Lecture 9 - Social Marketing

In our most recent lecture we had a guest speaker come discuss social marketing.

I was not familiar with this area, as my main interest is PR so I looked this topic up.

Social marketing has its roots in the work of Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman, who in the 1970's found that the practices and ideas that were used to sell goods and services, could be used to sell socially important causes for the benefit or good of society.

In Social Marketing in the 21st Century Alan R. Andreason gives an even more succint definition of the social marketing, stating that ;

"Social marketing is simply about influencing the behavior of target audiences".

In the book Anderson claims to re-think and re-define what is meant by social marketing, beyond just seeing social marketing to change bad-behaviors or negative attitudes, but reconceptualizing social marketing as something that can create societal good.

Anderson states that;

"I will claim here that social marketing has a greater and more powerful role to play in social change. The reason for such bravado is simple: social change requires individuals to act. For social change to happen, someone or - or many 'someones' - must bring the issue to our attention. Someone has to assemble possible solutions and evaluate them. Someone has to decide on the best courses of action. Someone - presumably many someones, in many kinds of arrangements - must mount efforts big and small to make change happen or to prevent change from happening. Finally someone has to keep track of how things are going, how modifications and redirections are necessary, and whether more or less effort is neccessary.Social marketing does this." (pg. 5).

However I am wary of these claims of being able to change behavior. As communicators I beleive our roles are to influence attitudes and beliefs, to convince and inform, not to alter or influence behaviour. As PR professionals we communicate certain messages and fulfill briefs, I would be apprhensive to promise to be able to change behaviour.

However I do find this area interesting and found Anderson's examination of how to move social marketing forward in the 21st century to be useful.