Social Marketing

I am often asked what exactly do I mean by Social Marketing? Now, obviously this question does not come from people who are already practitioners of social marketing, but from those who have no idea of what social marketing is. Or even, who believe that social marketing is social media marketing or just a fancy name for regular marketing at one end of the spectrum to social work at the other end!

The text-book answer would of course involve referring to the seminal work “Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change” by Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman in the Journal of Marketing in 1971, where the term “social marketing” first showed up. They asked:

 “Can marketing concepts and techniques be effectively applied to the promotion of social objectives such as brotherhood, safe driving, and family planning?”

In the 1971 article, Kotler and Zaltman defined social marketing as the design, implementation and control of programs calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas and involving considerations of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution and marketing research.

By 2002, the discipline had matured enough to revise the definition to “the use of marketing principles and techniques to influence a target audience to voluntarily accept, reject, modify or abandon a behavior for the benefit of individuals, groups or society as a whole. (Kotler, Roberto, Lee, 2002)

This revision has brought it closer to what I believe is the core of social marketing: it is all about behavior change.

So how is it different from the Coca-Cola company’s exhortation to me to drink Coca-Cola? Well, the well-thought out and perfectly executed marketing campaigns that we see thanks to the many commercial marketers are generally aimed at inducing brand preference and not true behavior change. Also, the goal of these campaigns is commercial profit for the marketer; with no regard to what may or may not be good for the client. The goal of social marketing is generally agnostic towards profits. What they are working towards is the adoption of desired behaviors and/ or the rejection of undesirable behaviors. Thus the objective is to benefit society by the promotion of desirable behaviors.

Having said that, some key similarities exist between social and commercial marketing. Both rely on a strong customer/ client orientation. Market research is used to identify relevant cues for altering behavior or preferences; audiences are segmented; target market selected and a complete marketing campaign designed addressing the 4Ps: product, price, promotion and place. Both social and commercial marketing use monitoring and evaluation to review, fine tune and improve performance.

The key ingredient is, of course, the exchange theory which suggests that all transactions, whether social or commercial, involve voluntary exchange of resources. We shall explore this in depth in another post.