The HSC is a health promotion agency that promotes health and encourages healthy lifestyles.

To encourage and enable people to make healthier lifestyle choices, HSC draws on the experience and success of commercial marketing and communication techniques to plan, execute and evaluate its programmes. HSC uses the tried and tested approaches of the commercial sector to improve people's health. This approach is used world wide and is known as social marketing.

This approach is consumer-oriented, responding to individual needs and wants. It is systematic, staged, underpinned by academic and consumer research, and is directly geared to achieving specific and measurable health goals over the short, medium and long-term.

Core principles of the HSC’s approach:

	All strategies begin with the key audience.
	Consumer behaviour is the bottom line.
	Programmes must be cost effective.
	Interventions involve a number of ‘p’s - price, product, place, promotion, people, and publics are examples.
	Market research is essential for designing, pretesting, and evaluating social marketing initiatives.
	It draws on transaction/exchange theory.
	Markets are carefully segmented.
	It acknowledges the competitive environment.

Visit www.socialmarketing.co.nz for more information on HSC’s approach.