Social Marketing – Influencing behaviors for good

Summary

Social marketing is a process that applies marketing principles and techniques to create, communicate
and deliver value in order to influence target audience behaviors that benefit society as well as target
audience .

Similar to commercial sector who sells goods and services, social marketers are selling behaviors. Agents
tipically want to influence target markets to do one of these four things:

1. Accept a new behavior

2. Reject a potentially undesirable behavior
3. Modify a current behavior
4. Abandon an old undesirable one.

Does social marketing differ from the commercial sector marketing? Most agree that a major
distinguishing factor lies in the type of product sold, as said above. Yet, the principles and techniques
used to influence are the same.

For a variety of reasons, social marketing is more difficult than commercial marketing. Consider how
hard and challenging is to influence people do something or believe is something.

Who does social marketing? In most cases, social marketing principles and techniques are used by those
on the front line responsible for improving public health, preventing injuries, protecting the
environment. It is rare when they have a social marketing title.
 Essentials of marketing research

Summary

In this chapter, the topic of the research design is extended to the conclusive research design. It will
focus on both descriptive and casual designs. Furthermore, it will specially elaborate on survey methods
and observation as they are one of highly used research techniques for collecting data in present day
field of marketing.

Conclusive research design provides a way to verify and quantify the insights gained from exploratory
research. It is classified into two major categories:

1) Descriptive research design is typically concerned with determining the frequency with which an
event occurs the relationship between two variables. It is used when the purpose of the research is:
a) To make predictions of market consumer behavior
b) To describe characteristics of certain groups.

To get meaningful results from descriptive studies researchers use methods such as dummy tables and
objective – question specification. To facilitate the discussion on descriptive research designs,
researchers divide it into two categories:

 Cross – sectional design – which is the most common and most familiar way of conducting
marketing research.
 Longitudinal design – which is more reliable than the previous one for monitoring changes over
time, because it relies less on consumers` mental capabilities and more frequently monitors
events.

Both these categories come with advantages and disadvantages.

2) Casual design provides answers to multiple questions by explaining which variables are the causes
and which ones are the effects. It is most appropriate when the research objectives include the need
to understand the reasons why certain market phenomena happen as they do.

Survey methods tend to be the mainstay of marketing research in general. There are four types of
survey methods, namely:

 Personal interviews
 Telephone interviews
 Mail interviews
 Online interviews

The most used method is the personal interview.

In observation studies, the researcher observes the behavior of consumers in real life setting.

The choice relating to the methods of observation depends on researcher`s need for:

 Directness of approach
 Respondent`s awareness of being observed
 The rigor of information and structure
 Observation or undisguised observation

Observations provide an opportunity to collect highly valuable behavioral information when used in
right fashion.