Kane and Morrison

Social marketing is a relatively new process to the UK. Its aim is to influence behaviour using a range of marketing and other related business techniques.

You may think to yourself ‘isn’t that what marketing already does?’ and to a certain extend you would be right. However social marketing is more focused on changing behaviour from the bottom up rather than top down.

Social marketing necessitates a detailed understanding of behaviour by who, what, where and how. This information is gathered by detailed research, both quantitative and qualitative. Its aim is to discover what methods and messages will influence behaviour from the people that you are trying to target. This differs from traditional forms of marketing that theorise ways to deliver marketing messages based on the organisations needs and objectives.

One analogy that can be drawn is the parent/child relationship. Some parents seek to influence their child’s behaviour by informing them that it is a bad or good way to behave. The social marketing approach would be to discover why their child behaves in a certain way by asking them what their parent could do to help them change their behaviour. A plan can then be devised to influence their behaviour based on this knowledge.

Social marketing is a useful discipline for organisations such as PCTs looking at reducing smoking, obesity problems or getting more people to go to the dentist. There are many other potential applications that K&M would be happy to discuss with you.

A typical social marketing process would be:

• Scoping and research
• Strategic development
• Strategy implementation
• Strategic evaluation, monitoring and follow-up