What Makes Social Marketing Different?
Influencing Behavior
Influencing behavior (not just awareness or knowledge) is the bottom line of
any social marketing program. Therefore, your program's goals should be designed
to influence behavior instead of only increasing knowledge or awareness of a
problem. You may want your target audience to adopt a new behavior, stop a
current behavior, or refrain from starting a new behavior.
To do this, you need to understand
- Current behaviors of your audience.
- Ideal behaviors.
- Reasonable steps to move the audience from the current behavior towards
the ideal behavior.
- What determines their behavior.
The initial behavior change you ask for may not be to adopt the ideal
behavior. The audience may need to start with smaller changes that move them
towards the ideal behavior.
The end point is always action. Ask yourself: What do we want the target
audience to do as a result of our intervention?
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