Social marketing is the use of marketing principles and techniques to develop and promote socially beneficial programs, behaviors, and other products. In public health, social marketing has shown great promise as a strategic planning process for developing behavior change interventions and improving service delivery. This entry describes social marketing's distinctive features, steps, and major challenges.

Social Marketing's Distinctive Features

Social marketing is a data-driven strategic planning process that is characterized by its reliance on marketing's conceptual framework to bring about voluntary behavior change. The most distinctive features are a commitment to create satisfying exchanges, the use of the marketing mix to design interventions, segmentation of the target populations, and a data-based consumer orientation.

Satisfying Exchanges

Marketers believe people act largely out of selfinterest, searching for ways to optimize the ...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles