‘Tackling health inequalities using geodemographics: a social marketing approach’ (IJMR 50/4, July, 2008)

Marc Farr (Dr. Foster Intelligence), Jessica Wardlow (University College, London) and Catherine Jones (University College, London)

In my editorial being published in 60/4 (July), I’ll be covering the first IJMR Lecture of 2018, held at the MRS on 20 March, delivered by Richard Webber (Origins.info). In his Lecture, Webber presented the main themes in his new book, ‘The Predictive Postcode’ (Sage, London 2018) which describes the origins, evolution and application of geodemographics.

Founded in the 1970s in the USA and the UK, geodemographics as a method to help understand society. Whilst used extensively to help shape business strategy, it has been rather shunned by academics who feel it lacks a theoretical base. However, in recent years, geodemographics have emerged as a key foundation of ‘commercial sociology’, that challenges traditional academic social science, as I describe in my Editorial in IJMR 60/3 (‘Wither the (social) survey’). At the launch of ‘The predictive Postcode’, that took place in Highgate, London on 21 April, the final speaker at the event, Emily Sparks (Webber Phillips) discussed applications in the public sector, including examples linked to healthcare. 

However, many of the papers on geodemographics published in JMRS/IJMR over the years have focussed on applications within the market research sector, in particular as a tool for survey design, analysis and segmentation, or describing other marketing/media related applications. These papers include the first commercial application in the UK, by the research agency BMRB, who used the first national UK geodemics classification, Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods (CRN), developed by Webber in the late 1970s, to develop both a new sampling frame for, and provide analysis of, the Target Group Index (TGI) survey.

So, although the paper I’ve selected as the latest IJMR Landmark Paper was originally published only ten years ago, I have selected it as it provides a public sector application, demonstrating the role that geodems can play in developing and executing a social marketing campaign – an example of ‘commercial sociology’. This paper also won the IJMR Collaborative Award, featuring a collaboration between Dr. Foster (an international organisation that helps the healthcare sector improve performance through the more effective use of data) and University College London. 

At the time the paper was written, social marketing was starting to evolve in the UK, the authors citing examples of successful campaigns in the healthcare sector conducted in other countries. The authors also argue the importance in social marketing campaigns of a fifth ‘P’, to add to the four ‘Ps’ advocated by Philip Kotler, ‘Process’. The authors describe how social marketing was pushing the boundaries of marketing by applying a set of measurable benchmarks covering behavioural goals, insight, audience segmentation, the application of the marketing strategy, competition and exchange. A database of UK case studies describing best practice had been established by the National Social Marketing Centre in the UK.

The case study described by the authors was the Action Diabetics campaign targeting population groups identified as being more susceptible to diabetes in the Slough Primary Care Trust geographic area, using a recently introduced tool, Health Needs Mapping, to identify high risk groups within the population. To create Health Needs Mapping, Webber linked the Mosaic geodemographic system segments (which he developed at Experian) to hospital admission data from within England. This tool was used to help identify those neighbourhoods containing at-risk groups in the Slough PCT, in this instance largely Asian communities within four Mosaic segments.

The targeted campaign is described in detail, plus a lengthy discussion of the post campaign evaluation, demonstrating the difficulties inherent in measuring success in social marketing campaigns, despite there being benchmarks. For example, success may take time to be discernible, and the measures need to be appropriate to factors applicable in the longer term. For example, awareness of symptoms might be a short-term measure, whereas any likely impact on hospital admission rates would be a longer-term effect, and more difficult to link back to any impacts of the campaign. Also, a campaign successful in one area might fail in another due to a range of localised factors.

However, whatever the challenges faced in developing effective social marketing campaigns in the healthcare, or other public sectors, the paper demonstrates the power of geodemographics in targeting key groups within the population. In the original paper written by the team at BMRB in 1979, the authors briefly discussed CRN as a technique for use in social research, seeing the method as a major breakthrough in the then increasing social research sector. The Farr et al paper provides an excellent example of how geodems came to be applied in this field.

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