Marketing Bullying Prevention - CiteSeerX

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when designing social marketing campaigns that focus on highly sensitive issues, such as ... The media campaign was divided into two phases. ... Planning for Phase 2 advertisements included persisting with the earlier positive parenting.
Marketing Bullying Prevention: A Case For Segmenting By Unmet Needs D. Brown1, N. Henley2, R. Donovan1, And D. Cross3 Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer Control, Curtin University 2 Centre for Applied Social Marketing Research, Edith Cowan University 3 Vario Health Institute, Edith Cowan University 1

Abstract This paper reports an action research finding that was identified through the process evaluation of a social marketing anti-bullying intervention, the Mandurah Bullying Prevention Project (MBPP): early consideration of market segmentation by ‘unmet needs’ is advisable when designing social marketing campaigns that focus on highly sensitive issues, such as bullying. The MBPP campaign was designed to appeal directly to parents of young children. Early parenting strategies were recommended that can help to create a home environment in which children are less likely to adopt bullying behaviour, and more likely to be able to cope with experiences of bullying in later life. We anticipated that parents of older children might take out the message that they were to blame if their child was bullying others, or severely affected by being bullied. Pretesting showed that the message content was not likely to evoke this response from the target audience. The campaign ran in two phases. Ongoing monitoring of Phase 1 indicated that the response was positive and there was raised salience and discussion in the community about bullying prevention and the negative long term consequences of bullying. Additional feedback indicated that the campaign may have exacerbated frustration in a group of parents whose children were currently suffering from bullying in the local high schools. These parents perceived that school and community solutions for bullying were inadequate and their complaints were being ignored. The MBPP researchers responded to the unmet needs of this unintended target market with a number of timely strategies that successfully averted potential damage to the main objectives of the campaign.

Background Bullying is a serious problem that affects the majority of Australian children in some way. Children who are bullied experience poor social connectedness through loss of friendships, feelings of isolation and powerlessness (Espelage, Bosworth & Simon, 2000; Forero, McLellan, Rissel, & Bauman, 1999; Sudermann, Jaffe, & Schieck, 1996). The term ‘bullying’ refers to systematic, repeated and intentional behaviour that causes physical or psychological harm (Forero et al., 1999; Sudermann et al., 1996). Bullied children feel more social anxiety (Craig, 1998; Slee, 1994) and are more depressed (Austin & Joseph, 1996; Callaghan & Joseph, 1995; Neary & Joseph, 1994). Self-worth is lower in children who are bullied (Andreou, 2000; Austin & Joseph, 1996; Callaghan & Joseph, 1995; Neary & Joseph, 1994; Slee & Rigby, 1993). The effects of bullying can be debilitating and long lasting (Forero et al. 1999). Children whose bullying behaviour goes unchecked early are at increased risk of becoming delinquent teenagers (Rigby & Cox, 1996), engaging in criminal activity and becoming physically abusive as adults (Espelage et al., 2000; Hoover & Hailer, 1991). A literature review on bullying and the negative influence of inadequate parenting (Tolan, Cromwell, & Brasswell, 1986); familial factors and aggression (Farrington, 1991; Olweus, 1980; Thornberry, 1994); delinquency (Loeber & Dishion, 1983); family and environment (Bowers, Smith, & Binney, 1994; Espelage et al., 2000); provided considerable support for a

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bullying prevention campaign that focuses on parenting strategies and community involvement. The Mandurah Bullying Prevention Project (MBPP) was a community based, social marketing intervention funded by the Commonwealth’s Stronger Families Fund. The primary objective was to recommend early parenting strategies that could help to create a home environment in which bullying behaviour was less likely to develop and one in which resilience to later experiences of bullying would be fostered. The primary target market was identified as parents of young children. This market was seen to meet Rossiter’s (1987) four main criteria for market segmentation: the segment should be relatively easily reached, able to be measured, substantial enough to warrant segmentation and potentially responsive enough to make a specific communication worthwhile. An unintended target market was identified as parents of older children. Pretesting with the general population was undertaken to ensure that this segment would not take out a message of blame from the campaign if their children had experienced bullying. The media campaign was divided into two phases. Phase 1 consisted of a series of advertisements designed to raise awareness of the long term, potentially debilitating consequences for a child who is bullied or who bullies others. Another advertisement promoted positive parenting strategies focusing on the positive parenting skill of actively listening to children. Each ad contained the MBPP’s website address and helpline numbers, and the local library was stocked with relevant books on bullying. Prior to the development of Phase 2, community consultations and monitoring of the community’s response to Phase 1 were taken into account. Community response indicated that Phase 1 had been generally well received by the wider community. However, there was a negative response from a group of parents whose children were suffering from bullying in local high schools. The campaign may have exacerbated the frustration of these parents whose needs for urgent, remedial action in the schools were not being addressed by the campaign’s early prevention approach. Planning for Phase 2 advertisements included persisting with the earlier positive parenting message, and a secondary emphasis on addressing unmet needs of parents of older children by providing practical advice about how they could deal with existing problems related to bullying. A post-campaign survey was conducted in Mandurah and the comparison town, Bunbury and finally an independent process evaluation was conducted by an external agency. From this reflective process evaluation, the finding relating to unmet needs of the unintended target market emerged. The campaign elements of the MBPP are described below to provide context for the action research finding.

The Campaign: Phase 1 A series of ‘Scenario’ ads in Phase 1 focused on raising community awareness of the serious long term consequences of bullying for children who bully and children who are consistently bullied; for example: ‘She feels deeply depressed and worthless’; ‘He is described as violent and has a criminal record for assault’. They illustrated how some parental behaviour can contribute to maladaptive behaviours in children, for example: ‘His parents let him run wild. They were too busy to establish boundaries’; ‘Home life was chaotic’ and demonstrated that bullying also includes non-physical intimidation, for example, ‘The other kids called him dumb’; ‘Her father called her names when he was stressed’. The ads also indicated how parents could make a difference; for example, ‘Children who bully need as much help as the

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children they target’, ‘Nobody took the time to help Alison feel good about herself’. A positively framed ad focused on empowering parents with the positive parenting skill of actively listening to children. Throughout the campaign, all media ads carried the primary communication objective: ‘Parents DO make a difference’ and the primary behavioural objective: ‘Have you really listened to your child today?’. We anticipated that parents of older children might take out the message that they were to blame if their child was bullying others, or severely affected by being bullied. Therefore, we pretested extensively to avoid such a response and looked for any other potentially negative responses. The pretest questionnaires included questions such as: Please tell me some of the thoughts and feelings going through your mind as you were reading this ad; What do you think is the main message of this ad?; What does this ad say about bullying?; This ad says that parents make a difference. Does it also say how they make a difference?; Was there anything about the ad that you particularly disliked or found confusing?. Results showed nothing to indicate that parents would perceive the ads as blaming; instead, there was a positive response to the style and content of the ads. Ongoing monitoring of Phase 1 indicated that the response was positive and there was raised salience and discussion in the community about bullying prevention and the negative long term consequences of bullying. Additional feedback indicated that the campaign was exacerbating frustration in a group of parents whose children were currently suffering from bullying in the local high schools. These parents perceived that school and community solutions for bullying were inadequate and their complaints were being largely ignored. Contrary to our early concern that they might feel blamed by the ads, these parents complained that the MBPP was not doing anything to ‘fix’ the problem in high schools. They formed an action group, Parents Against Bullying, held a public meeting mobilizing other groups in the community, and notified local and state media of their intention to publicly air their complaints about bullying in Mandurah high schools. We responded swiftly to this feedback by making contact with the leader of the parents’ action group and subsequently meeting with her. The Project Manager listened to her frustrations about the severity of the bullying her children were experiencing and her anger at the perceived inadequate and ineffective response from schools. She said they thought bullying prevention strategies that had been implemented to date were too soft, such as using suspension as a punishment “…because that means that they will be on the streets” rather than “…getting to the bottom of the problem”. It was also revealed that some of the group’s motivation to public action had been fuelled by recent media reports about a woman from NSW who had successfully sued and received significant financial compensation for being bullied at school. The group were looking into the possibility of legal action for their children after corresponding with the woman. The primary complaint raised about the MBPP’s campaign was in relation to the group’s interpretation of the word ‘prevention’. Whilst our intended meaning was to ‘prevent bullying before it happens’, they had interpreted our communication as an undertaking to ‘stop’ bullying. Regular exposure to the scenario ads in local media had increased salience of the problem, and in turn, raised expectations that the MBPP “should be doing something to stop bullying in the schools”. The group leader commented on the project’s tagline ‘Parents DO make a difference’ by saying, “They won’t listen, so this is what I am Doing now”. We subsequently called a meeting with key agencies and members of the community to discuss this reaction to the MBPP campaign. Representatives from the local police service,

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local and state social service agencies and a member of the local education department attended the meeting. These agencies had been involved with the MBPP since its inception as our community reference group and had been consulted throughout the project’s development. In the meeting we heard that there was a generally high acceptance in the community of the campaign’s message and the project’s intentions. However, in recent months, social service agencies had noticed an increase in demand from desperate parents looking for help with their children’s bullying problems at local high schools. Although there were no supporting statistics at the time, police were aware of more regular complaints about existing bullying-related problems, and more reported assaults leading to restraining orders. High school headmasters and teachers had also recorded more complaints about serious bullying incidents. The local education department representative contributed that all schools had policies to take bullying complaints seriously and that many of the issues voiced by members of the newlyformed Parents Against Bullying were known to the education department and police. However, there were no standardized procedures for effectively dealing with severe bullying in local schools. Further, there were few people qualified to deal with bullying outside of schools in the area and local social service agencies reported being understaffed with only two state-funded psychologists allocated for the area. The psychologists were already inundated with a broad range of problems and unable to adequately handle further demand. There was a need for additional psychological services and support groups in the area, but at that point, there were no resources available or immediate plans to increase services in the community. The MBPP’s referral services were largely directed towards delivering information about positive parenting strategies to the parents of pre-school and primary school aged children, and there were no funds available for the project to provide further counselling or mediation services. The Campaign: Phase 2 As a result of the community feedback after Phase 1, we determined it likely that the campaign had successfully raised discussion and salience of the serious, long-term consequences of bullying in the community. We identified that the word ‘prevention’ in the project’s name may have been misleading, at least for this group whose needs relating to ‘stopping bullying’ were not being met. A more specific statement such as “help stop bullying before it starts” could have helped to avoid that misconception. After some debate, we decided to keep the project’s name for uniformity and repeat the original ads in Phase 1 to reinforce awareness. However, we felt ethically bound to respond to the unmet needs of the parents of older children. We identified two aims for Phase 2. Firstly, we decided to persist with the early parenting message that by adopting positive parenting strategies, parents can make a difference to how their children cope with bullying behaviour, but to refocus this message on early prevention making it clear that we were wanting to ‘prevent before it starts’ rather than ‘stop’. Secondly, we decided to address the unmet needs of the group of parents of older children who were experiencing bullying by providing practical advice about how they could deal with existing bullying problems. A professional advertising agency was consulted to assist us with the development of three new advertisements, two specifically designed to emphasise early positive parenting strategies to prevent bullying and one large ad filled with detailed information and practical advice on what to do if their child was being bullied or bullying

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others. This ad included a coupon inviting parents to order a booklet containing further information on bullying prevention for $5.00. The new ads were pretested before publication. Feedback from the community was widely positive to Phase 2. Simultaneously, discussions commenced between the local superintendent of police and a representative of the Friendly Schools Project from Curtin University regarding the possibility of implementing a Mandurah-wide, bullying initiative. This resulted in implementation by Safer WA of new strategies and procedures in Mandurah schools and sustainability of an ongoing approach to the bullying prevention in Mandurah. Discussion To understand what happened from a theoretical perspective, we refer to Lewin’s Field Theory in social psychology which requires all aspects of the ‘field’ be included for effective change to take place. Lewin (1951, cited in Hothersall, 1995) asserted that unmet psychological needs can result in increased tension, causing stimuli that were previously neutral to accumulate power or force, akin to a magnetic attraction or repulsion from the stimulus in question. The response can range from weak to strong, dependent on the intensity of the need state (1951, cited in Hothersall, 1995). The MBPP case is an interesting example of field theory in practice. In the MBPP instance, frustration arising from an unintended target group’s unmet needs was so great that it threatened to derail an otherwise effective campaign for change – the whole field had not been included. By actively listening to the parents’ action group leader, and explaining the project’s aims and intentions, the MBPP’s Project manager acted as a change agent, and successfully diverted anger away from the project to the extent that the group ceased direct criticism of the campaign. A relatively inexpensive adjustment to Phase 2 of the campaign reinforced the perception that their needs were not being ignored. They continued to protest about the unsatisfactory response from local high schools and subsequently held a public meeting to raise these issues. A considerable amount of negative press about bullying in the community followed but this was not detrimental to the objectives of the campaign. The subsequent implementation of the Friendly Schools Program in Mandurah high schools is a testament to the success of this group’s efforts to be heard. The initial negative response came from a very small group of parents (two or three) but their needs were such that they were able to mobilize a much larger group. However, even if the numbers were very small, the emotions were so highly charged, and the issue of such great concern to the community (following school killings in the United States and suicides everywhere, including Mandurah) that we recommend considering even small market segments, whether intended or unintended, when the issue is highly sensitive. If we had considered segmenting by unmet needs in the early stages of the project, we would have made decisions based on the totality of the field, not just our intended market of parents of young children. This experience is leading the researchers to develop a more inclusive antibullying prevention approach that integrates social marketing interventions with school-based programs. We suggest that market segmentation by unmet needs may be a potentially useful strategy in designing social marketing prevention campaigns, especially those that deal with other highly emotive issues, such as preventing domestic violence, road fatalities or racism.

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