James Lindenberger

“Much of the work that we did, whether at our agency or at USF, was really done collaboratively between the two,” Lindenberger recalled.  While agreeing that the Social Marketing Conference drove at least the USF entry into the field, and probably more, he shared Bryant’s recollection of a shaky start.

“It was the first conference we’d ever put on,” he said.  “We didn’t know what we were doing, exactly, but we did have a lot of people who were instrumental in the field of social marketing, which was still a very young discipline.  We had a lot of what we thought were the important folks in the field do the presentations.”

One of those people, Lindenberger said, was Alan Andreasen, now a marketing professor at Georgetown University and executive director of the Social Marketing Institute.

“We asked him to be the closing speaker and add an exclamation point to the conference,” Lindenberger said.  “So, after a day-and-a-half of presentations, Alan got up and said, ‘Well, I want to tell you all that none of you know what social marketing is.  You’re completely wrong.’  He then proceeded to spend about 35 or 40 minutes telling us how much we had messed up.”

Lindenberger and Bryant at the recent COPH Alumni Awards

Bryant and Lindenberger laughed heartily as they recalled the incident, but said they were far from finding it amusing at the time.

“We were furious.  You left the room,” Lindenberger said, nodding to Bryant, who agreed.

“I got up,” she said, “and was just pacing in the hallway thinking, ‘I can’t take this.’”

“We were really furious,” Lindenberger continued, “because this is a guy who was really important, and a lot of people looked to him, and we wanted him to come in and say, ‘Bless you.  Thank you for doing this.  Nobody else has done it before.  We appreciate it.’  Instead, he got up and basically said, ‘You idiots.’

“After a few weeks of us getting through this, it dawned on us that he was right.  His concern was that we had had almost all communications presentations.  Almost everything we talked about was promotion.  He said, ‘That’s not what we’re about.  We aren’t advertisers, we’re marketers, and marketers do a complete and holistic look at solving problems and apply those different variables to the solutions.’”

What resulted, Lindenberger said, was a dramatic redesign of the conference for the following year.

Holding a conference at a seaside resort is a good thing, as the faces of Social Marketing Conference attendees show.

“It’s been interesting,” Bryant noted.  “That mistake was made by almost everyone we invited.  They showed off all their promotional materials and were very proud to do so, and we still have trouble with trying to make sure people don’t do that, and that our audience understands that it isn’t just advertising.

“It’s very humbling that people can sit there for two days having us tell them that maybe 20 times and still try to hire us to do TV ads.  I think it’s because most people think marketing is advertising.  It’s a hard misunderstanding to correct.”

In fact, both said the term “social marketing” has long been problematic.  Technology, it might seem, is doing all it can to keep it that way.

“It’s interesting,” Bryant said.  “It’s changed from ‘Don’t call it that, because marketing is evil’ or ‘Don’t call it social marketing, because that’s social engineering.’  Now, it’s a different debate.”

“A lot of the debate,” Lindenberger said, “seems to be rooted in younger folks coming into the field who do want to be social marketers, but when they present themselves as social marketers to their peers, their bosses or their clients, those people misinterpret that to mean social media and social media marketing.  Their concern is that it’s diminishing their ability to have an impact and also diminishing their ability to have a successful career.”

“For many of us who are kind of the old guard on this,” he continued, “our belief is there’s just so much brand equity built into it.  There’s a huge array of publications and organizations and conferences that are built around social marketing.  We would have another 30 years of building the brand up.”

“But we already have lost a lot of brand equity,” Bryant countered.  “If you Google ‘social marketing,’ you’ll get social media, even social media marketing conferences.  It is a real problem.

“In the U.S. public health system, and certainly within anthropology, it was seen as advertising and manipulation,” added Bryant, an anthropologist by training.  “I had anthropology friends who just thought I had gone totally to the dark side, but public health had a real misunderstanding about it, too, until people like Marsha Walker in Texas got it right and funded a really successful program.  That program was so successful that soon, the other agencies were asking us to do projects for them.  So, as they saw it work in this country, people in public health went, ‘Wait a minute.  Whatever it’s called, this might work for us.”

“I think what happened here at USF is a very significant part of why the discipline grew as rapidly and as successfully as it did,” Lindenberger said.  “A national program that we did out of USF and Best Start was the national breastfeeding promotion campaign for the Department of Agriculture.  That became their national brand.  It’s been used in every state in the country, is still being used, and that really brought social marketing to the foreground in Washington in a way domestically that it had never been before.”

Throw me a line

That early show of strength by the program also was a very early sign of things to come for the field, “upstream” social marketing, an approach that wouldn’t have a name for many years.

“Downstream is basically going to the individual or small group to influence their behaviors to be more positive in a particular issue, health issue or whatever it may be,” Lindenberger explained.  “Upstream is trying to look at the environment, decision-makers and the other factors that actually create a situation in which people can make change more effectively and more usefully.”

“All these people are drowning in the river downstream,” Bryant offered by way of the prevailing example in the field.  “So, you throw them educational pamphlets on how to swim or pull them out one at a time.  But upstream says, ‘No, let’s find out where they’re coming from.  Is there a bridge that’s broken?  Is something giving way?  Let’s go up there and keep them getting into the river in the beginning, instead of one by one educating them on how to survive.’  It’s a powerful metaphor, and it is catching on.”

Lindenberger noted that early applications of upstream social marketing significantly predate the metaphor.  While the national breastfeeding campaign was being developed in 1989, he said, Bryant and a pair of colleagues went to Capitol Hill and lobbied Congress for funding.

Social marketing at work at the Social Marketing Conference

“It had never been done before,” Lindenberger said, “and after that lobbying effort, $8-million was set aside specifically for breastfeeding promotion and management to be dispersed throughout the country in the WIC program.  That was upstream.  The very first project we ever did was as upstream as it gets.”

Bryant credits Andreasen for helping to widely disseminate the metaphoric term – source unknown – that has become a directional imperative for social marketing over the past decade, as well as numerous others for driving it forward.

“Many speakers at our conference, Bill Smith and Gerard Hastings from Scotland, especially, brought that metaphor alive for us and nudged us to go more upstream,” Bryant said, “and then our critics like Larry Wallach were saying the same thing,” which was that the downstream approach was blaming the victims, chiding them for not knowing how to swim well enough to save themselves.

“All those forces came together at the same time, and public health had the same realization.  We said, ‘Wait a minute.  We’d be really stupid to keep going downstream.  Let’s come up with a model that takes social marketing upstream,’ so that’s what we’ve done for the last 10 years – develop the model and test it out, and now, we’re training people in it.

“I’m hoping it will really take off.  It is more difficult to get funding, but it is more sustainable, too.”

This year, social marketing at USF COPH added to its impressive list of accolades the nation’s first MPH with a social marketing concentration.  Last year, the program celebrated the revision and re-launch of its social marketing training web site in conjunction with the Florida Prevention Research Center.  There is excitement over the field’s burgeoning relationships with other disciplines, namely engineering (humanitarian engineers) and a long-standing but still growing symbiosis with anthropology.  There also is that strengthening upstream trend.

Which way do we go?

But with all its successes, expansion, diversification and partnering, social marketing nonetheless remains a relatively new field in a time when a digital communications explosion can threaten to turn almost anything into a shape-shifter.  While few would argue that 44 successful years likely points toward anything less than a positive future, identifying potential threats can hardly be seen as unwise.

So, just where is social marketing headed?  In arguably its adolescence, what will it look like fully grown?  Who better to ask than two people who have nurtured it from infancy?

“I see a lot of dangers ahead,” Bryant said, “the big one being the brand equity diminishing because of confusion with social media marketing, and I’m not sure where I stand on the argument.  But I’m at this point kind of leaning toward maybe we do change our name, or do a qualification to it, ‘social marketing for behavior change,’ or something like that to help clarify that we’re not social media.

“Like anything, it peaks and then it falls,” she said, “and I resisted doing an MPH in social marketing, because I was afraid it was just an approach and its popularity might wane, and people with that degree – other people wouldn’t even know what they did.  I think those are some dangers that are real, but there are now so many people active in the field around the world.  We have two list serves, two journals, two conferences, and we’re thousands strong instead of just a hundred, so I think those fears are probably not warranted.”

“I agree with that,” Lindenberger offered.  “They’re not warranted.  We differ over the name issue and social media marketing.  I’m fairly comfortable with the fact that people sometimes get confused, and we can help them learn more about it if we have the chance to engage them.  And I also don’t really care.  I think we and other social marketers continue to do what we do, and if we do it well, if we produce the product successfully and deliver something to their audiences that they really need and want that will help them accomplish their own missions, then we’re fine.”

After discussing the future they anticipate for social marketing, it was time to consider the one they’d like to see.

A student poster presentation at the conference

“Something I think will happen – we’re already seeing it – that I would like more of is social marketing moving out of public health,” Bryant said.  “I think our conference taught people in public health how to apply social marketing.  Only more recently have we attracted people from other fields and changed our name from Social Marketing in Public Health to just Social Marketing Conference.

“It since then has also taken off in environmental protection.  A man named Doug McKenzie Moore, who’s a good trainer and has a wonderful web site and a list serve, has really spread it around the world for people who are working in recycling and all kinds of things.  We’re working with Qatar now to do the same thing in transportation.  Some social marketers want to see it in finance helping people to manage their finances better.

“So, what I’m hoping happens is it really does move out of just public health applications, because it could work so well in other arenas.  Healthy People 2020 has a set of objectives related to social marketing, and they want to see, by 2020, more health departments using social marketing.  I’d like to see state health departments really use it.  And the other set of objectives in Healthy People 2020 is that all schools of public health will offer at least a course in social marketing.”

“I’d like to see it be a degree program in a lot of universities around the country,” Lindenberger said.  “I think that would be a way for this to really take off – that people see it as a legitimate credential that helps them get jobs and provides them with tools to be able to influence positive change.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

The post Pioneers of social marketing discuss its founding and its future appeared first on College of Public Health News.

The USF College of Public Health’s Social Marketing Conference is headed back to the beach as it enters its 26th year with a continued and vigorous commitment to social marketing’s robust capacity to influence complex social problems. Based at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater, FL, the May 27-28 conference includes plenary sessions, interactive panels and focused collaborative sessions. A training academy will be held right before the conference on May 25-26 to provide in-depth training on the social marketing process.

The conference will attract an estimated 250 professionals working in fields such as environmental health, transportation, wildlife preservation, financial literacy, education, not-for-profit management, labor relations, the arts, health and many more.

In recognition of social marketing’s expansive reach and increasing interest in persons in other disciplines, organizers have shifted the scope of the Social Marketing Conference beyond public health to welcome all professionals who work in social marketing.

Newcomers to the field are encouraged to attend the Social Marketing Training Academy in addition to the main conference. This two-day intensive pre-conference training offers participants an opportunity to gain social marketing expertise in a concentrated time frame. Using a combination of live case studies and interactive group exercises, academy trainers help participants understand how to increase the impact of behavioral change by learning the core elements of a successful social marketing initiative.

The main conference offers a blend of plenary presentations by internationally recognized social marketing experts on topics of interest to learners at all levels; panel presentations and conversations that focus on a variety of topics relevant to the practice, application and dissemination of social marketing; continuing professional development; and “hatch labs” to enable participants to discuss ideas with each other and invited experts.

Additionally, examples of social marketing practice and research will be showcased during a poster walk and reception.

Keynote Speakers include:

• Rex Briggs, author, consultant and speaker
• Dr. Roy Eidelson, psychologist
• Sara Isaac, director of strategy and planning for Marketing for Change
• Jeffrey Jordan, president and executive creative director for Rescue Social Change Group
• Rose McGee, creator of Sweet Potato Comfort Pie
• Bill Novelli, founder of Business for Impact at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business

For additional information on the Social Marketing Conference and to register, visit http://thesocialmarketingconference.org/ or contact socialmarketing-coph@usf.edu.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

The post It’s back to the beach for the USF Social Marketing Conference appeared first on College of Public Health News.

At first glance, it may seem hard to decipher how reproductive rights, protecting our environment and social marketing all overlap.

But for USF College of Public Health (COPH) alumna Kelley Dennings, it comes easily.

Dennings, who earned an MPH in public health practice from USF in 2018, is now working as a campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, AZ, where she addresses issues associated with population growth and overconsumption―and how both can negatively impact the environment.

When thinking about it from a consumption perspective, it’s easy to see how stabilizing population growth using a human rights lens can help reduce the pollution and waste that devastate natural habitats. Dennings believes that access to all forms of birth control, abortion care and medically accurate health education provides potential for environmental changes in our communities as well.

“Addressing growth requires me to focus on family planning. I advocate for universal access to contraception and comprehensive sexual education,” said Dennings. “The [Center for Biological Diversity] is a unique environmental organization in that it supports the reproductive rights and justice movement along with advocating for the decrease in the consumption of plastic, changing to plant-based diets and 100 percent renewable energy.”

Dennings was the founding president of the Social Marketing Association of North America (SMANA) and a 2018 recipient of the Millbank Social Marketing Award for Innovation in the Environmental Field. In addition, she recently received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the World Social Marketing Conference in June of 2019. These experiences make Dennings uniquely qualified to lead this type of intervention and raise awareness about the connection between family planning, habitat loss and climate change.

“I bring my social marketing skills to my work with the Center for Biological Diversity,” said Dennings. “One goal of mine is to increase the number of nonprofit groups working at the intersection of reproductive and environmental justice.”

Dennings was first introduced to social marketing when a supervisor suggested she focus on behavior change for a presentation linking litter and recycling. She then came to USF, where she pursued a certificate in social marketing and found a valuable support group in her professors and fellow students.

“My nonprofit work has provided many opportunities in designing, implementing and evaluating social and behavioral change programs,” said Dennings. “So I frequently draw upon all of my social marketing, advocacy and behavioral change classes.”

With all of the experiences she has gained through SMANA and the lessons learned throughout her time at USF, Dennings remains focused on her new role at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“My future plans include continuing to grow in my position while also continuing my volunteer work with the Social Marketing Association of North America.”

Fast Five:

What did you dream of becoming when you were young? A female Sherlock Holmes

Where might we find you on the weekends? In my garden

What was the last book you read? “So You Want to Talk About Race,” by Ijeoma Oluo

What superpower would you like to have? The ability to stop time or have an infinite amount of time during the day

What is your all-time favorite movie? “St. Elmo’s Fire” or “The Princess Bride” or almost anything from the 80’s.

Story by Cody Brown, USF College of Public Health

The post Social marketing, reproductive rights and the environment: How one COPH grad tackles all three appeared first on College of Public Health News.

For more than two decades, the USF College of Public Health’s Social Marketing Conference has drawn attendees from around the globe with the common interest of using strategic marketing principles to make the world a better place.

The COPH’s Florida Prevention Research Center (FPRC) has managed the conference, held every two years, since 1991.

Attendees of the 2018 health training academy gather for a group photo. (Photo by Angela Makris)

More than 200 attendees representing more than 30 states and 10 countries gathered at this year’s event held June 27-30 in Clearwater, Fla.

COPH meeting planner Bobbi Rose was the primary organizer assisted by the USF continuing education group. Dr. Rowena Merritt, director of Millbank Social Marketing, LTD of London served as the conference chair, with support from an external planning committee of global social marketing leaders, FPRC faculty, and members of the Social Marketing Association of North America (SMANA) and the International Social Marketing Association (iSMA).

Dr. Claudia Parvanta, professor of community and family health and director of the FPRC, said this conference stands out in bringing the “latest and greatest” in social marketing to the public health workforce at a very reasonable cost. Parvanta co-hosted the conference and instructed in the advanced training academy, the first time this was offered.

“People are saying that this has been the best conference in years, partly because we offered more choices for training, including one focused entirely on environmental issues—led by Steve Menzies of New Zealand—and because there was a real diversity of speakers, more contributed posters and presentations, and lots of new energy!” she said. “I also heard later that those who could not attend in person felt connected through our active Twitter feed—another new feature this year.”

Attendees included practitioners from public health departments, military representatives, students, and working professionals from all sectors.

Dr. Mahmooda Khaliq Pasha, COPH alumna, assistant professor of community and family health, and FPRC faculty has been involved with the Social Marketing Conference since its inception. She commented that the event has evolved throughout the years along with social marketing.

“It is the longest running conference in the social marketing field,” Khaliq Pasha said. “We have a basic process for how you do social marketing, but that process changes as we adopt new technologies, new media, and take on new challenges.”

Another conference first, keynote speakers—Timo Dietrich, Judd Harner, Ashani Johnson, Jeff Jordan and Sharyn Rundle-Thiele—followed their plenary sessions with small break-out groups to allow participants to brainstorm with them. These “hatch labs” were complemented by more traditional small sessions and mini workshops.

Keynote speakers, Akeem Ali and Christine Domegan, also presented at the conference.

“It had that collaborative feel to it, where it didn’t feel like speakers were talking at you, it had an engaging environment where you were working together toward a common goal and people felt that they were able to interact with high level social marketers,” Khaliq Pasha said.

Conference attendees and staff catch up during networking and poster sessions. (Photo by Angela Makris)

“The Social Marketing Conference has always been the practitioner’s conference, and the diversity of participants’ disciplines was so great this year—we had people from public health and clinical medicine as usual. But we also had a large number working on environmental issues, social care, marine protection and animal conservation, international aid, and engineering,” said conference chair Dr. Rowena Merritt. “To me this demonstrated the applicability of the social marketing tools and techniques to a whole range of ‘wicked’ problems.”

Dr. Rowena Merritt interacts with training academy participants. (Photo by Angela Makris)

Susan Kirby, associate editor for Social Marketing Quarterly and president of Kirby Marketing Solutions, said she attended this year for the networking opportunities.

“It was exceptional for a domestic social marketing conference,” she said. “This conference used to be known as a “beginner’s” conference, but this year was certainly quite different from that. I think it got me more up to speed on new modes of communication, partnering, and commercial/cause marketing.”

This year’s event garnered the largest number of poster submissions in conference history. (Photo by Angela Makris)

“The USF Social Marketing Conference is a mecca for alumni of USF’s social marketing graduate programs. I always look forward to this conference as a chance to reconnect with former classmates and instructors. USF plays a vital role in providing continuity for our profession through the USF Social Marketing Conference,” said Dr. Brian Biroscak, COPH alumnus and current SMANA vice president.

Awardees at this year’s event included:

The Phillip Kotler Social Marketing Distinguished Service Award
Sharyn Rundle-Thiele, PhD
Director of social marketing, Griffith University in Australia
Editor-in-chief, Journal of Social Marketing

The National Social Marketing Centre’s Award for Excellence in Social Marketing
Tony Zech, MBA, RD/RDN
Public health nutritionist/SNAP-ED coordinator at Department of Health Services in Madison, Wis.
“Partnership for a Healthier America’s FNV initiative”

Millbank’s Social Marketing Award for Innovation in the Environmental Field
Kelley Dennings, MPH, PMP
Director of social marketing, Action Research in Oceanside, Calif.
“Using Social Marketing to Change Winter Holiday Gift Giving Behavior and Improve Well-Being”

SMANA Outstanding Agency Award for Commitment to Elimination of Social Disparities
Oklahoma Nutrition Information and Education (ONIE) Project!

Taproot New Professional Award
Yana Manyuk, MA
Social marketing specialist, Sight and Life in Switzerland

The conference benefitted from commercial sponsorship (for attendee scholarships, the Twitter wall, tote bags, awards, refreshments, advertising and promotion), and the active participation of speakers and attendees, from AB InBev Foundation, Hager Sharp, the National Social Marketing Centre (UK), Porter Novelli, Rescue Agency, and Taproot in addition to iSMA, SMANA and Millbank, as well as COPH.

The next Social Marketing Conference will be held in 2020. Details will be posted on the Social Marketing Conference website.

Story by Anna Mayor, USF College of Public Health

The post Social Marketing Conference celebrates 25th anniversary appeared first on College of Public Health News.

From founding social marketing as a focus area at USF to spearheading a seminal program promoting breastfeeding among the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clients, Dr. Carol Bryant has dedicated more than 30 years to a career focused on improving lives.

Bryant, Distinguished University Health Professor in the USF College of Public Health’s Department of Community and Family Health and former director of the Florida Prevention Research Center—a center she played a vital role in establishing—retired in August with emeritus professor status.

Dr. Carol Bryant. (Photo by Eric Younghans)

“It’s a little scary after working so hard for so long and being so focused on public health and service; it’s been hard to have a sense of purpose and feel fulfilled the same way I did when I was working,” Bryant said. “After you’ve had your nose to the grindstone and worked your butt off for 45 years, you have to take care of whatever remaining body parts you have!”

The Miami native studied applied anthropology at the University of Kentucky and then started working at the health department in Kentucky, working her way up from health educator to health education deputy commissioner over a span of twelve years.

In 1989 she joined the Department of Community and Family Health (CFH) as an assistant professor eventually becoming the founder of all things social marketing at the COPH.

She said she was first exposed to social marketing while volunteering in Ecuador with her husband and saw it as the key to creating action in public health.

“The basis of social marketing is understanding and respecting the people, the community’s values, their dreams, their fears, their day-to-day issues, and honoring them in a way that allows you to help them solve the problems they want to solve and get the life they want to have,” Bryant said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been implementing her breastfeeding program, “Loving Support Makes Breastfeeding Work” since the 1990s.

Because of the success of the program to promote breastfeeding among WIC clients, the demand for training in social marketing grew and led Bryant to establish the Social Marketing Conference and Training Academy, a conference held every two years that draws public health professionals from across the globe.

As a result, Bryant has taught more than 6,000 public health professionals on how to use social marketing to get communities engaged in a healthy behavior.

“This is a totally different approach, it [social marketing] focuses first on understanding and respecting and honoring people,” she said. “Once you have that insight, you often can take what science says will make them healthier, and their community a better place to live, and define it for them and recommend ways that they can do that within their life and their dreams.”

Bryant with FPRC staff and attendees during the 2016 Social Marketing Conference. (Photo courtesy of Bobbi Rose)

She said thanks to the support of COPH administration including COPH Dean Donna Petersen, Paula Knaus, associate dean for faculty affairs, and Jay Evans, chief operating officer, she was able to get social marketing efforts off the ground.

In addition to the Social Marketing Conference and Training Academy and the FPRC, Bryant also established the graduate certificate in social marketing, MPH social marketing concentration, and USF’s World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Social Marketing and Social Change.

“She has invested enormous creative energy over the past 28 years to build the USF social marketing program into the world-class status it enjoys today,” said Dr. William Sappenfield, director of the Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies.

Bryant said one of her proudest professional achievements is the work she’s done at the FPRC, one of 26 named Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Centers in the nation, funded by the CDC.

“I’ve always believed in the power of the community owning the problem and the solutions,” Bryant said. “At the FPRC that is the hallmark of what they do.”

According to Bryant, each center has a specialty they focus on, but only the USF center uses social marketing to promote change among the community.

“It’s terribly satisfying to see a community solve a problem that they’ve had for a long time and be given a new of way thinking about problem-solving that they never thought about before,” she said.

The FPRC has sustained funding since 1998, according to Bryant, and over that span of time has taught communities how to use social marketing to design programs and bring about policy change. Their newest focus is now bringing about entire systems change.

Tali Schneider, COPH alumna and FPRC program administrator, who has worked with Bryant for seven years said she’s always appreciated Bryant’s passion and friendly demeanor.

“I love the way she gets enthusiastic when new ideas are presented,” Schneider said. “She always listens to others and gives her sincere opinion. She has the gift of presenting any idea or news, good or bad, in a positive light and convincing manner.”

Bryant said that while it was difficult to leave, she is confident that the FPRC will continue to do great work.

“We found a person who is a far better social marketer than I, Dr. Claudia Parvanta, who used to be the health communication director at the CDC,” she said. “So, while I miss everybody, I don’t worry about them, I know they are in great hands. I know they will continue doing fabulous work and I am so grateful to USF in supporting that work.”

Dr. Claudia Parvanta and Dr. Carol Bryant during Bryant’s retirement party, hosted at Parvanta’s personal residence. (Photo by Anna Mayor)

Parvanta, who also serves as a full-time professor in CFH, said she had interacted for decades with Bryant on social marketing efforts before joining the COPH.

“I always thought of Carol as one of a very few social marketers who worked in academia—most of us were in the private sector or government at the time. But, until coming here in January, I had no idea how hard Carol works, and how much effort she puts into every project,” Parvanta said. “Even though she very nicely handed over the reins of the PRC to me, she continued to show up, and work hard, until the minute she retired. And she is counting the days until she is allowed to ‘volunteer’ for USF social marketing efforts. She is a role model on so many levels, not only for her students, but for her colleagues around the globe.”

Parvanta said a scholarship fund has been initiated in honor of Bryant and work in the field of social marketing.

“If you have ever studied with Dr. Bryant, worked with her, benefited from her advice, or just like her, please contribute something to help us launch the next wave of social marketers,” Parvanta said.

To donate to the Carol A. Bryant Social Marketing Scholarship, click here.

Bryant addresses her former colleagues during her retirement party thanking them for all their hard work, “Not a day goes by that I don’t miss each one of you,” she said. (Photo by Anna Mayor)

Bryant’s colleagues revel in memories each speaker shared during Bryant’s retirement party. Colleagues came from near and far, including some who traveled from Washington, D.C., to share in the celebrations. (Photo by Anna Mayor)

After toasts, Bryant cut into the celebratory cake reading “Best Wishes Dr. Carol Bryant, You Made a Difference.” (Photo by Anna Mayor)

Bryant said in retirement she will focus her attention on her new passions of art, pottery, glass fusion, photography, and spending time with family.

“I learned something new every day [at USF] and I loved the people I’ve worked with and I will miss them every day, but it is time for me to take care of this almost 70-year-old body and see what I can do in the art field,” Bryant said.

Story by Anna Mayor, USF College of Public Health

The post Dr. Carol Bryant’s career of improving lives through social marketing appeared first on College of Public Health News.

More than 200 attendees gathered at the 24^th Social Marketing Conference, June 15-18, in Clearwater, Fla., hosted by USF College of Public Health’s Department of Community and Family Health.

Social marketing has been vital to planning numerous public health interventions, according to Dr. Carol Bryant, Distinguished USF Health Professor.

“It’s a very sophisticated way to plan interventions to bring about social change,” she said. “USF is the leader in this country in teaching it and it has gained quite a bit of traction, in fact, the Healthy People 2020 document now includes objectives for social marketing.”

The USF College of Public Health has been providing training on social marketing since 1998. (Photo by Bobbi Rose)

According to Bryant, since 1998, USF has been involved in teaching various coalitions and state health departments on bringing about social change on a wide range of topics, from preventing drinking among middle school students to encouraging citrus pickers to wear their safety glasses.

The 24^th Social Marketing Conference drew attendees from all over the globe to gain hands-on experience in the growing field.

Attendees also had the option to take part in the conference’s two-day Social Marketing Training Academy, which is described on the conference website as a “concentrated product for thirsty learners.”

Attendees take part in a hands-on team building activity during the training academy portion of the event. (Photo by Bobbi Rose)

As part of the training academy, attendees learned how to segment an audience base, come up with behavioral goals, and conduct the research necessary to understand the ideals of a specific target audience.

“Social marketing is not social media or advertising,” Bryant said. “The conference helped them to use what I find to be a very sophisticated planning tool for bringing about change.”

The event also included presentations from practitioners working in the field, providing real world examples of how social marketing works.

Ten different countries and territories were represented at the event, including scholarships awarded for attendees from Brazil and Nigeria.

“The conference delivered on my expectations and more­­­—professional development, fresh thoughts, new ideas, networking, etcetera,” said Sonayon Ajose, an attendee from Nigeria and recipient of a scholarship. “I also was thrilled to meet in person with quite a number of social marketing professionals I have followed online and eulogized their works over the years.”

Scholarship recipient, Sanoyon Ajose (far right), and other attendees of the event. (Photo by Bobbi Rose)

Scholarships were provided by the various organizations involved in social marketing who were present at the event.

The conference is offered every other year and will be presented again in 2018.

For more information regarding the event, visit the conference’s website.

Story by Anna Mayor, USF College of Public Health

The post Social Marketing Conference inspires action appeared first on College of Public Health News.

The Social Marketing Conference enters its 24th year with a continued and vigorous commitment to social marketing’s robust capacity to influence complex social problems. Based at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater, FL, the June 17-18 conference includes plenary sessions, interactive panels and focused collaborative sessions.

Some of the attendees at the 2013 Social Marketing Conference.

Carol Bryant, PhD, MS, director of USF’s Florida Prevention Research Center and founder of the Social Marketing Conference, is a major presenter and trainer. According to Bryant, social marketing has potential applications in myriad fields, including environmental studies, sustainability, transportation, financial literacy, education, not-for-profit management, labor relations, engineering, public health, and health care. “These and many other fields can benefit from social marketing’s consumer-centered, strategic approach to influencing change,” she said.

A USF Health distinguished professor in the Department of Community and Family Health, Bryant explains why this year’s conference will be extra special. “While global inequality has lessened over the past century, more recent times have shown a marked increase in inequality in finances, health, political access, and social mobility,” she said. “This year’s theme, “Building on the Legacy: Forging New Paths,” looks at these pressing contemporary issues and how the field can lead the way in creating new solutions. This conference looks to the new challenges and solutions which social marketing is called to engage.”

The conference is divided into two sections, with a training component June 15-16, then the main conference on June 17-18.

Newcomers to the field are encouraged to attend the Social Marketing Training Academy in addition to the main conference. This two-day intensive pre-conference training offers participants an opportunity to gain social marketing expertise in a concentrated time frame. Using a combination of live case studies and interactive group exercises, academy trainers help participants understand how to increase the impact of behavioral change by learning the core elements of a successful social marketing initiative.

Dr. Carol Bryant (right) presents Sahilja Mathur (left) with her certificate of completion at the 2014 Social Marketing Training Academy.

The main conference consists of plenary sessions with national leaders in education, design and organizational development; panel presentations and conversations that focus on a variety of topics relevant to the practice, application and dissemination of social marketing; continuing professional development; and, collaboratories—facilitated discussions designed to dive more deeply into emerging issues and explore ways to apply innovative ideas for social marketing education, training and practice.

Additionally, examples of social marketing practice and research will be showcased during a poster walk and reception.

Plenary Speakers include:

• Phil D. Harvey, founder of DKT International
• Dr. Punam Keller, professor of management, Tuck Business School, Dartmouth University
• Dr. William “Bill” Smith, president of Making Change4U
• Dr. Fiona Spotswood, senior lecturer at University of the West of England
• Dr. Sharyn Rundle-Thiele, president of ANZMAC and professor at Griffith University
• Jeffrey Jordan, president and executive creative director of Rescue Social Change Group

For additional information on the Social Marketing Conference and to register, visit http://thesocialmarketingconference.org/ or contact Ms. Tali Schneider at tschneid@health.usf.edu.

Related story:
Social marketing concentration a national first for COPH

Story by Anna Mayor, USF College of Public Health

The post USF hosts international Social Marketing Conference, June 17-18 appeared first on College of Public Health News.

The first and largest conference of its kind, the 23^rd Social Marketing Conference convenes in Clearwater Beach on June 18 with a strong USF College of Public Health presence. An annual event through 2012, it now is held only in even-numbered years to avoid conflicting with the newer World Social Marketing Conference held in odd-numbered years.

The conference is divided into two sections, with a training component June 18 and 19, then the main conference on June 20 and 21.

Carol Bryant, PhD, MS, director of USF’s Florida Prevention Research Center, coordinates the conference and is a major presenter and trainer. A USF Health distinguished professor in the Department of Community and Family Health, she explained why this year’s conference will be extra special.

“For the first time, a lot of leaders from the Florida Department of Health are coming to our conference to train in social marketing,” she said, “because the Prevention Research Center specializes in using social marketing to teach communities social marketing to solve problems.”

The Centers for Disease Control just granted $4.35 million to fund the FPRC for another five years. The organization has continually received CDC funding since FPRC’s founding in 1998.

Another COPH faculty member, James Lindenberger, directs the Social Marketing Group, which works hand-in-hand with FPRC. He and COPH alumna and research associate Tali Schneider are members of both groups.

Bryant said that she and Lindenberger (who are married) were vacationing in Ecuador in 1991 when they first heard about social marketing on the radio, found the local woman in charge of the program, and hired her to train them.

At the time, Bryant was deputy commissioner for nutrition and health education in Lexington, Ky., where she had worked her entire career trying to promote breast-feeding, with little success until she learned social marketing.

“I knew all of ten women we had convinced with our program. I mean, it was just dismal. The rates nationally were plummeting as we tried and tried to get people to do this.”

After social marketing training, she said, everything changed.

“My god, it worked! The breast-feeding rates started to move up, and it was because we totally had missed the point. We were telling women why they should breast-feed, because it’s good for them and their babies, instead of what we learned by listening to them. We should be honoring their dreams of being really great moms. We should talk about breast-feeding as a way to bond and realize their dreams of motherhood. Boom! That did it.

“So then, USDA said, ‘Wow, you’re doing this in the south; let’s do this nationally, and they gave us a very large grant to do it.’”

Bryant and Lindenberger, both anthropologists, found that social marketing worked with any health issue they applied it to, and because of that, they’ve focused on social marketing training ever since. Within a few years, Bryant was at USF, Lindenberger at a local educational TV station, and their social marketing movement was big enough to warrant – and need – official organization, so they founded FPRC and SMG to accomplish just that.

FPRC, founded in 1998, does work on community-based prevention marketing training and modifying health behaviors; SMG (formerly the Center for Social Marketing) focuses on the social marketing angle that feeds into the FPRC’s larger framework, said Mahmooda Pasha, a doctoral student member of the SMG.

“I think of the Social Marketing Group as a sister organization of the Florida Prevention Research Center, which does the larger research,” she said.

“With our researchers, there’s almost complete overlap in personnel between the two groups,” Bryant added.

“Social marketing is the most unique component in the PRC’s planning framework – community-based prevention marketing,” she said. “We adopted ‘prevention’ to fit more neatly into the PRC network, but it is just another name for social marketing.

“The other ingredient in all our work is community control over program planning. The final ingredient has changed over time: First, we used the model to plan behavior change interventions, then we used it to select and promote policy and environmental changes, and next we will use it to understand and improve entire systems, i.e., the cancer screening and follow-up system.

“Each PRC has a specialty.  All the other PRCs focus on a disease or other public health problem or on an under-served population.  We are unique in specializing in a planning process that allows community coalitions to select the problem they want to solve.”

“The focus is on health equity,” Pasha said of this year’s conference. “Ten years ago, they were talking about health disparity, and now they’re talking about health equity. It’s the same aspect, but it’s like a positive twist on health disparity, which is more of a negative.”

“Looking at the positive!” Schneider said, nodding her agreement.

“It’s looking at health equity from the perspective of gender, from mental health, and from just overall health, environmental, economic,” Pasha further elaborated. “All of those can come into interest in looking at health equity as an issue.”

Pasha is leading several presentations and conducting training sessions at the conference. Among her presentations is one on journey mapping – in this context, essentially the study of health-care consumers’ needs from their perspective – and one on neonatal mortality rates as a health equity issue, a socio-economic one, in particular. That presentation is from a study she did with the World Health Organization last summer.

Members of WHO, the Pan American Health Organization, the United States Agency for International Development, Peace Corps environmental engineers, and members of the USF Center for Urban Transportation Research are among the nearly 200 expected participants at the conference, Bryant said.

In addition to Bryant, featured speakers will include social marketing pioneer Philip Kotler and Bill Smith, as well as adjunct professor Rowena Merritt, who co-chairs this year’s conference in preparation of taking the reins in 2016 after Bryant’s retirement.

The speakers are paying their own way and not being paid to speak, Bryant said.

“Then we have funds to offer scholarships to people from Africa and other places, and the United States, who can’t afford to come to this,” she said with grinning enthusiasm.

“Isn’t that neat?”

Story by David Brothers, USF College of Public Health. Photos by Eric Younhans, USF Health Communications

The post World’s largest social marketing conference anchored at USF appeared first on College of Public Health News.