Good Works!

How do you actually change behavior for social good? In Social Marketing: Changing Behaviors for Good, authors Nancy R. Lee and Philip Kotler argue that you must stop thinking like a communicator and start thinking like a marketer. The core claim is simple but revolutionary: social problems can be addressed when you treat behaviors as products, citizens as consumers, and exchanges as value transactions that benefit both individuals and society.

At its heart, social marketing applies commercial marketing principles—product, price, place, and promotion—to issues like health, safety, and the environment. The difference is intent: instead of selling shampoo or soda, you’re selling safer roads, cleaner water, or more compassionate communities. The behavior you seek isn’t awareness or attitude—it’s action. As Bill Smith put it, social marketing’s essence lies in the exchange: you must offer something people truly value (time saved, approval gained, money kept, pride felt) in return for a behavior that benefits both them and the larger society.

From Awareness to Behavior

Unlike persuasion or education campaigns that rely on information alone, social marketing insists on systematic planning, deep audience insight, and rigorous evaluation. It prioritizes concrete behaviors—accepting, rejecting, modifying, or quitting actions—and tailors interventions through segmentation and targeting. Gloucester’s “Hope Not Handcuffs” initiative exemplifies this approach, where addicts were offered treatment instead of arrest. That tangible exchange—freedom from jail in return for agreeing to seek treatment—reframed enforcement into empathy and saved lives.

A Systematic, Evidence-Based Model

The book’s ten-step strategic planning model gives you a disciplined template. You first define purpose, focus, and background; then analyze your situation (SWOT), select audiences, set objectives, identify insights, and position your offering. Next, you design the marketing mix (4Ps), plan evaluation, secure funding, and implement while planning for sustainability. This model is iterative—a spiral, not a checklist—so research and pilots lead to adaptation. The EPA’s WaterSense campaign used these steps to brand water-efficient products, building partnerships that saved trillions of gallons and billions in utility costs.

Research and Audience Orientation

Effective social marketing starts with research: exploring who you’re helping, what barriers they face, and what benefits they value. Mixed methods—focus groups, interviews, surveys, and small-scale pilots—let you hear the audience’s voice. As the PSI Uganda reproductive health campaign showed, human-centered design uncovers subtle motivators (like fear of judgment at clinics) and spawns culturally specific solutions (vouchers, peer educators, and redesigned spaces). The mantra is: start with the decision you need to make, and gather just enough data to inform it.

Integrating Theory and Human Insight

Lee and Kotler combine psychology, sociology, and design thinking to explain why people act. Frameworks like the Health Belief Model, Theory of Planned Behavior, and Diffusion of Innovations guide choices. For instance, if readiness to change is low, you focus on raising self-efficacy and reducing barriers, while if norms are the challenge, you use visible community signals (like compost bin decals or Playful City awards). The best programs—such as the truth® anti-tobacco campaign—blend cognitive, social, and environmental theory to move people toward consistent new habits.

The Moral Imperative

Social marketing is more than technical craft—it’s an ethical commitment. Practitioners carry responsibility for persuasion in the public interest. That means testing for unintended effects, safeguarding privacy, and ensuring that incentives or partnerships don’t exploit vulnerable populations. Ethical reflection runs throughout the book: whether to accept corporate funding, how to prevent stigma, and how to ensure that interventions—especially monetary incentives or public shaming—do more good than harm.

In sum, this discipline is both art and architecture. You integrate data, empathy, and design to engineer environments where good behaviors become easy, normal, and rewarding. Whether you’re running a global vaccination program or a neighborhood composting project, social marketing gives you a roadmap—from defining the problem to delivering scalable, ethical impact. This synthesis of marketing science, behavioral theory, and moral purpose is what makes it one of the most practical frameworks for solving “wicked problems” in modern society.

Every social marketing plan begins with focus. You cannot help everyone or solve every facet of a problem, so you clarify purpose, define focus, and analyze context. This foundational step frames the scope of your campaign and identifies where your efforts can realistically make a measurable difference.

Clarifying Purpose and Focus

Purpose expresses the broad social value—reducing drunk driving, increasing recycling, or boosting vaccination. Focus narrows that into an actionable slice of the issue. For example, the CDC’s Zika response identified its purpose as reducing birth defects, then focused on helping pregnant women and partners practice four protective behaviors: covering, dumping standing water, using repellent, and safe sex. The clear focus determined audience, message, and resources.

Analyzing the Situation

A situation analysis scans internal strengths, weaknesses, external opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Internally, assess capacity—funding, staff, partnerships. Externally, look at cultural, demographic, and technological trends. The “macroenvironment” might include economic slowdowns, new laws, or shifting public sentiment. The Zika team leveraged existing local partnerships but faced distrust of federal agencies; their SWOT revealed both what to amplify and what to fix.

From Analysis to Action

This groundwork shapes behavior objectives later, prevents wasted effort, and builds credibility with funders. It answers: why this issue, why now, who can we reach, and how will we know? (Note: skipping Step 1–2 often leads to vague problems and unrealistic goals.) By grounding every choice in situational evidence, you align early strategic intent with later measurable outcomes—creating the conditions for success before a single pledge card, post, or product appears.

Investing time upfront pays dividends later. When Gloucester PD redefined opioid policing as treatment access, it demonstrated this rigor: focus (addicts seeking help, not drug dealers), SWOT (police trust vs. medical system limitations), and situational insight (high recidivism and social stigma). The result: a defensible, fundable, and replicable model of compassionate behavioral intervention.

Your audience determines whether your idea survives contact with reality. Social marketing requires deep empathy and segmentation—identifying distinct groups who share similar barriers, motivations, and capacities—and designing an exchange each finds worthwhile.

Segmenting and Selecting Priority Audiences

Segmentation can be demographic (age, income), psychographic (values, lifestyles), or behavioral (readiness to act). Ed Maibach emphasizes that picking the right audience is the highest-leverage decision. Use Andreasen’s nine factors—size, reachability, readiness, and organizational capacity—to prioritize. And remember midstream and upstream audiences: sometimes you must target teachers, journalists, or policymakers rather than consumers. The Climate Matters project successfully focused on meteorologists as trusted influencers, proving influence begins where leverage lies.

Understanding Barriers, Benefits, and Competition

Audience insight arises from five lenses: perceived barriers, desired benefits, motivators, competition, and influential others. Shore Friendly discovered that shoreline owners feared erosion more than regulation; firefighters cared about team camaraderie over fitness itself. Waste Not Want Not found that families wanted quick recipes, not guilt about leftovers. You build offers that tip perceived value in the audience’s favor—reducing cost, raising benefits, and making competition (apathy or habit) less appealing.

Research Methods and Co‑design

Effective insight gathering mixes qualitative depth and quantitative prioritization—focus groups, codesign workshops, surveys, and pilots. The PSI Uganda Human‑Centered Design project exemplifies this: by listening closely to why youth avoided clinics, they created vouchers and peer educators that shifted perceived costs from fear to convenience. (Design principle: you cannot solve someone else’s problem until you have walked in their shoes.)

This step ensures you aren’t selling what people don’t want. Instead, you redesign the offer so they voluntarily exchange behavior for real value—ease, pride, safety, status, or belonging—anchoring your entire program on their lived experience.

After knowing the audience, you must define what you want them to do and decide how you want them to see your offering. Objectives make success measurable; positioning makes it memorable.

Setting SMART Objectives

Behavior objectives describe exactly what action you want people to take, while knowledge and belief objectives address gaps that enable it. Doug McKenzie‑Mohr advises focusing on simple, divisible behaviors (“designate a sober skipper”) and setting SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time‑bound. Pilots help you calibrate realism before rolling out and connect goals to evaluation criteria.

Positioning the Desired Behavior

Positioning is the perception you want in the audience’s mind—how the behavior feels compared to alternatives. You articulate it through a simple internal statement: “We want [audience] to see [behavior] as [benefits].” Five strategies guide this: focusing on behavior itself, removing barriers, highlighting benefits, contrasting with competition, or repositioning an existing norm. Road Crew in Wisconsin positioned sober driving as more fun than drunk driving; Seattle’s police redefined recruits from “warriors” to “guardians.”

Aligning 4Ps to Positioning

Once positioned, your entire marketing mix must reinforce that view. If you position a senior fitness class as “safe and fun,” you ensure certified instructors (product), affordable pricing and trial coupons (price), local centers (place), and relatable imagery (promotion). Authenticity is your ethical guardrail—promise only what you can deliver. DADS (Divine Alternatives for Dads Services) built its “hopeful, dignified help” positioning into services, staffing, and tone, strengthening both credibility and uptake.

Positioning isn’t decoration—it’s direction. It tells your audience who you are and tells your team what to build, ensuring every decision reinforces a single, motivating idea.

The 4Ps translate strategy into action, turning insights and positioning into experiences people actually encounter.

Product: Designing for Use and Meaning

Think of the product in three layers: core benefit (what people really want), actual product (what delivers it), and augmented product (extras that support adoption). The Lucky Iron Fish succeeded because it combined tangible utility with cultural symbolism—a fish that represented well-being in Cambodian homes. Text4baby succeeded by adding free SMS delivery (augmentation) to core health education. Use design thinking to iterate with real users, as PATH’s Safe Water Project did to refine usability and aesthetics.

Price: Changing the Cost Equation

Price includes all costs—money, time, effort, embarrassment. You can raise benefits, lower costs, or increase costs of competing behaviors. Norway’s refundable bottle deposit increased recycling to 90%; Fair‑Play Hockey’s nonmonetary “sportsmanship points” reduced penalties. Combine incentives with ethics—avoid manipulating vulnerable groups or creating stigma. Remember that rewards can bootstrap habits if they transition to intrinsic motivation.

Place: Where and When the Action Happens

Make access convenient and pleasant. SmileMobile dental vans bring services to kids; vote‑by‑mail brings democracy to living rooms. Little shifts in place—like sunscreen dispensers at beaches or pill‑testing booths in nightclubs—remove friction and multiply results. Social franchising, as PSI’s Greenstar clinics show, expands trusted access while maintaining quality.

Promotion: Crafting Messages and Messengers

Promotion gives voice to your offer. Use creative briefs to align teams around audience insights, communication objectives, and proof points. Tailor messages to the stage of change, mix emotional storytelling with clear calls to action, and select credible messengers—peers, local heroes, professionals. The Meth Project used real testimonials; Preventable in British Columbia placed subtle ambient cues at exact decision moments (“Have a word with yourself”).

Each P must function together as a system. When they do, your audience perceives your offer as obvious, easy, and desirable—a product they would choose again.

Choosing the right channel is strategic, not decorative. Channels determine who sees your message, how often, and in what context. The authors outline eight factors: objectives, required reach, audience media habits, timing (especially at the decision moment), integration across messages, message complexity, crisis needs, and budget.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

IMC ensures that every touchpoint—TV, poster, social feed, brochure—shares consistent tone, facts, and calls to action. “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” worked across all media because every channel reinforced the same identity and emotional theme. Consistency builds memory and trust.

Channel Match and Timing

Different channels serve different functions. Mass media provides reach; selective media targets niches; personal contact builds persuasion. Match message complexity to medium—simple prompts fit coasters and posters, while nuanced how‑to guidance needs workshops or digital modules. PedFlags placed flags and signage directly at crosswalks, increasing usage by 64%. Social media enables peer diffusion: in the Living the Example project, trained youth ambassadors shared authentic content that reduced marijuana intentions among peers.

Design your mix around where and when decisions happen, not where your office is comfortable advertising. Integration across physical, digital, and interpersonal touchpoints transforms messages into social momentum.

Evaluation ensures your work creates value, and ethics ensures it does no harm. Lee and Kotler weave both into every stage—from pilot to ROI calculation—to maintain accountability and trust.

Building Evaluation into the Plan

Design evaluation around a logic model: Inputs → Outputs → Outcomes → Impacts → ROI. Measure resources invested, activities conducted, behaviors changed, and larger societal results. The Road Crew example demonstrates the payoff: $870,000 spent, 140 crashes prevented, saving $32 million—an ROI exceeding 3,600%. Set purpose, methods, timing, and budget for evaluation early; funders appreciate transparent logic.

Choosing Appropriate Methods

Pick methods that match stakes and cost. Randomized controlled trials offer causality but require funding and ethics review; matched controls or observational studies work when randomization is impossible. Pilots like Canada’s Turn It Off anti‑idling test allow rapid learning before scaling. Observation of real behavior often beats self‑reported intent.

Ethics as Design and Review

Common dilemmas include funding from conflicting partners, stigmatizing messages, or intrusive incentives. Use professional codes (such as the AMA’s honesty, fairness, and transparency norms) and the “smell test”—would this tactic feel manipulative or coercive to those affected? Pilot ethically questionable ideas in small controlled environments and monitor unintended outcomes. Being transparent with the public and funders builds legitimacy and long‑term support.

Ethical reflection and empirical rigor reinforce one another: testing prevents harm and builds credibility, while moral clarity keeps effectiveness aligned with justice. Together, they make social marketing both trustworthy and transformative.

Execution determines whether a brilliant plan lives or dies. Implementation planning turns strategy into concrete activities, responsibilities, and timelines, while sustainability tactics keep behaviors alive after campaigns end.

From Plan to Action

An implementation plan lists actions, assigns roles, sets dates, links costs to deliverables, and provides checkpoints. Tools like Gantt charts and phased rollouts (by geography, audience, or channel) reduce risk. The “Rapid Results” 100‑day sprint model generates quick wins that build morale. Include sustainability tactics—follow-up prompts, recognition, infrastructure changes—from the outset.

Budgeting and Funding

Budgets should derive from objectives and tasks, not arbitrary limits. Use the objective‑and‑task method: define goals, list activities, estimate costs. Calculate cost‑per‑behavior and projected ROI to justify investment. Seek funding alignment—governments seek replicability, foundations value impact, corporations desire brand congruence. Always test corporate partnerships for authenticity and ethical fit. The Road Crew’s transparent ROI narrative turned local experiments into a funded statewide campaign.

Sustaining Behaviors

Sustainability relies on cues, commitments, and norms. Prompts like “Change Your Clock, Change Your Battery” link actions to existing routines. Public pledges and recognition create self‑consistency (e.g., Allstate’s teen driver pledges). Visible markers—yard signs, decals, city recognitions—help diffusion by normalizing new behaviors. Embedding cues into public infrastructure (restroom reminders, utility bill inserts) ensures ongoing reinforcement at little cost.

When implementation, budgeting, and sustaining tactics work together, programs become living systems—adaptive, financed, and socially anchored, capable of enduring beyond the initial campaign window.