Social Marketing is a planned process for influencing change. Social Marketing is a modified term of conventional Product and Service Marketing. With its components of marketing and consumer research, advertising and promotion (including positioning, segmentation, creative strategy, message design and testing, media strategy and planning, and effective tracking), Social Marketing can play a central role in topics like health, environment, and other important issues.
In its most general sense, Social Marketing is a new way of thinking about some very old human endeavours. As long as there have been social systems, there have been attempts to inform, persuade, influence, motivate, to gain acceptance for new adherents to certain sets of ideas, to promote causes and to win over particular groups, to reinforce behaviour or to change it -- whether by favour, argument or force. Social Marketing has deep roots in religion, in politics, in education, and even, to a degree, in military strategy. It also has intellectual roots in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, communication theory and anthropology. Its practical roots stem from disciplines such as advertising, public relations and market research, as well as to the work and experience of social activists, advocacy groups and community organizers.
As Phil Kotler points out in his book Social Marketing - Strategies for Changing Public Behaviour, campaigns for social change are not a new phenomenon. They have been waged from time immemorial. In Ancient Greece and Rome, campaigns were launched to free slaves. In England during the Industrial Revolution, campaigns were mounted to abolish debtor prisons, grant voting rights to women, and to do away with child labour. Notable social reform campaigns in nineteenth-century America included the abolition, temperance, prohibition and suffragette movements, as well as a consumer movement to have governments regulate the quality of foods and drugs.
In recent times, campaigns have been launched in areas such as health promotion (e.g., anti-smoking, safety, drug abuse, drinking and driving, AIDS, nutrition, physical fitness, immunization, breast cancer screening, mental health, breast feeding, family planning), environment (e.g., safer water, clean air, energy conservation, preservation of national parks and forests), education (e.g., literacy, stay in school ), economy (e.g., boost job skills and training, attract investors, revitalize older cities), and other issues like family violence, human rights, and racism.
Social Marketing combines the best elements of the traditional approaches to social change in an integrated planning and action framework, and utilizes advances in communication technology and marketing skills. It uses marketing techniques to generate discussion and promote information, attitudes, values and behaviours. By doing so, it helps to create a climate conducive to social and behavioral change.
