How to use the tool

The tool has been developed to be as intuitive to use as possible and will allow you to quickly and easily see a snapshot of where the different segments live in your area. This mapping has been designed to be used alongside, not instead of, your own knowledge, insights and social marketing research. Run your own secondary and primary research around your target audiences to identify particular barriers and motivators to behaviour change. This will enable you to implement effective communications campaigns for your local audiences.

The segmentation has been designed for communications campaign planning and guidance around alcohol. It doesn't just show where priority audiences live, it also looks at factors like responsiveness to direct marketing and the media. It shouldn't be used to guide policy planning or commissioning. Similarly, it can't be used for social marketing activity into different health issues.

What's in the tool?

The tool has four core elements:

1. Pen Portraits of the social marketing drinking segments

These provide a brief description of the types of people in each segment in terms of their age, affluence, drinking behaviour and hospital admissions - see box below for details. Within the pen portraits there are index figures next to criteria such as hospital admissions, types of drink and income, which can be compared to the UK average.

These index figures enable different criteria to be compared to the UK average. The average, or base, is always 100. Therefore:

• An index of 100 indicates that this criteria is the same as the UK base for the audience being discussed
• An index of over 100 shows above average representation e.g. 140 shows that this variable is 40% above average
• An index of under 100 shows below average representation

2. Descriptive spreadsheet

This provides a more detailed breakdown of the population in each segment. It includes more detailed demographic information, media consumption and drinking behaviour.

3. Postcode directories

These are provided at PCT and national level. They contain all the postcodes in your PCT where people from different segments live. This information includes population and household counts. Use the directories to code up service users or campaign respondents, so that you evaluate your work more effectively. You can search to identify all of the postcodes that are in a particular segment or identify the segment of a particular postcode.

4. A3 Maps in pdf format

Print these to get a quick picture of where the segments are located in your PCT.