some “Marketing correct” recommendations for family planning campaigns

Summary

This paper takes issue with some recommendations that have been made for communication and motivation in family planning programs and suggests some ways in which family planning marketing may be improved. The author agrees that family planning programs should initially emphasize information, facts, and logistics, and that the subsequent campaign should aim at the best prospects, emphasize self-interest, belay the audience's distrust of the communicator, make post-delivery visits to the mother, work with impersonal messages, and legitimate the behavior that it wants to stimulate. But he suggests that private, personal communication has not been shown to be most efficient; that amounts of information should be large, not small; and that messages should be distributed as widely as possible and be as various as possible.

In the end, an appropriate message-accounting system and an explicit consideration of the dollarvalue of each “customer,” when imposed upon these principles of hard-nosed advertising experience, will be invaluable to the growth and success of the family planning campaign.