What is Social Marketing?
Social marketing is the art of behavior change. How do you get someone to stop smoking?
Or stop polluting the environment? Instead of selling a product, we are often
breaking habits, or encouraging new ones. In most cases, social marketing requires more finesse than
traditional marketing campaigns. The principle concepts are:
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Result:
What value or behavior do we want people to adopt?
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Strategy: What message will convince people to adopt this value or behavior?
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Hook:
What will the target group have to give up? What rational, financial or
emotional benefits are there to changing their behavior?
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Tactics:
How and where will we promote our message?
Social marketing needs to convince people that there's a personal benefit to changing
their behavior. Will adopting this new behavior save them money, or make them
feel good? Successful social marketing encourages behavior change because we
communicate the personal benefits of the new behavior. This requires we
understand the target audience and design strategies based on their wants and
needs.
It Starts with Research
To understand the target audience for each social marketing campaign, we begin with
a review of the research that has been done on that target population to get a
feel of their beliefs and behavior. If
no research has been done, then we conduct our own. Mason Tillman has performed
thousands of interviews in multiple languages nationwide, more than 1000
intercept and one-on-one interviews, and thousands of mail surveys with
telephone follow-up, along with literature reviews. This research forms the core
of our campaign strategy.
The Message
There is a prevailing misconception that the general population receives messages in
the same manner. They don't. Different
people react in different ways to the same message. To develop effective
messages to reach all of them, we need to know about people's knowledge,
attitudes, and practices. Simply
put, what do they know, how do they feel, and what do they do? Our messages must take all of these questions into account. Mason Tillman has performed more than 50 focus groups to refine concept
development and message delivery. The end result is a focused messaged that will
affect everyone in our target.
Digesting the Data
While we collect information about our target population, we create systems to store
that information, organize it, and recall it for analysis and reporting. Mason Tillman designs user-friendly databases that can produce customized
statistical reports and serve as easy references for both laypersons and
analysts.
Implementing the Campaign
Our social marketing campaigns have two main components: message delivery and
post-campaign evaluation.
We
ensure an effective message delivery by using our research to determine
effective methods of reach. Depending on who we are trying to reach, we will
utilize the most effective media outlets, and ally ourselves with organizations
and institutions that are relevant to our target.
The
post-campaign evaluation uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to
assess our impact. We find out how successful we were in building awareness
around an issue, and how successful we were at changing behavior around that
issue.
Training Services
Although we have the capacity to launch an entire campaign in-house, Mason Tillman can
teach public agency and corporate staff everything they need to know to
implement a social marketing campaign themselves.
Why Choose Mason Tillman?
Since 1978, Mason Tillman has been providing public relations and public policy
research on a local, statewide, and national level. With a doctorate in
anthropology, the firm's team of specialists add academic
insight to its public relations savvy to design campaigns that shape positive
behavior.
Some of Our Past Clients
Some of Mason Tillman's past and current clients include:
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Alameda
County
-
Alameda
County Economic Development Alliance for Business
-
California
Department of Health Services
-
California
Endowment
-
California
Energy Commission
-
CalWORKS
We
specialize in targeting youth, multilingual and multicultural audiences, and
have launched campaigns for challenging issues such as smoking, prenatal care,
teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, pollution, recycling, and waste management.
