Social Marketing

Social marketing is a process of designing, implementing, and controlling programs to increase the acceptability of a prosocial behavior among population segments of consumers. This application of for-profit marketing principles to prosocial causes, as described by Philip Kotler and Eduardo Roberto in 1989, relies on (a) systematic targeting and audience segmentation through identification of certain demographic, situational, and behavioral characteristics to maximize the trade-off of message impacts and cost per individual contacted; (b) the use of consumer-based research and feedback from representative population segments about prototypical social products; and (c) management of a change program through evaluation.

Social marketing has become one of the most widely applied models of social change in the world as those of us who work for social betterment have come to ...