What is Social Marketing?

Marketing as a profession has many branches. The Chartered Institute of Marketing UK classifies marketing into the various branches: social sciences, communication, strategy and research. The most synonymous with marketing is communication, but the social sciences have contributed more to the profession than people think.

 

In their book, “Social Marketing: Influencing behaviours for good,” Philip Kotler, Nancy Lee and Michael Rothschild defined it as a process that applies marketing principles and techniques to create, communicate and deliver value in order to influence target audience behaviours that benefit society (public health, safety, the environment and communities) as well as the target audience.

 

Some of the areas in which social marketing can make an impact includes drinking & driving, domestic violence, waste reduction, energy conservation, air pollution from automobiles, forest destruction, blood donation, etc.

 

Social marketing achieves behavioural change by embedding a strategic customer focused approach involving customer insight, social theory, branding, stakeholder strategies, marketing mix including communication, and above all, a behaviour focus (rather than awareness) based on deep customer insight. The National Social Marketing in UK uses the term ‘behavioural interventions’ to describe it. This goes contrary to what non practitioner’s perceive to be just a communication tool.

 

The recently held elections adopted a ‘No Verification, No Vote’ exercise to create awareness and change people’s attitude to voting. This yielded positive change in the electoral process as compared to the way elections and voting in particular was done without biometric machines. If for some reason the key objectives were not attained, then it means the right social marketing techniques were not applied in the right way.

 

This means an increased awareness of the principles of social marketing can lead to positive social change as well as economic and political success.

 

Professor Jeff French, Director of the National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC), points out that “as social marketing has a purely behavioural objective as compared with commercial marketing, which is driven by sales/profit/market share, this clear focus on behaviour is one of the reasons why social marketing is in some way leading the latest thinking.” He goes on to argue that “changing long-term behaviours requires a deeper insight – for example, the average smoker makes several attempts to stop smoking over a long period of time,” and as social marketing is familiar with long term-processes, “this partly explains why in many ways social marketing is leading the thinking: changing habits is a tougher proposition than changing product.”

 

This long term process involves building relationship marketing for a significant change without which it will be difficult to achieve success and success can lead to brand building, competitive advantage and profitable growth.

 

Governments and public sector bodies are investing more time and budget in social marketing strategies, a move from communications-only to fully integrated behaviour change campaigns.

Marketing is often seen as contributing to most of the problems that afflict society’s well-being but marketing with social marketing techniques can change the negative perceptions associated with the profession and improve people’s lives.

 

Many organizations have embedded corporate social responsibilities into their core activities to tackle various social intervention programmes and at the same time crave for a positive image in the society in which they operate but the concept works best when the three professional bodies, namely social marketing, commercial marketing and corporate responsibility, merge for better decision-making as demonstrated in other research by leading scholars.

 

Government and other professional bodies like the Ghana National Social Marketing Foundation must therefore take up the mantle and develop occupational standards as is done in the UK by the Marketing and Sales Standards Setting Body (MSSSB), the National Social Marketing Centre and the Chartered Institute of Marketing UK. This will ensure that the principles of social marketing is well adhered to in our system. It will also outdoor the many benefits that marketing can give back to society, not only in developing products/services for consumption.

 

With social marketing, the world will be healed of many social vices which will make it a great place to live.