National Social Marketing Centre

The Research team at The NSMC helps organisations use research and insight to design effective, customer-centred, behaviour change programmes and strategies. 

With our expertise in practical social marketing and behaviour change, we work with in-house teams to help them manage live projects whilst developing and fine tuning their skills and confidence to:

• Clarify objectives and articulate behavioural goals
• Design research specifications to understand the motivators, barriers and needs of the target audience
• Use existing data and tools more effectively
• Segment audiences by behavioural and psychographic variables
• Commission and manage the right research agencies
• Analyse quantitative and qualitative data to generate insights
• Use insights to improve services and programmes and achieve behavioural outcomes
• Establish baselines and develop evaluation plans to capture learning and measure impact

We also work on research projects that develop and promote the practice of social marketing, enhance the effectiveness of behaviour change initiatives and share practical experiences. Current projects include:

• Creation of an online value for money tool to calculate cost-benefit for multifaceted behaviour change programmes
• Running ShowCase, the online case study database
• An organisational design study to stimulate new thinking around how best to organise, deploy and manage staff and resources, so that customer orientation and marketing principles become embedded across public and third sector organisations
• Development of a quality improvement framework to investigate the efficiency of the management processes associated with a behaviour change programme or project

To find out more about how we can help you with your research needs, please contact Dr Rowena Merritt at r.merritt@thensmc.com.