The market today has seen a surge in the number of water and sanitation (WATSAN) enterprises. These enterprises provide economical solutions that combine quality with affordable pricing for the population at the base of the pyramid. They have in their basket dynamic solutions to bring about large-scale impact and change. These solutions are in the form of low cost filters, water purifiers, point-of-use water disinfection methods and toilets, all specially designed for those at the base of the pyramid.

However, what these enterprises often fail to take into consideration is: Do people even perceive a need for these solutions? Do they understand the implications that it might have on their health? Do they understand that the solution alone is not an end in itself and that it is equally important to ensure proper maintenance and personal hygiene to attain the health objectives the solution is intended to achieve?

For example, what is the point in trying to sell water purifiers to people who feel that their water is clean? Similarly, what use lies in trying to make toilets available for use when the actual problem is not its availability but a cultural barrier which prevents its use? A latrine provides the primary barrier against faeco-oral transmission of disease. However, this barrier is easily breached by a dirty latrine or if hand washing after use does not become normal practice.

Not long ago, the remedy to this problem would have been to market the solution along with ‘hygiene promotion’. Traditional hygiene promotion programmes have commonly been concerned with the ‘supply’ of education and materials, rather than with satisfying a ‘demand’ from intended beneficiaries. In recent times, this has been replaced with social marketing which is a systematic application of marketing along with other concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good. The primary aim of social marketing is demand creation apart from bringing together marketing, hygiene promotion and beneficiary participation.

This form of marketing comes along with practices to scale up the demand and supply for safe drinking water and sanitation among the poor. It offers a staged, customer-focused approach, converting assessed user needs into demand and then providing the means of satisfying the demand. However, to use it, WATSAN enterprises require a good understanding of their customer base and various approaches to reach them.

The key components of social marketing are as follows:

The basic characteristics of the social marketing approach are the four Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. What is the product, its form, format and presentation in terms of packaging? What price would the consumer be willing to pay for the product? Where will the product be available to the consumers, including where is it displayed or demonstrated? How will the consumers know that the product exists? What are its benefits, costs and where and how to get it?

The promotion must ideally influence the primary users and those who influence them in the family circle or in the wider community social structure. The medium used for promotion must be carefully selected keeping in mind the environment in which the target audience interacts. In this way, enterprises can get the perfect marketing mix.

TARA plans to roll out a social marketing campaign for one of its products Aqua+, a point of use water disinfection product. In the pilot phase, this product is being promoted in a number of urban slums in Delhi. With the help of a market research and consulting firm IPSOS, it was found that women should be the target audience for the social marketing campaign as they deal with the day-to-day chores and household activities and would be the primary users of the product. The women in these urban slums are influenced by the opinions of their husbands, in-laws and neighbours. Therefore, this group would encompass the secondary target audience. The urban slum women are also influenced by women association leaders, authorities of the schools that their children attended and Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs) in their locality. These are primarily people who shape the opinion of others in the community. This group would become TARA’s tertiary audience for the campaign. TARA realised that in order to have a successful social marketing campaign it needed to gain the acceptance of all the identified stakeholders. A survey was also done to check the perceptions of people on the existing product, packaging and price. Local consumer stores, slum-level entrepreneurs, RMPs, water tanker owners and government authorities were interviewed to check the acceptability of the product and, in some cases, their ability to promote it. It was established that slum-level entrepreneurs had a good understanding of the community they lived in and would be ideal choices for promoting Aqua+ in their community apart from others such as RMPs. Interviews also revealed that promotion would best be in the form of street plays, posters and similar awareness-generation activities. This kind of background work ensures successful rollout of a social marketing campaign. It also gives us an idea as to how strategic partnerships can be built to ensure achievement of the campaign and associated WATSAN goals.

Some of the most successful social marketing campaigns in the WATSAN sector have been introduced by Population Services International (PSI), which has launched safe water programmes in more than 20 countries and Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, India. There are several reports and case studies available on the Internet that provide substantive evidence to this claim.

In the current scenario, the challenges faced in implementing social marketing approaches in WATSAN lie in the so-called enabling environment. Some of the key ones include:

It is now obvious that the immediate change that WATSAN enterprises should be looking for is not so much a behaviour change for the poor, but a change for themselves: the way they work with government and other stakeholders, the way they subsidise, and the way they market the same to the poor. To succeed, they must integrate their efforts and ask themselves: How might we, as agents of change, who have a common interest to help others, step out of our spaces, and work together more? How might we adopt new technologies to improve efficiency by bringing together ideas that work? The answers to these are the need of the hour. q