Framing Social Marketing Interventions to Better Engage and Motivate Target Audiences

A critical component of social marketing is to get into the hearts and minds of the target audience and find a way to transmit messages that will be attended to, remembered and acted upon. To do so, social marketers have to frame both the problem they seek to address and the solutions they propose in ways that connect with the deeply held values of their target audiences. By incorporating strategic framing into the traditional social marketing process (formative research, audience segmentation, pretesting and evaluation), organizers can increase the likelihood that their campaigns will engage and motivate their target audiences to take action.

In our session, we will show that connecting public health issues with the deeply held values of the target audience, and reflecting those values in the social marketing intervention (product, price, place and promotion), can increase the likelihood of the adoption of sustainable behaviors. We will describe how research can identify the core values that relate most directly to the public health behavior being addressed, and describe how pretesting can identify whether the designed intervention is accurately connecting with the values of the target audience.

We will share tools and techniques attendees can use in their daily work, and we will use case studies and evaluation data to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in campaigns that increased HIV testing and test retrieval, established mental health as a critical component of overall wellness, and promoted contraceptive use while reducing binge drinking among college women.