Chapter 2: Introduction to IPC
 

How does IPC Program Development fit within PSI’s Social Marketing Framework?

The Social Marketing Process is a framework that highlights the overarching steps and activities PSI country programs go through when designing social marketing programs. The framework pictured here, developed by PSI, demonstrates the context in which social marketing development takes place and indicates how PSI's activities are linked to and build upon each other. PSI encourages the use of this framework to improve marketing plans and activities. The Social Marketing Process explains how effective social marketing is a process driven by evidence, and therefore the more programs are grounded in research and lessons learned, the more likely they are to be successful.

There are 9 steps to the PSI Social Marketing Process:

1. Assessing needs involves conducting literature reviews and epi pies (graphs that show the demographic and behavioral breakdown of a country's epidemic), with the purpose of choosing a target group and a target behavior. At this stage, a population is segmented by health need or risk in order to prioritize the groups with the greatest risk. Once this is done program planners should be able to state the goal and purpose sections of a logframe.
2. Assessing capacity is done simultaneously with assessing needs because the capacity of the organization is relevant to the choice of target group. One tool for assessing capacity is conducting a SWOT analysis.
3. Analyzing behavioral determinants involves analyzing segmentation tables, and other evidence which helps understand why some people in the target group adopts the desired behavior and why others don't. The key outcome at this stage is a choice of which behavioral determinants to focus on and some hypotheses on how the social marketing intervention can influence those determinants. Organizational capacity is relevant to this decision as well, so SWOT analysis may also be done at this stage.
4. Determining marketing mix involves developing a marketing plan including a situation analysis, decisions about marketing mix (4Ps), designing an M&E plan, and developing a marketing budget. This is a topline strategy for influencing behavior determinants with as many components of the marketing mix as possible.
5. During the step of Operationalizing the strategy, social marketers translate the topline strategy into specific communication, distribution, pricing and product action plans. This step may include writing creative briefs, a media plan, a distribution plan, price structure, positioning statement, and channel selection.
6. Implementing & monitoring involves two simultaneous processes; the execution of marketing activities and the collecting of data to monitor the marketing intervention. On the implementation side, this means selling products, conducting promotional events, organizing IPC sessions, broadcasting spots, etc. On the monitoring side, it means collecting sales data, exposure data , carrying out MAP and TRaC surveys, and tracking process indicators.
7. Evaluation of the marketing intervention for behavior change entails assessing behavioral impact through evaluation dashboard tables that incorporate exposure. Evidence from all the monitoring data can be useful in determining the success of the intervention. The key question is whether more people in the target group adopted the target behavior as a result of exposure to the elements of our marketing mix.
8. Evaluation of changes in the institution can be assessed through the PRISSM report, stakeholder analysis, and/or strategic sustainability plans. As a result of implementing and monitoring the intervention, has the capacity of the social marketing organization changed? Has the competitive position of the organization in the country changed?
9. Evaluation of health outcome is difficult to do and general only occurs after several rounds of the marketing cycle and some time has gone by. The key question is whether the health needs of the overall population have changed as a result of the social marketing program or due to other factors? Such evaluations are important when considering whether one should change the target group.

Consistent with most marketing or communication processes, it is a cyclical, iterative process with the results of the evaluation phase feeding back into the first step of assessing needs. This iterative process is demonstrated by the graphic below.

There are two cycles within the process: the program cycle and the marketing cycle. In the program cycle (steps 1-9), evaluations of the impact of marketing interventions, institutional evaluations, and health impact evaluations are fed back into a general needs assessment of the public health needs of the country. In the marketing cycle (steps 3-7), the evaluation of the effectiveness of the behavior change intervention is fed back into the process of analyzing the determinants of behavior.

The PSI marketing cycle is essentially the same as the P Process framework (and other communications processes) that provides the backbone for this manual as well as the steps for designing an IPC program. The chief difference between PSI's Social Marketing Process and a framework such as the P Process is that in social marketing, the knowledge of the target group - which should deepen with each revolution of the marketing cycle - is fed into a strategy which includes the 4 P's: promotion or communication, product strategies, pricing strategies, and place or distribution strategies. Since interpersonal communications is one of many channels of a communications or promotional strategy, it can use a traditional approach to the behavior change process such as the P Process.
 

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