Next, select channels of communication. Is television the best way to reach your target audience? Or is your intended audience more likely to pay attention to newspaper articles? Talks by experts? Word of mouth? Keep in mind budget limitations when you are deciding on your most effective medium, but be creative--there are many free or low cost ways to disseminate your message. It's up to the brainstorming power of your group to find them.
Social marketing is a concept that's fairly new to the health and development field. Nonetheless, it's an idea that shows immense promise, and can give you an excellent framework through which your organization can do what you have set out to do: help individuals and society as a whole live better lives. Is this something that can be used to further the goals of your program or coalition? The next section of this chapter, will help you decide the answer to just this question.

In its most general sense, Social Marketing is a new way of thinking about some very old human endeavours. As long as there have been social systems, there have been attempts to inform, persuade, influence, motivate, to gain acceptance for new adherents to certain sets of ideas, to promote causes and to win over particular groups, to reinforce behaviour or to change it -- whether by favour, argument or force. Social Marketing has deep roots in religion, in politics, in education, and even, to a degree, in military strategy. It also has intellectual roots in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, communication theory and anthropology. Its practical roots stem from disciplines such as advertising, public relations and market research, as well as to the work and experience of social activists, advocacy groups and community organizers.

In response, social marketers have adapted commercial marketing for health purposes. Social marketing now uses commercial marketing techniques—such as analysing target audiences, identifying the objectives of targeted behaviour changes, tailoring messages, and adapting strategies like branding—to promote the adoption and maintenance of health behaviours. Key trends include the recognition that messages on health behaviour vary along a continuum from prevention to promotion and maintenance, as reflected by theories such as the “transtheoretical model”9; the need for unified message strategies and methods of measuring reactions and outcomes10; and competition between health messages and messages that promote unhealthy behaviour from product marketers and others.11
Though it's not clear, behind the corporate objectives, which in themselves offer the main context for the marketing plan, will lie the "corporate mission," in turn provides the context for these corporate objectives. In a sales-oriented organization, the marketing planning function designs incentive pay plans to not only motivate and reward frontline staff fairly but also to align marketing activities with corporate mission. The marketing plan basically aims to make the business provide the solution with the awareness with the expected customers.


Likewise, if you are "selling" teen pregnancy prevention, what barriers make it difficult to prevent those pregnancies? Can teenagers easily obtain birth control, or is it difficult for them to get hold of? Maybe there isn't a good teen clinic in town. Or if there is a clinic available, maybe it's all the way across town, and it's only open on weekdays until 4:00, making it difficult to get to without missing school.
In the preface to Marketing Social Change, Andreasen defines social marketing as “the application of proven concepts and techniques drawn from the commercial sector to promote changes in diverse socially important behaviors such as drug use, smoking, sexual behavior... This marketing approach has an immense potential to affect major social problems if we can only learn how to harness its power.”1 By “proven techniques” Andreasen meant methods drawn from behavioural theory, persuasion psychology, and marketing science with regard to health behaviour, human reactions to messages and message delivery, and the “marketing mix” or “four Ps” of marketing (place, price, product, and promotion).2 These methods include using behavioural theory to influence behaviour that affects health; assessing factors that underlie the receptivity of audiences to messages, such as the credibility and likeability of the argument; and strategic marketing of messages that aim to change the behaviour of target audiences using the four Ps.3

Speaking of what they termed "social change campaigns", Kotler and Ned Roberto introduced the subject by writing, "A social change campaign is an organized effort conducted by one group (the change agent) which attempts to persuade others (the target adopters) to accept, modify, or abandon certain ideas, attitudes, practices or behavior." Their 1989 text was updated in 2002 by Philip Kotler, Ned Roberto and Nancy Lee.[33] In 2005, University of Stirling was the first university to open a dedicated research institute to Social Marketing,[34] while in 2007, Middlesex University became the first university to offer a specialized postgraduate programme in Health & Social Marketing.[35]
Prevent backsliding. Often, the recipient's action must be followed by reinforcement, by the provision of some benefit for having acted, so that the desired action will be repeated. How is her life better in a meaningful way for having fewer children? Will her friends and family improve? Will she have more money? Can she go to school? Is she healthier than her neighbors?
The purpose of a marketing budget is to pull together all the revenues and costs involved in marketing into one comprehensive document. The budget is a managerial tool that balances what is needed to be spent against what can be afforded, and helps make choices about priorities. A budget can further be used to measure a business's performance in the general trends of a business's spending.