ABSTRACT
In social marketing, research is a strategic tool: it guides the planning process and helps maintain the creative, competitive, collective and client orientations. Social marketers, like their commercial cousins, adopt a pragmatic mix of methodologies that they feel will best aid decision making and help them get a better understanding of what makes people do what they do. The subtlety and flexibility of qualitative methods also help when researching intense or potentially threatening issues such as sexual health or life-threatening illness. Social marketers then will do all sorts of research at every juncture of the social marketing planning process. All too often with behaviour change, however, the focus is on testing the intervention, which pushes things towards a more positivist research approach. Typically, participatory research involves a process of learning and reflection, followed by action, and then by more learning and reflection, and so on.
