Planning education to care for the earth - IUCN Knowledge Network

Social marketingnew behaviours. The process should be fundamentally participatory andresponsive to people’s needs.Social marketing has defined four domains of influence - the four Ps:product, place, price, and promotion (fig. 2).ProductPricePlacePromotionFigure 2. The Social Marketing Inputs.The product P represents the programme decisions associated with selectingand shaping the idea, commodity, behaviour, or service (the product) to bepromoted. At each process stage, managers must focus on the qualities ofthe product which will increase the benefits to the target audience.Place refers to the system through which the products flow to users and thequality of service offered where those products are made available. Placefocuses largely on overcoming one important obstacle to use: difficulty ofaccess. Place also includes the training of providers (community-basedoutreach workers, peers, friends, neighbours, professionals). Socialmarketing focuses attention on their role as an effective sales force, stressingtheir skills in communication and persuasion.Price refers to more than monetary cost. It represents all the barriers a personmust overcome before accepting the proposed social product, including lossof status, embarrassment, the time lost in adapting to a new practice.Promotion - the fourth P - includes the functions of advertising, publicrelations, consumer promotion, user education, counselling, communityorganization and inter-personal support. It also encompasses decisions aboutwhat will be said about the behaviour and its benefits, and on the channels tobe used to get the message across to the right people at the right time.Each P makes an irreplaceable contribution to successful behaviouralchange, but the proportional role of each in any given situation may vary.The art of successful social marketing is to achieve the right mix so that13