PSI and Social Marketing

Blog 7- PSI – Day 7 (Wednesday August 10th)

Today our social entrepreneurship program met up with Population Service International (PSI) India. PSI is the third largest NGO in the world and it runs one of the world’s largest and oldest family planning programs in India. We had the wonderful opportunity to be presented about the Women Health Project. The goal of the Women’s Health Project is to increase the use of IUDs and to dispel myths and misconceptions about the contraceptive. India continues to haul high maternal mortality rates due to low usage of temporary methods such as IUDs, birth control pills and condoms. The goal of the Women Health Project is promote higher usage of temporary methods by an increase of 1% in the next two years.
To achieve the objective of higher usage, PSI India has really taken advantage on the opportunity of social marketing and the use of the media. What I noticed about PSI India’s marketing methods is that they take into consideration India’s conservative perspective about family planning, but provided a new twist in providing innovating solutions. For example, PSI India’s commercial about the Freedom 5 IUD contraceptive points out how providing a solution such as temporary sterilization can provide a couple the options not to have children until they are ready again. This provides the opportunity of birth spacing and another method to decrease the maternal mortality rate. The commercial has an empathetic, but a funny tone and it demonstrates that the right decision would be to use Freedom while empowering the woman on her decision, while receiving support from her husband.
Watching the commercial made me realized how the marketing methods that are used in business to sell dish washing soap for profit are now being used in public health for social impact. The commercial demonstrated the research that was put into studying the population, how to brand the Freedom 5 product, and how to sell it to the population. It illustrates that business models such as SWOT and other marketing tools can be transfer into public health to generate social impact and this is an important component of social entrepreneurship.