Key Stages

What are the key stages involved?

Social marketing has a number of key stages:-

• Scope
• Development
• Implement
• Evalulate
• Follow-up

Most of these stages will be familiar to anyone involved in project or programme development. However, we highlight the importance of the scoping stage, which needs to drive the process. The primary concern here is with establishing clear actionable and measurable behaviour goals to ensure focused development across the rest of the process.

The effectiveness of social marketing rests on whether it is possible to demonstrate direct impact on behaviour. It is this feature that sets it apart from other communication or awareness-raising approaches, where the main focus is on highlighting information and helping people to understand it.

This model is being developed further by the National Social Marketing Centre to provide practical support and tools to enable those applying this approach.