Research and Evaluation in Social Marketing

Social marketing efforts do not only benefit from research, but research is essential to effective social marketing. This research can be done at several points in time. Before the program begins or (as intervention as is often labeled) begins, you can find out what people are already doing, why they are doing, what they are doing, how they see the desired behavior, and whether they have any desire to change; during the intervention, you can ask how well your effort is working, and what they think about your social marketing intervention; afterward, you can discover how effective the intervention was, where it succeeded and where it didn’t. You can also understand which of the social marketing tools were employed in a given intervention and compare that to how successful the effort was. That is, research is critical in finding out what people do and why, and this provides an understanding of what you should do, as well as what worked, what didn’t, and why. This chapter will review the major categories and approaches to social marketing research. In the appendix following this chapter, online resource links are provided for further guidance in research and evaluation.