Alcohol education - a social marketing approach
Our social change team helped NHS Halton and St. Helens to deliver a social marketing programme to support its new alcohol screening and education service, known as CASES (Community Alcohol Screening and Education Service).
The key behavioural goals of this end-to-end social marketing project were to lower high levels of alcohol misuse and to increase levels of alcohol education across designated Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) wards, thus driving sustainable behaviour change around alcohol consumption.
Through a combination of desk-based research and targeted questionnaires, we identified two educational needs to support behaviour change: encouraging safer drinking levels and warning about the long-term health effects of sustained drinking above recommended limits. Our social change team used geo-demographic data to segment three specific target audiences - young adults (18-25s), adults (26-50) and older citizens (51+) - and carried out a series of focus groups to gain further insight.
From this data, ICE's social marketing specialists produced a wide range of alcohol awareness building campaign materials to reinforce CASES as a sustainable 'brand name' and pre-tested the concepts before they went live.
We then developed a bespoke website and used interactive touch screen kiosks to engage with hard-to-reach communities. Our social change team also ran a series of community outreach events, supported by promotional giveaways such as free drinks diaries, non-alcoholic cocktails and alcohol calorie counters. The result? Measurable behaviour change in target communities.
