Evolution of Social Marketing

Social marketing has “social benefit” as its main objective. The primary goals of traditional commercial marketing are financial, albeit they may also have beneficial societal impacts. Social marketing would encourage overall health, increase awareness, and bring about behavioural changes in the context of public health. Like commercial marketing, social marketing has evolved to fit the current environment. It was first conducted via newspapers and billboards, but it has been a significant business for a while. In today’s world, social media is the most popular platform for using social marketing. It would be simplistic, then, to think of social marketing as nothing more than the application of conventional commercial marketing techniques to non-commercial objectives.

Social Marketing’s Evolution

Numerous academics attribute the beginning of the area of social marketing to an essay written by G.D. Wiebe that appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly’s Winter 1951–1952 issue. “Why can’t you sell brotherhood and reasonable thought like you can sell soap?” Wiebe said rhetorically in it. He continued by talking about the difficulties he saw in trying to market a social good like a commodity, designating social marketing as a separate field from commodity marketing even though he did not refer to it as such. However, Wilkie & Moore (2003) point out that from the discipline’s inception, the marketing field has been engaged in discussions over the junction of marketing and society.

Ten years later, groups like the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the KfW Entwicklungsbank in Germany, the Canadian International Development Agency, the UK Department for International Development, and the US Agency for International Development started funding social marketing initiatives to advance family planning and other social objectives in Sri Lanka, Africa, and other parts of the world.

The next significant development in the field of social marketing came with the release of Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman’s “Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change” in the Journal of Marketing. “The design, execution, and management of programmes meant to impact the acceptance of social concepts and incorporating considerations of product development, price, communication, distribution, and marketing research” is how Kotler and Zaltman, the term’s originators, described social marketing. In their conclusion, they state that “social marketing seems to offer a bridge mechanism which connects the socially valuable application of what that knowledge permits with the behaviour scientist’s understanding of human behaviour.”

Social marketing was first employed and studied in the field of public health in 1988, thanks to the efforts of Craig Lefebvre and June Flora. In order to improve public health (the community-wide prevention of cardiovascular diseases in their respective projects), they noted that there was a need for “large scale, broad-based, behaviour change focused programmes.” They also outlined eight crucial elements of social marketing that remain relevant today:

• a focus on the customer to achieve organisational (social) objectives
• a focus on suppliers and customers exchanging products and services voluntarily
• investigation into segmentation tactics and audience analysis
• Formative research is used in the creation of products and messages, and these materials are pretestened.
• An examination of pathways for communication or distribution
• Utilizing and combining the attributes of product, price, venue, and promotion in the planning and execution of interventions is known as the marketing mix.
• An integrated process tracking system with control and integration features
• a management procedure that includes planning, implementing, analysing problems, and providing feedback.

“A social change campaign is an organised effort done by one group (the change agent) which aims to convince others (the target adopters) to accept, alter, or reject specific ideas, attitudes, practises, or behaviour,” Kotler and Ned Roberto said in their introduction to the topic. In 2002, Philip Kotler, Ned Roberto, and Nancy Lee revised their 1989 book. The University of Stirling established a research institution exclusively focused on social marketing in 2005, while Middlesex University launched a specialised postgraduate programme in health and social marketing in 2007.

Distinguishing between “strategic social marketing” and “operational social marketing” has become more crucial in recent years.

Operational social marketing is the main theme of the research and case studies, where it is used to accomplish certain behavioural objectives related to various audiences and issues. Nonetheless, more is being done to make sure social media marketing moves “upstream” and is used much more deliberately to guide the creation of strategies and policies. In this case, developing successful policies and strategies is informed and guided by great consumer awareness and insight rather than a concentration on niche audiences and issue work. Most of the time, social marketing is different from corporate marketing in that it promotes the welfare of society. The goals of this marketing strategy are to influence the attitudes and behaviours of various public audiences.

In addition, social marketing is being investigated as a framework to promote the adoption of evidence-based practises among professionals and organisations, a technique for social innovation, and a fundamental competency for managers in the public sector and social entrepreneurs. It is seen as a way to create more fair, efficient, effective, and long-lasting strategies to improve social well-being. It goes beyond changing people’s individual behaviour to include bringing about good changes in social networks, public policy, corporations, and societal norms.

There are many instances of social marketing research available; a six-volume bundle of these studies has over 120 publications. For instance, current study demonstrates strategies to lessen people’s intents to participate in risky driving or binge drink. According to Martin, Lee, Weeks, and Kaya (2013), it’s critical to comprehend customer personalities and how individuals see one another. Advertisements addressing the negative consequences of excessive drinking were displayed to the public. After seeing an advertisement portraying themselves and a close friend, those who considered their close friendships as a part of who they are were less likely to desire to binge drink. Individuals who were lonely or did not consider close friends to be significant in their identity responded more favourably to advertisements that portrayed them. Ads featuring drivers travelling at high speeds had a similar trend. This shows that advertisements showcasing a person’s close friends have more impact than those exposing the potential damage that binge drinking or reckless driving might do to residents.