The definition of social marketing (versus social media) is promotion of social programs and ideas such as recycling, highway safety, family planning, energy conservation, and use of libraries. Social marketing typically relies on donated funds and may be engaged in by public, nonprofit, or for-profit institutions. Another definition of social marketing according to Wikipedia is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good.
Social marketing works to help people change their behaviors to become healthier or to improve society or the world in some way. On the continuum of methods to bring about health and social change are the two used most often: education, which uses rational facts to persuade people to change their behaviors, and coercion, which forces people to adopt a behavior under threat of penalty for not doing so. Somewhere in between those two points lies social marketing — the use of commercial marketing methods to persuade people to change their behaviors for reasons that go beyond the rational facts to appeal to their core values. So often, people know exactly what they should be doing and why, and they still disregard what their head tells them. Social marketing adds heart back into the mix and utilizes emotional appeals to resonate with the part of the brain that determines what people actually do, as opposed to what they know they should do.
Lets think about what social marketing is and what social marketing is not. Social Marketing is a process that uses commercial marketing techniques to promote the adoption of positive health or social behaviors. Social marketing is an approach that benefits the people who are adopting the behaviors or society as a whole, rather than the organization doing the marketing. Social marketing may include some of the items in the “not” column above (okay, not the dating service) but those activities in and of themselves are not social marketing. Now the things social marketing is not. Social marketing is not viral marketing. Social marketing is not word of mouth marketing. Social marketing is not dating or match making services. Social marketing is not public service announcements. Social marketing is not focus groups or cause marketing (companies adopting a cause to improve their image and get more sales).
The health and social communications field has been rapidly changing over the past two decades. It has evolved from a one-dimensional reliance on public service announcements to a more sophisticated approach which draws from successful techniques used by commercial marketers, termed “social marketing.” Rather than dictating the way that information is to be conveyed from the top-down, public health professionals are learning to listen to the needs and desires of the target audience themselves, and building the program from there. This focus on the “consumer” involves in-depth research and constant re-evaluation of every aspect of the program. In fact, research and evaluation together form the very cornerstone of the social marketing process. Social marketing was “born” as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to “sell” ideas, attitudes and behaviors. Kotler and Andreasen define social marketing as “differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society.” This technique has been used extensively in international health programs, and is being used with more frequency in the United States at the national, state and local levels for such diverse topics as drug abuse, exercise and human trafficking. Social marketing is helpful to people who want to improve themselves.