Social Marketing

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Research
What is Behavior?
When designing the components of your intervention, you may want to segment even further to
more accurately reach specific groups. You may want to design a single specific activity – say a TV
spot – specifically for part of your target audience, such as women in urban areas who want outdoor
lamps to spot intruders. See AED’s segmentation tool in the Social Marketing Tools section.
To be successful, you have to
understand your goal. You have
to know whom you want to
do what.
Segmentation is always a problem for social
marketers, particularly those in government.
Isn’t our job to reach everyone and not target
a specific group? Don’t we open ourselves to
criticism of favoritism or, worse, stereotyping
if we target a particular group? The answer is
often yes. But we can argue that our programs
are more likely to succeed if they are designed to help the specific target audiences. Commercial
marketers target because they have limited resources and know they need to be effective
with those resources. Now, if the commercial folks have limited resources, what about us? Don’t
we have a responsibility to be effective too?
Exercise: What is Behavior?
A behavior is: Example 1 Example 2
Action
Put child in the back seat
with seat belt on
Put child in the back seat
with seat belt on
Segment Mother of one child,
Father of one child,
age 7
age 7
Condition When driving the family van When dropping the child
with four other children in it off at school, on the way
to work
While the observable action may stay the same, the specific condition under which an action
is taken may vary your strategies and messages. In this example, the two conditions are defined
based on consumer research that has shown that parents of young children are less likely to
buckle them up if they have several other children in the car.