Social Marketing

CAPÍTULO TOMADO DE: “The Community Tool Box is a global resource for free information on essential skills for building healthy communities.”

“Promoting community health and development by connecting people, ideas and resources”




|Understanding Social Marketing: Encouraging Adoption and Use of Valued Products and Practices |
|Main Section|Contributed by Jenette Nagy |
| |Edited by Bill Berkowitz and Jerry |
| |Schultz |


What is social marketing?


Whocan do social marketing?


Why is social marketing important?


Basic principles of marketing: The "4 Ps"


Stages of a successful social marketing effort

 

Community groups do many different things to solve the issues that interest them. A group fighting child hunger might advocate free breakfasts at school, increased funding for WIC (Women and Infant Children), and morechild-oriented legislation from the state senate. And to accomplish each of these goals, the group will again probably do many different things: letter-writing campaigns, direct lobbying, and advertising in the media, to name just a few. Thousands of details and hard work by many people are usually involved in a successful initiative.

Looked at from a different perspective, however, it comes down to onething. At the root of all of the group's work is one basic principle: change people's behavior. This is true not only for a child hunger campaign, but for almost any health or community development initiative. A coalition against violence wants people to stop committing acts of violence. A teen pregnancy initiative tries to put an end to children having children. And an organization for peacelooks for the day when world peace is more than a lovely thought on holiday greeting cards.

This concept of changing people's behavior is the basis of this section, and of social marketing as a whole. We will talk about what social marketing is, and why it can be of use to you in your organization. Then, we'll go into more depth on marketing, and discuss what are known as the "4 Ps"--the fourelements around which all types of marketing, social or profit-oriented, are centered. Finally, we'll finish with an overview of the stages someone will go through if their effort is successful.

It's a lot of information, and much of it is more conceptual in nature than many other sections of the Tool Box. The next three sections of this chapter, then, will try to ground these ideas more thoroughly,so they can be used in your day-to-day work.

|Chapter 45, Section 2: Conducting a Social Marketing Campaign, will help you determine why and when you might implement a |
|social marketing campaign, then explain the major steps in managing one. |
|Chapter 45, Section 3: Listening to Those Whose Behavior Matters, will help you preparean effective social marketing campaign |
|by enlisting the help of those whose behavior you seek to change. |
|In Chapter 45, Section 4: Segmenting the Market to Reach the Targeted Population and Section 5: Promoting Awareness and |
|Interest Through Communication, specific phases of developing and implementing a socialmarketing effort are discussed. The |
|next three sections of the chapter (Sections 6, 7 and 8) focus on promoting, maintaining, and monitoring behavior change |


What is social marketing?

So what, exactly, is social marketing? In Social Marketing Report, it's defined as, "the application of commercial marketing techniques to social problems." It means to take the same principles used...