The meaning, effectiveness and future of social marketing

Abstract

The unique feature of social marketing is that it takeslearning from the commercial sector and applies it to theresolution of social and health problems. This idea datesback to 1951, when Wiebe asked the question ‘Can broth-erhood be sold like soap?’ For the first time, people beganto think seriously that methods used very successfully toinfluence behaviour in the commercial sector might transferto a non-profit arena. Wiebe evaluated four different socialchange campaigns, and concluded that the more similaritiesthey had with commercial marketing, the more successfulthey were.Over the next two to three decades, marketers and publichealth experts developed and refined this thinking, learningparticularly from international development efforts, wheresocial marketing was used to inform family planning anddisease control programmes (1). Social marketing thinkingand techniques spread to the developed world, and socialmarketing is now located at the centre of health improve-ment in several countries. In the USA, social marketing isincreasingly being advocated as a core public health strat-egy for influencing voluntary lifestyle behaviours such assmoking, drinking, drug use and diet (2).Last year in the UK, the potential of social marketingwas recognized in the White Paper on Public Health, whichtalks of the ‘power of social marketing’ and ‘marketingtools applied to social good’ being ‘used to build publicawareness and change behaviour’ (3). The National SocialMarketing Centre, led by the National Consumer Counciland the Department of Health, has been established to‘help realise the full potential of effective social marketingin contributing to national and local efforts to improvehealth and reduce health inequalities’ (4).Social marketing – like generic marketing – is not atheory in itself. Rather, it is a framework or structure thatdraws from many other bodies of knowledge such as psy-chology, sociology, anthropology and communicationstheory to help us understand how to influence people’sbehaviour (5). Several definitions of social marketing exist,but one of the most useful is Andreasen’s, which describessocial marketing as follows:Social marketing is the application of commercial mar-keting technologies to the analysis, planning, executionand evaluation of programs designed to influence thevoluntary behaviour of target audiences in order toimprove their personal welfare and that of society. (6)Four key features are illustrated in this definition. Thefirst is a focus on