SOCIAL MARKETING

Social marketing has the primary aim of "social good", while in "commercial marketing" the aim is
primarily financial. Although social marketing is sometimes seen only as using standard commercial
marketing practices to achieve non-commercial goals, this is an oversimplification. Commercial
marketers can still contribute to achievement of social good.

Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches, to
influence behaviors that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good. It seeks to
integrate research, best practice, theory as well as audience and partnership insight.

HISTORY OF SOCIAL MARKETING

Kotler and Zaltman coined the term 'social marketing' and defined it as "the design, implementation,
and control of programs calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas and involving
considerations of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution, and marketing research."
They conclude that "social marketing appears to represent a bridging mechanism which links the
behavior scientist's knowledge of human behavior with the socially useful implementation of what
that knowledge allows."

Craig Lefebvre and June Flora introduced social marketing to the public health community in
1988,[8] where it has been most widely used and explored. They noted that there was a need for
"large scale, broad-based, behavior change focused programs" to improve public health (the
community wide prevention of cardiovascular diseases in their respective projects) and outlined
eight essential components of social marketing that still hold today:

1.A consumer orientation to realize organizational (social) goals

2.An emphasis on the voluntary exchanges of goods and services between providers and consumers

3.Research in audience analysis and segmentation strategies

4.The use of formative research in product and message design and the pretesting of these materials

5.An analysis of distribution (or communication) channels

6.Use of the marketing mix—using and blending product, price, place and promotion characteristics
in intervention planning and implementation

7.A process tracking system with both integrative and control functions

8.A management process that involves problem analysis, planning, implementation and feedback
functions

Needs And Objectives Of Social Marketing

Social Marketing

Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and
techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good.
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Social marketing can be applied to promote merit goods, or to make a society avoid demerit goods
and thus to promote society's well being as a whole.

For example, this may include asking people not to smoke in public areas, asking them to use seat
belts, or prompting to make them follow speed limits

Need Of Social Marketing :

Social Marketing works to help people change their behaviors to become healthier or to improve
society or the world in some way.

We can say that social marketing is the use of commercial marketing methods to persuade people to
change their behaviors for reasons that go beyond the rational facts to appeal to their core values.

Social marketing provides a technique and a process for effectively making changes.It generally
consists of 5 steps :

• Research

• Plan

• Design

• Execute
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• Evaluate

Social marketing helps build brands, loyalty, customer base and much more.It helps by Connecting
with customers

• Positioning businesses in the marketplace

• Promoting banding

• Increasing sales because of increases in exposure

Objectives Of Social Marketing

In social marketing, the goal is to improve a condition of public health or safety.

We need to pay attention to a communication objective, identify a target audience, design a

compelling message, find support for it and look for success indicators.

We also need to spend some money, not a lot necessarily, but some.

In using persuasion and the media to affect social change, those in the public health and prevention
fields have entered a new era.
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Research in the Social Marketing Process

by Nedra Kline Weinreich

[Note: This article was written in 1992 and is somewhat out of date at this point, though the
concepts are still applicable.]

The social marketing approach differs greatly from how public health agencies have typically gone
about developing programs or materials. In the past, health educators often focused on providing
information to the general public about a particular topic, with the hope that the people who
needed it would realize they are at risk and change their behavior as a result. In contrast, social
marketers know that there is no such thing as "targeting" the general public. To be most effective, a
program must precisely specify its target audience and use very customized methods to reach those
people. In addition, social marketing does not rely solely upon educating people about an issue, but
uses persuasive messages developed through research with members of the target audience. The
participation of the people for whom the program is intended is critical.

A social marketing program has as its core the wants and needs of its consumers. These are
determined through market research methods that aim to learn as much about the target audience
and how it thinks, feels and behaves in relation to the issue the program is addressing. These
methods include quantitative research, such as a knowledge, attitude and behavior (KAB) survey,
which reveals how many people think or do something. Qualitative research, on the other hand,
provides insight into why people think or do what they do, through techniques such as focus groups
and individual interviews.

The process of developing a social marketing program involves research at every stage, with
constant reevaluation to assess whether the program is on track. This process consists of five
general stages, each of which involves several different types of activities: 1) Planning; 2) Message
and materials development; 3) Pretesting; 4) Implementation; and 5) Evaluation and feedback. The
figure below visually depicts the process as a pyramid of sequential steps; in practice, social
marketing is not necessarily a clear series of linear steps but rather a process of feedback and
adjustment that might require revisiting past stages to make changes based on new information.

The planning phase (Step 1) forms the foundation on which the rest of the process is built. To create
an effective social marketing program, you must understand the problem you are addressing, the
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audiences you are targeting, and the environment in which the program will operate. Research is
used to analyze these factors and to develop a workable strategy for effecting behavior change.

The message and materials development phase (Step 2) uses the information learned in the planning
phase to design the messages to be conveyed as well as the materials that will carry the messages to
the target audience.

The pretesting phase (Step 3) involves using various methods to test messages, materials and
proposed tactics with the target audience members to determine what works best to accomplish the
program's objectives. It is not uncommon to go back and forth several times between development
and pretesting as you make necessary changes in the messages, materials or overall strategy and
explore whether the new approach works.

In the implementation phase (Step 4) the program is introduced to the target audience. Preparation
is essential for success and implementation must be monitored to ensure that every element
proceeds as planned.

Finally, the evaluation and feedback phase (Step 5) assesses the effects of the program as a whole as
well as the individual elements of the strategy. Evaluation occurs throughout the process of program
development, not just at the end, and feedback is used at each stage to improve the program.