My first experience as a marketer of the challenges of influencing behaviour... 

...was probably 20 years ago when I found myself cold-calling the Health Editor of Cosmopolitan to persuade her to write about my client's urinary incontinence products.

Fortunately a kind soul pointed me towards a job in development research communication and since then I've been replacing my fixation on finding a good headline pun, with a mission to understand: 

'What can marketing, on its best behaviour, offer development?'

By 2008, I was a newly qualified Chartered Marketer and part-time marketing lecturer, and frankly a bit of a pest to some of my lovely colleagues at the Institute of Development Studies about what marketing could do for them. Just as I was ordering my 'marketing misfit' business cards...

Brighton became the centre of the Social Marketing world (for two days)

The first World Social Marketing Conference came to town and I discovered a HUGE community of brilliant friendly people who knew their 7 Ps from their Porter's Five Forces and were committed to social change. By the time of the second conference, I was an independent consultant, hopelessly devoted to social marketing and getting better acquainted with evaluation.

Aren't we (nearly) always evaluating behaviour change?

I spend as much time in my work now evaluating change as I do trying to make it happen. But I'm still a social marketer first, evaluator second. At some point in every assignment I'll reach into my handbag for a behaviour change theory or marketing tool that I think will bring a useful perspective to our work. Some of my favourites can be found in Behaviour Change for Beginners.