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Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good.[1] Social marketing can be applied to promote merit goods, or to make a society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote society's well being as a whole. For example, this may include asking people not to smoke in public areas, asking them to use seat belts, or prompting to make them follow speed limits.
Although "social marketing" is sometimes seen only as using standard commercial marketing practices to achieve non-commercial goals, this is an over-simplification.
The primary aim of social marketing is "social good", while in "commercial marketing" the aim is primarily "financial". This does not mean that commercial marketers can not contribute to achievement of social good.
Increasingly, social marketing is being described as having "two parents"—a "social parent" = social sciences and social policy, and a "marketing parent" = commercial and public sector marketing approaches.
Beginning in the 1950s when Weibe asked "Why can’t you sell brotherhood and rational thinking like you can sell soap?”, it has in the last two decades matured into a much more integrative and inclusive discipline that draws on the full range of social sciences and social policy approaches as well as marketing.
Shaklee Coorporation, who pioneered social marketing over 50 years ago, has trademarked the term "Social Marketing."[2]
Social marketing must not be confused with social media marketing.
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Health promotion campaigns in the late 1980s began applying social marketing in practice. Notable early developments took place in Australia. These included the Victoria Cancer Council developing its anti-tobacco campaign "Quit" (1988), and "SunSmart" (1988), its campaign against skin cancer which had the slogan Slip! Slop! Slap!.[3]
WorkSafe Victoria, a state-run Occupational Health and Safety organization in Australia has used social marketing as a driver in its attempts to reduce the social and human impact of workplace safety failings. In 2006, it ran "Homecomings", a popular campaign that was later adopted in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia, and named the 2007 Australian Marketing Institute Marketing Program of the Year[4]
DanceSafe followed the ideas of social marketing in its communication practices.
On a wider front, by 2007, Government in the United Kingdom announced the development of its first social marketing strategy for all aspects of health.[5]
Two other public health applications include the CDC's CDCynergy training and software application,[6] and SMART (Social Marketing and Assessment Response Tool).[7]
Social marketing theory and practice has been progressed in several countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and in the latter a number of key Government policy papers have adopted a strategic social marketing approach. Publications such as "Choosing Health" in 2004,[5] "It's our health!" in 2006; and "Health Challenge England" in 2006, all represent steps to achieve both a strategic and operational use of social marketing. In India, AIDS controlling programs are largely using social marketing and social workers are largely working for it. Most of the social workers are professionally trained for this particular task.
In the U.S. the Washington D.C. based organization "Men Can Stop Rape" Anti-Rape Movement have successfully used social marketing in anti-rape posters and other media targeting a rape-prevention message at boys and young men. [8]
A variation of social marketing has emerged as a systematic way to foster more sustainable behavior. Referred to as Community-Based Social Marketing (CBSM) by Canadian environmental psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr, CBSM strives to change the behavior of communities to reduce their impact on the environment [9] Realizing that simply providing information is usually not sufficient to initiate behavior change, CBSM uses tools and findings from social psychology to discover the perceived barriers to behavior change and ways of overcoming these barriers. Among the tools and techniques used by CBSM are focus groups and surveys (to discover barriers) and commitments, prompts, social norms, social diffusion, feedback and incentives (to change behavior). The tools of CBSM have been used to foster sustainable behavior in many areas, including energy conservation [10], environmental regulation [11] and recycling [12]
Social marketing uses the benefits and of doing social good to secure and maintain customer engagement. In social marketing the distinguishing feature is therefore its "primary focus on social good, and it is not a secondary outcome. Not all public sector and not-for-profit marketing is social marketing.
Public sector bodies can use standard marketing approaches to improve the promotion of their relevant services and organizational aims. This can be very important, but should not be confused with social marketing where the focus is on achieving specific behavioral goals with specific audiences in relation to different topics relevant to social good (e.g.: health, sustainability, recycling, etc.). For example, a 3-month marketing campaign to encourage people to get a H1N1 vaccine is more tactical in nature and should not be considered social marketing. Whereas a campaign that promotes and reminds people to get regular check-ups and all of their vaccinations when they're supposed to encourages a long-term behavior change that benefits society. It can therefore be considered social marketing.
As the dividing lines are rarely clear it is important not to confuse social marketing with commercial marketing.
A commercial marketer selling a product may only seek to influence a buyer to make a product purchase.
Social marketers, dealing with goals such as reducing cigarette smoking or encouraging condom use, have more difficult goals: to make potentially difficult and long-term behavioral change in target populations.
It is sometimes felt that social marketing is restricted to a particular spectrum of client—the non-profit organization, the health services group, the government agency.
These often are the clients of social marketing agencies, but the goal of inducing social change is not restricted to governmental or non-profit charitable organizations; it may be argued that corporate public relations efforts such as funding for the arts are an example of social marketing.
Social marketing should not be confused with the Societal Marketing Concept which was a forerunner of sustainable marketing in integrating issues of social responsibility into commercial marketing strategies. In contrast to that, social marketing uses commercial marketing theories, tools and techniques to social issues.
Social marketing applies a "customer oriented" approach and uses the concepts and tools used by commercial marketers in pursuit of social goals like Anti-Smoking-Campaigns or fund raising for NGOs.
In 2006, Jupitermedia announced its "Social Marketing" service,[13] with which it aims to enable website owners to profit from social media. Despite protests from the social marketing communities over the hijacking of the term, Jupiter decided to stick with the name.[14] However, Jupiter's approach is more correctly (and commonly) referred to as social media optimization. Another similar, but different marketing approach is Holistic Marketing which also aims to benefit society, but through aligning the values and ethics of employees and owners of a company with their marketing goals, regardless of the product being marketed.
Social marketing began as a formal discipline in 1971, with the publication of "Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change" in the Journal of Marketing by marketing experts Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman.[15] However, earlier, social marketing had already been used as a tool for birth control in India, where a persuasion-based approach was favored over a legislative approach.[16]
Craig Lefebvre and June Flora introduced social marketing to the public health community in 1988,[17] where it has been most widely used and explored. They noted that there was a need for "large scale, broad-based, behavior change focused programs" to improve public health (the community wide prevention of cardiovascular diseases in their respective projects), and outlined eight essential components of social marketing that still hold today. They are:
Speaking of what they termed "social change campaigns", Kotler and Ned Roberto introduced the subject by writing, "A social change campaign is an organized effort conducted by one group (the change agent) which attempts to persuade others (the target adopters) to accept, modify, or abandon certain ideas, attitudes, practices or behavior." Their 1989 text was updated in 2002 by Philip Kotler, Ned Roberto and Nancy Lee.[19] In 2005, University of Stirling was the first university to open a dedicated research institute to Social Marketing,[20] while in 2007, Middlesex University became the first university to offer a specialized postgraduate programme in Health & Social Marketing.[21]
In recent years there has been an important development to distinguish between "strategic social marketing" and "operational social marketing".
Much of the literature and case examples focus on operational social marketing, using it to achieve specific behavioral goals in relation to different audiences and topics. However there has been increasing efforts to ensure social marketing goes "upstream" and is used much more strategically to inform both "policy formulation" and "strategy development".
Here the focus is less on specific audience and topic work but uses strong customer understanding and insight to inform and guide effective policy and strategy development.