Converting research findings into practical applications is an important concept to education but one that has been overlooked by the educational research community until recently. While a model for turning concepts into practical applications has been developed and field tested for human service practitioners, the model has not been directly applied in education. It appears that social science researchers have not put the resources into disseminating their research that they have put into the research effort itself. A recently proposed solution is "social marketing," a conceptual system for thinking through the change process which places a high priority on identifying the needs, perceptions, preferences, reference groups, and behavioral patterns of audiences, and tailoring innovations to best suit audience characteristics. This paper describes an application of social marketing concepts to the education dissemination process, outlining the tasks performed during the needs assessment phase, the research and development phase, the dissemination phase, and the utilization profit phase. A comparison between business and industrial marketing and social marketing is drawn and further analyzed within the framework of the four basic component marketing fields: (1) product; (2) promotion; (3) place; and (4) price. It is noted that the model has been field tested in a social organizational setting with results that warrant further study in education. (13 references) (GL)