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 appreciate the broad applicability of marketing ideas beyond commercial products and services. In the same way that marketing has assumed strong importance in the operations of corporations such as Toyota, Google, and Netflix, social marketing has given shape to many of the efforts of large nonprofit organizations and agencies, such as the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What types of social problems is the social marketing approach applied to? In England, the government's National Social Marketing Centre created 10 demonstration sites to implement and evaluate campaigns about smoking cessation, men's lifestyle changes, diabetes control, alcohol use, and advantages of breast-feeding. In Canada, the province of Alberta has applied the social marketing model to a range of cancer prevention and cancer screening campaigns that are distinguished for their comprehensive approach to the establishment of need, target audience preferences, positioning and branding of messages, creative development, and an integrated approach to learning within and across campaigns so that health services in the province as a whole can benefit, as described by Jennifer Dooley, Sandra C. Jones, and Kendra Desmarais.

A hallmark of social marketing is comprehensiveness in the approach to behavior change. This means that—borrowing again from marketing sciences—the campaign or message is just one piece of all that is done in a social marketing effort. The marketing truism that “the customer is king” is taken to heart so that “customer” wants, needs, preferences, and behavioral patterns guide the development of services and products, the production and distribution of those services and products, and continual process improvements, just as a commercial products corporation would do. This attention to detail means that little is left to chance or guess in a social marketing approach when done well. For commercial marketing is anything but haphazard. It is about control of consumer attention, control of image and message, and control of services and products to match consumer expectations and demand. Perhaps the most distinctive facet of the social marketing approach is the attention to the consumer that it borrows from marketing science. Because they are premised on a detailed understanding of the wants and felt needs of the target audience, the content of “offers” made to the target audience can seem to be less about the change objective (whether mammography screening or increased condom use) and more about the expressed interests of the target audience (responsibility and being there for your grandchildren, or youth and excitement). The role of the marketer is to “sell” the former via the latter.

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