Jay M. Bernhardt on "Iterative by design"

There are different times when you may want to go back to different phases in your program as you learn more about your audience, as you learn more about the health problem that you’re working on, and so CDCynergy is designed to be iterative, so you can go back to different phases at different times as your program is implemented.

CDCynergy contains phases and steps. Each phase contains a number of steps but its not designed for you to necessarily go through all of them in order. You may find yourself going through different phases and different steps at different times as you’re implementing your program and it’s designed to allow you to do that. You can actually treat those steps as a checklist to make sure you have covered all the important pieces while you’re developing your program.

Social marketing programs actually do take a fair amount of time, but the amount of money that they cost to do really can vary. You can’t short change your program by rushing it into the field. You really do need to spend enough time doing the appropriate research, background, formative work, message testing and all these important steps that we talk about in CDCynergy. However the amount of money that it costs can really vary based on what your goals are and what your resources are. Some programs, those in particular that require buying quite a bit of media may be more expensive, but there are other ways to implement programs that can be effective for far less money.

Improving health often involves changing behaviors, but unfortunately changing behaviors is really hard. What we’ve learned in social marketing is that the best way to change behaviors is with our up front planning, so you’ll see on CDCynergy that a great deal of effort and time is spent in the up front strategic planning that goes into developing your programs, but we’ve found that if you devote enough energy to this up front work behavior change is possible.

Some people think social marketing is public service announcements or TV spots. Social Marketing is much more than that. You can use all different kind of communication channels, whether you’re using the internet, or comic books, or lay health advisors in the field, but one of the most important things to remember about social marketing is that the media and the messages don’t drive what you do, the audience drives what you do. And what you learn about the audience that you’re working with and the health problems you’re trying to address will help you make the decisions about whether you should be using the internet or whether you should be using people in the community or any number of other communication channels.