Social marketing aims to effect positive social change through advertising campaigns, such as promoting healthy choices or safe sex practices. It differs from commercial marketing, and uses the marketing mix to identify target audiences and develop effective campaigns. Long-term social change occurs when policies are defined to correspond with behavioral change. The media is a highly effective tool for reaching target audiences and policymakers.
Social marketing is the use of advertising practices to effect good social change. Some examples include advertising campaigns designed to get people to stop smoking or marketing ads that encourage people to eat healthier foods. This type of marketing differs from commercial marketing in that it aims at positive social change whereas commercial marketing aims at increasing financial benefit.
Social marketing combines social policies and marketing practices to achieve defined social behavioral goals within a target audience. This use of marketing developed in the 1970s when two business advertisers, Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman, began using traditional marketing tools to sell behavioral concepts and practices rather than products. Trade marketing tries to find out what problems consumers might have and then offers those products in ways that meet perceived needs. Social marketing researches what problems the public or community may have and then seeks to determine what behavioral changes would be needed to remedy that problem. Health promotion is one of the biggest industries that uses this type of marketing, encouraging positive health choices among consumers without offering a specific product. An example of a social marketing campaign that promotes healthy choices would be the advertising campaigns across Africa that encourage safe sex practices to stop the spread of AIDS.
The main goal of social marketing is usually to create positive social change; for example, not all non-profit marketing is necessarily considered social. Nonprofit marketing can have alternative goals outside of “good” social change, such as electing a political candidate or raising money for specific charities. This type of marketing may incorporate some social messages that promote positive social change, such as adapting to environmentally friendly energy sources or raising awareness of the causes of cancer, but these messages may not form the main focus of the marketing campaign and therefore , would not be considered social marketing.
Trade marketing uses the marketing mix to establish a target audience and develop an effective campaign to reach that audience. This mix consists of identifying the so-called four Ps of marketing: product, price, location and promotion. Social marketing typically operates within the same parameters, putting behavioral changes in place of the product. A social marketer will usually first identify the behavior that needs to change within the target audience. Next, the price an individual pays for changing their behavior is established, such as the potential for social embarrassment. The marketer identified which venues would be appropriate to advertise the need for this new type of behavior and finally decided which promotional materials they could use to convince consumers to switch.
Social marketing typically works best when the price of behavioral changes is outweighed by the benefits the target audience receives. New policies and social attitudes often compete with existing social attitudes, creating a behavioral shift that social marketers must account for when designing their marketing campaigns. Long-term social change usually occurs when policies are defined that correspond to the behavioral change affected or recommended. One highly effective tool that social marketers use to reach their target audiences is the media. According to agenda-setting theory, the media can influence both the public agenda and the policy agenda by convincing target audiences to switch to recommended good behavior and policymakers to enact new laws that reinforce that behavior.
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