Executive Summary

Alcohol-related harm costs the NHS around £2.7 billion each year and has social and health consequences for drinkers and their families. The Department of Health (DH) is committed to reducing the rise of alcohol-related hospital admissions, which are currently increasing at a rate of around 73,000 per year. Increasing and higher risk drinking is a national problem that needs to be addressed by local, regional and national action. Social marketing has been identified as one of the high-impact changes needed to reduce alcohol-related hospital admissions and de-normalise increasing and higher risk drinking behaviour.

DH's alcohol social marketing strategy began in 2007 and was showcased by the National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC) as World Class Practice in March 2009. The Know Your Limits (KYL) national alcohol campaign launched in 2006. The Units campaign, part of KYL, was rolled out by DH in 2008 to raise the public's awareness of units. Building on this, the Alcohol Effects campaign was launched in February 2010, to raise awareness of the unseen damage caused by increasing and higher risk drinking.

It is a fully integrated campaign that uses a variety of channels to take increasing and higher risk drinkers on a journey from clearly and unequivocally identifying themselves as the campaign target, through re-appraising their own drinking habits, and into a space where they not only believe alcohol reduction is achievable but they start their own sustained attempt to drink less. National campaign activity reinforces the messages and should be complimented by social marketing activity at a local level.

Social marketing uses a range of techniques and approaches, commonly known as a 'marketing mix', to help change people's behaviour in a clearly defined and positive way. A social marketing approach can be used to help achieve, and sustain, behaviour change with a target audience. Social marketing activity is very targeted, breaking audiences down into segments. It considers all of the possible influences that affect the way each segment behaves so that it can identify the best ways to help change this behaviour. The main aims of alcohol social marketing are to get people who are drinking at increasing and higher risk levels to reduce their consumption and to provide the necessary support and information to help them do so.

The NSMC has identified eight National Benchmark Criteria that can be used as a best practice checklist: Customer orientation; Insight; Behavioural goals; Segmentation; Exchange; Competition; Methods mix; and Theory. The NSMC Total Process Planning model identifies five stages of a social marketing project:

• Scope: Clear, actionable and measurable behaviour goals are developed, by looking at existing research and expert views on increasing and higher risk drinking. The different audience segments that a social marketing project will target are identified
• Develop: Activities that are likely to bring about behavioural change are developed and tested
• Implement: Social marketing activity is delivered to the target audiences. Activity is monitored and refined if necessary
• Evaluate: Activity is evaluated to measure whether objectives and KPIs have been met
• Follow-up: Findings are shared so all Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) can develop consistent and successful systems for behavioural change and alcohol related harm. KPIs are reviewed against national criteria

Audience segmentation is an essential part of social marketing. The DH social marketing segmentation tool identifies priority audiences by defining different segments and providing information about their characteristics. PCTs can use the tool, alongside their own knowledge, insights and research, to work out where key target audiences live in their area. The tool uses HealthACORN data, the 2006/7 alcohol attributable hospital admissions data from NWPHO and TGI (2009) data.

All social marketing activity needs to be evaluated at some level to identify how relevant, effective and efficient it is in meeting objectives. The DH evaluation tool provides the principles behind evaluation and the four keys steps to putting it into practice.

The benefits of evaluation include: more effective marketing interventions; more experimentation; improved efficiency by investing in the things that work best; better informed budgeting processes; more accurate forecasting of outcomes; more effective management of expectations about results; increased consumer knowledge and insight; and enhanced credibility of social marketing