Strategic Social Marketing

For Behaviour and Social Change

Jeff French, Ross Gordon

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526471635
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Adopting an international approach and offering a broader context, this second edition of Strategic Social Marketing presents social marketing principles in a strategic, critical and reflexive way, illustrating the value of applying marketing to solve social problems, including:

• A brand new chapter on evaluation.
• Updated advances in relevant research and theorizing.
•New vignettes and short case studies to illustrate theories throughout the text. The authors explore the reasons why marketing should be an integral component of all social programme design and delivery when looking to achieve social good, while progressingon to the nature and application of social marketing; rethinking traditional concepts such as 'value' and 'exchange' in the social context. Their hands-on features then let students lay out strategy, plans, frameworks and tactics to influence behaviours.

1 The Role and Contribution of Social Marketing

Learning objectives

By the end of this chapter, readers should be able to:

• understand why social marketing is increasingly being incorporated into social strategy development as well as the operational delivery of programmes
• articulate some of the key weaknesses associated with many current approaches to social policy and strategy aimed at influencing behaviour
• describe the key added value associated with the adoption of a strategic marketing approach to social policy selection, development, delivery and evaluation.

Introduction

We have not started this second edition with an introduction to social marketing principles and readers who wish to start at this point should go to Chapter 2. Rather we have decided to start this second edition with an exploration of the contribution to social policy development and delivery that social marketing and strategic social marketing can make.

Social marketing was defined by Lazer and Kelley (1973: ix) as being:

Concerned with the application of marketing knowledge, concepts, and techniques to enhance social as well as economic ends. It is also concerned with the analysis of the social consequences of marketing policies, decisions and activities.

In 2013 the first consensus definition of social marketing was developed by the International Social Marketing Association in collaboration with the European Social Marketing Association and the Australian Association of Social Marketing. These organizations defined social marketing as follows (iSMA, ESMA, AASM, 2013):

Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviours that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good. Social marketing practice is guided by ethical principles. It seeks to integrate research, best practice, theory, audience and partnership insight, to inform the delivery of competition sensitive and segmented social change programmes that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable.

As can be seen from these two definitions, despite the intervening forty years the key focus of social marketing has remained constant. Social marketing is centred on the application and use of marketing principles, concepts and techniques to bring about social good.

The past forty years have seen social marketing become increasingly prominent in both marketing academe and in the social policy arena driven by increasing evidence that suggests it can be an effective social change approach in its own right (Gordon et al., 2006; Stead et al., 2007; French and Evans, 2018) and also because it can make positive contributions to many forms of social policy (French, 2011; Gordon and Gurrieri, 2014; Rundle-Thiele et al., 2019; Santos, 2019). With examples such as the government agency in England responsible for delivering health improvement – Public Health England – adopting a long term and sustained social marketing strategy (Public Health England, 2017).

Building on existing developments, the field is now proffering new ideas relating to management of an expanded social marketing intervention mix and integrating it with other forms of behavioural influence (Tapp and Spotswood, 2013), upstream marketing and policy (Gordon, 2013; Biroscak 2018; Borden et al., 2018), interdisciplinarity and inter-sector collaboration (French et al., 2017). Social marketing has also in recent years adopted a more strategic orientation (this textbook and Dessart and van Bavel, 2017), applied service logic (Russell-Bennett et al., 2013), critical thinking (Gordon, 2011; Gordon, 2018), value creation (Zainuddin et al., 2017; Beirão et al., 2017), and an increasing focus on sustainability (Smith and O’Sullivan, 2012). Calls including this text are also being made for a broader, ‘systemic’ view of social marketing to be adopted (Lefebvre, 2012; Brychkov and Domegan, 2017; Hastings and Domegan, 2018). The use of social media, digital technology and web-based interventions and strategy has also increased substantially in recent years (Shawky et al., 2018).

Given its orientation towards practical social policy intervention design and delivery, social marketing also attracts significant research and development funds often not available in commercial marketing academe. The consequence is that social marketing is proving to be a testing ground for the conceptualisation, application and evaluation of new generic marketing as well as social marketing concepts and theories. As Andreasen (2012) and others explain (Polonsky in Dibb and Carrigan, 2013), the opportunities are considerable for social marketing to inform marketing, and indeed social policy and change management, as its acceptance as a legitimate discipline increases. However, to realise this potential, social marketing needs to break out of the confines of being a field of study and application focused on just the operational delivery of social programmes and campaigns, by seeking to influence the development and selection of social policy and strategy.

Out with the old, in with the new

This book aims to signal the need for a move away from an operationally focused conception of social marketing, a position that could be called social marketing myopia, towards a broader concept of social marketing that we term strategic social marketing. Strategic social marketing is focused on the potential for social marketing to add value not only at an operational level of programme delivery that seeks to influence groups and individuals, but also at the structural, environmental, political and social level (Goldberg, 1995; Andreasen, 2002; Gordon, 2013; French, 2017).

We argue that a narrow conceptualisation and a myopic focus on operational implementation have led to unnecessary and erroneous criticisms of social marketing and have unhelpfully limited its contribution to solving social challenges around the world. The authors seek to remind both advocates and critics of social marketing that even as it was first emerging, select scholars proposed a broader remit for social marketing (Lazer and Kelley, 1973) beyond just the systematic planning and delivery of marketing-based social tactical interventions.

Specifically, the strategic, holistic and interdisciplinary approach to conceptualising and operationalising social marketing presented here seeks to describe how it can facilitate a more comprehensive and multi-faceted approach to social change. Social marketing achieves this by applying marketing principles, concepts and techniques that can be utilised at individual, microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystems levels at both strategic and operational levels. Social marketing can also be employed as a tool for engaging in wider critical systems analysis and thinking to understand and influence systemic challenges, as well as economic, social and organizational factors that cause social harm, or when they are positive, promote social good.

Marketing focused social programme design

The processes associated with developing effective social programmes designed to influence behaviour and bring about social progress are a challenge faced by all governments and their institutions as well as by private and NGO organizations. If social marketing is to deliver on its full potential to assist with the development, ...