Social marketing depends on a deep understanding of the consumer. In this phase, you will research exactly who your target audience is, and what makes different consumer groups, or "segments," alike and different from one another.
This research is important, because you will need to approach different consumer groups in different ways to be successful. If you do social marketing for sanitation, for example, you will not be very successful if you only have one standard product, at one given price, available only at one place that is promoted in only one way (e.g., through radio campaigns). You will need to segment your consumers into different groups you want to target, because those groups will have different needs and priorities in regard to sanitation. With market research, you aim to get inside the consumers' heads, understanding what they want in exchange for what your program wants them to do, and what they struggle with in order to engage in that behavior. The objective of the research is to determine the following:
(i) how to cluster your target audience into useful segments,
(ii) which target audience segments are most ready to change their behavior, and
(iii) what they want or need most in order to do that.