What is Social Marketing?



Social marketing is a process that applies marketing principles and techniques to create, communicate, and deliver value in order to influence target audience behaviors that benefit society (public health, safety, the environment and communities) as well as the target audience. Philip Kotler, Nancy Lee and Michael Rothschild (2006). In short, it is a methodology for creating behavior change.


What can Social Marketing do for me?
Social marketing can help you influence the behavior of target audiences in order to improve the welfare of individuals and society. It can help identify the reasons people resist positive change, uncover affordable benefits your audiences care about and create ways to market those benefits in compelling and cost-effective ways. Social marketing helps organizations to increase participation, rebrand their images, and in the case of government organizations to increase voluntary compliance with new laws and policies. Use of social marketing has proven effective in many programs: from promoting condom use, to introducing water conservation, to increasing immunization rates among children, and protecting rare eco-systems to name a few.

Standards of Practice


The National Social Marketing Centre in the UK have produced an 8 point social marketing National Benchmark Criteria that is being used to help encourage and promote greater consistency in the use and application of social marketing:

Clear focus on behavior and achieving specific behavioral goals

Centered on understanding the customer using a variety of customer and market research

Is theory-based and informed
Is 'insight' driven
Uses 'exchange' concept and analysis
Uses 'competition' concept and analysis
Has a more developed 'segmentation' approach (going beyond basic targeting)
Utilizes an 'intervention mix' or 'marketing mix' (rather than relying on single methods)

Social Marketing Lite

“Social Marketing Lite” is a compilation of articles about issues, themes, definitions, and case studies designed to give practitioners a basic introduction to social marketing. Most of these papers were published originally in Social Marketing Quarterly as a column authored by Dr. William Smith.

The purpose of the book is to provide low-cost suggestions about how "thinking like a marketer" can improve your program of social change.