Social marketing
Want to help people to eat more healthily, recycle more, or get involved in the local community? The traditional approach was to rely on providing the same information to everyone and assuming that people would then choose the most positive behaviour. However, this was often ineffective. More recently, organisations have sought to persuade people to change what they do. This method underestimated how much the context influences what people do.
In the Campaign Company, we draw on our long experience in community engagement and political marketing to go a step further. We integrate campaigns within peer networks, to overcome individual and group-level barriers to changing behaviour, with initiatives to change the context, tackling structural barriers to behaviour change.
We also apply emotional intelligence to our work at personal and social levels, recognising that emotions are more powerful drivers of behaviour than logical reasoning, that self-confidence and other personal resources are key to breaking negative behaviour patterns and that strong interpersonal relationships are crucial for the initiation and maintenance of positive behaviour change.
Many traditional campaigns have been unsuccessful due to a lack of understanding of the people they are working with or the theoretical foundations for behaviour change. We draw on our background in qualitative research, and working with hard-to-reach groups, identifying relevant personal, social and structural factors. This research and subsequent pre-testing of messages and materials ensures that our interventions have the relevance and resonance to contribute to behaviour change.
We draw on the social marketing principles of behaviour change, insight, segmentation, marketing mix, exchange and competition theories. To go beyond an individualistic approach, we emphasise community engagement and the building of social capital, in addition to seeking opportunities to move “upstream” and influence policy. This is vital to facilitate behaviour changes and make them sustainable.
We are using our experience in social marketing to work with clients, ranging from Hackney Council, Shoreditch Trust, North Fulham New Deal for Communities, Southend Council, Brighton Primary Care Trust (PCT), Kirklees PCT and Barnsley PCT.
Last Updated on Thursday, 25 June 2009 01:02