Social Marketing
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
28<br />
Research<br />
Behavioral Science<br />
Behavioral science is the study of factors that affect or influence the actions of individuals.<br />
These include individual factors, interpersonal factors, organizational factors, or community factors.<br />
Behavioral science can help you better understand members of your audience, what they<br />
do and why. Research on people and their behaviors has led to general theories of what affects<br />
what people do – what helps determine their behavior.<br />
For decades, human behavior has been an intense target of empirical research. Anthropologists,<br />
psychologists and sociologists have been interested in what we call the determinants of<br />
behavior. Determinants of behavior are those factors, both within an individual’s thought process<br />
and external to the individual, that influence people’s actions. There are numerous theories<br />
and a dense literature to wade through, absorb, and try to understand. At the same time, for<br />
the past 20 or so years, there has been a growing experience-base of shaping human behavior<br />
through marketing. From early programs such<br />
If you can find a way to make your<br />
new behavior fun, easy, and popular<br />
with your audience, you have<br />
a good chance of succeeding.<br />
as Smokey the Bear, to more recent efforts<br />
targeting seat belt use, smoking cessation,<br />
drug abuse, HIV prevention, diet and exercise,<br />
we now have a solid, if incomplete, base from<br />
which to make judgments on where to start<br />
and how to understand human behavior.<br />
Determinants of Behavior<br />
Determinants are those factors that influence behavior. Obviously many factors influence human<br />
behavior. Where do you start? In the <strong>Social</strong> <strong>Marketing</strong> Tools chapter, we provide a worksheet<br />
that can be used for identifying determinants. The best place to start is to use market research<br />
to answer the following questions:<br />
• What are people doing now as opposed to what I want them to do? (Call this the “competing<br />
behavior.”)<br />
• What do people like about the competing behavior?<br />
• What do people dislike about the competing behavior?<br />
• What makes it easy for them to do the competing behavior?<br />
• What makes it difficult for them to do the competing behavior?<br />
• Who approves of them doing the competing behavior?<br />
• Who disapproves of them doing the competing behavior?<br />
Now, answer these same questions about the new or safer behavior you wish to promote: What<br />
do they like/dislike about it? What makes it easy/hard? Who would approve/ disapprove?
Change language