Internal Social Marketing within a Breastscreening Service: Aligning Employee Behaviour and Attitudes with Service Quality

Internal Social Marketing within a Breastscreening Service

Project dates: 2007 - 2011

Following the success of the state-based ‘The Facts’ mass media social marketing campaign in 2007 and rebranding of Breast Screen Queensland (BSQ), an internal analysis identified inconsistencies across the state between high and low performing service centres and highlighted a need for alignment between the service being promoted and what is delivered. One approach adopted by BSQ to address this service challenge was to align internal marketing efforts with the external social marketing message disseminated through ‘The Facts’ campaign.

To develop an ‘internal social marketing’ focus within BSQ, it was important to spread the idea among service workers that, to encourage sustainable breast screening behaviours among the target audience of women, employees at all service touch-points needed to consider themselves important influences in encouraging and supporting women to attend a regular breast screen. However, the lack of integration between health and marketing responsibilities was evident from the qualitative analysis of the interviews and focus groups conducted with the service managers and employees; where many employees considered social marketing to be separate from their duties. The service mix was functionally separated, where service resources (i.e. actual breast screen, health information and marketing) were segregated by professional boundaries.

To achieve alignment, BSQ partnered with researchers from QUT and University of Queensland to conduct a mixed-methods research project that aimed to benchmark internal marketing orientation, to be followed by up-skilling employees with social marketing knowledge and measuring staff attitudes and behaviours toward marketing activities.


Partners

Publications

  • Russell-Bennett, Rebekah, Previte, Josephine, Gallegos, Danielle, Hartel, Charmine, Smith, Geoff, Hamilton, Robyn (2013) A Services Approach to Social Marketing Programs. In Kubacki, K, Rundle-Thiele, S (Eds.), Contemporary issues in social marketing, pp.111-140.
  • Previte, Josephine, Russell-Bennett, Rebekah (2014) The need for internal social marketing (ISM): extending the people focus to service employees. In Domegan, C, Hastings, G (Eds.), Social marketing: from tunes to symphonies, 2nd Edition, pp.326-333.