CHAPTER ONE

UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MARKETING

Definition of social marketing
Before we discuss about social marketing let us define marketing. Marketing is a
social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they
need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others. it is
the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and
distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual
and organizational goals
Different people including Health promoters perceive social marketing as a
predominantly promotional or, even more narrowly, a communication activity.
Simple they consider it as a means to deliver a message which may allow
influencing, persuading and reminding target audiences (like Eat vegetables, Wear
seat belt).
But promotion is only a part of the overall marketing program. This
misunderstanding leads to describe social marketing social advertising or
communication activities not developed with marketing’s conceptual framework.
Several social marketing definitions are listed below:
 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.
 Social marketing is an approach used to develop activities aimed at changing or
maintaining people's behavior for the benefit of individuals and society as a whole.
 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 as well as the target audience.
 Social Marketing is a process that uses marketing principles and
techniques to influence target audience behaviors that will benefit
society as well as the individual. This strategically oriented
discipline relies on creating, communicating, delivering, and
exchanging offerings that have positive value for individuals,
clients, partners, and society at large.
 Social Marketing is the application of commercial marketing
principles and tools where the primary goal is the public good.
 Social Marketing is the activity and processes for understanding,
creating, communicating, and delivering a unique and innovative
offering to overcome a societal problem.
As indicated in the above definitions social marketing is:

 It is sub discipline of marketing-distinct discipline within the field

of marketing.
 it involves adoption of commercial marketing philosophy and
adaptation of Commercial Marketing Technologies /tools
 It aims for voluntary behavior change
 Social Marketing Programs Influence Behavior
 It relies on the principles and techniques developed by commercial
marketing, especially the marketing mix strategies, conventionally
called the 4Ps- product, price, place and promotion.
 It Seeks to Benefit Target Consumers and/or the Society as a
Whole.
 Social marketing is the use of marketing to bring a social change in the society.
Social marketing can be used for achieving specific behavioral goals from the
society by using various marketing & advertising tools. Social marketing is the
use of marketing and its techniques as a tool not to benefit in monetary terms to
the business but the general public at large. The causes for which social
marketing has been used cover environmental issues, health, safety, ethics, law,
human rights, peace etc. which benefit the society as a whole.
 The primary purpose of social marketing is to help achieve improvement in the
lives of people. This helps to distinguish it from commercial marketing where the
primary purpose is financial, in terms of profits or shareholder value
 Commercial marketing tries to change people's behavior for the benefit of the
marketer; social marketing tries to change people's behavior for the benefit of the
target audience, or of society as a whole.

In some programs, the primary beneficiary is the target audiences or their family.
This would be the case in programs designed to promote breast self-examination, or
the immunization of children. Other programs target the society at large as the
major beneficiary, as in efforts to increase consumer recycling or induce farmers to
plant more trees. Finally, some programs have joint beneficiaries. Efforts to get
drivers to obey the miles per hour speed limit, which would help save the lives of
drivers and their passengers.
 Social marketing elements
The following are social marketing elements which are borrowed from the field of
commercial marketing.
Audience orientation
To be competitive in a market environment it demands a steadfast commitment to
understanding consumers, the people whose behavior we hope to change. The
premise is that all program planning decisions must emanate from a consideration of
the consumers’ wants and needs. put them at the center of every decision we make.
One of the traditional Marketing Principle is customer focused or customer
orientation. Social marketing applies this principle to understand target audiences’
needs and wants, their lives, behavior, barriers they perceive to adopting the desired
behavior and benefits they want and believe they can realize.
Social marketing begins and ends with target audience. Consumer/audience
orientation is the basic concept that an organization’s mission is to bring about
behavior change by meeting the target market’s needs and wants.
It is recognizing that customers have unique perceptions, needs, and wants that the
marketer must learn about and adapt to. Understand target audiences and see things
from their perspective provide a clear picture what target audience would like to do.
Therefore, the social marketer should know audiences and put them at the center of
every decision they make. All decisions are made with the audience's perspective in
mind. Social marketing planners take time to learn what the target audience currently
knows, believes, and does which allows them designed program to fulfill the
audience's needs and wants.
The backbone of a customer orientation is consumer research. research is used to
gain a deeper understanding of a target audience’s needs, aspirations, values, and
everyday lives.
Research also provides information on distinct population subgroups and the social
and cultural environments in which the people act on behavioral decisions. This
information is used to make strategic marketing decisions about the audience
segments to target, the benefits to offer, and the costs to lower, and about how to
price, place, and promote products. Although consumer research need not be
expensive or complex, it must be done.
Audiences can be primary or secondary audience. Primary target audience: Also
called target audiences, a group of individuals whose behavior needs to change to
positively impact the problem. They could be directly affected by the problem
themselves, or those who can make policy or environmental changes.
Secondary audience: A group of individuals who exert influence on the primary
target audience's behavior.
For example, if social marketers wanted children to get more physical activity by
walking to school each day, children would be primary audience. They need to
change their behavior to impact the problem (lack of physical activity). But, the
majority of the marketers’ program activities may be designed to intervene with
parents who play a significant role in influencing the behavior of their children.
Another example, a social marketing organization could be trying to get city
council members to approve funds for construction of sidewalks. The end goal is
still getting children to walk to school, but in this case, the city council members
would be the organization primary audience. You are trying to change their voting
behavior. Secondary audiences in this situation would be people who influence the
city council members, such as parents, school board members, or the media.
Audience segmentation
Social marketers know it is not possible to be “all things to all people. They should
avoid a ‘one size fits all’ approach.” Rather, differentiates populations into subgroups
or segments of people who share needs, wants, lifestyles, behavior, and values that
make them likely to respond similarly to the social marketing intervention plan.
Since peoples are differ in many things and no single offering will please everyone,
Strategies must be tailored to the unique wants, needs, resources, and current
behavior of differing market segments. Audience segmentation is the process of
dividing a broad target audience into more homogeneous subgroups. The purpose of
segmentation is not to answer the question of whether a social marketer can
distinguish different subgroups of a larger population. The question for segmentation
is whether identifying differences among groups will drive how social marketers
approach their marketing solution.
Segmentation allows coming up with different behaviors, messages, products, and
services aimed at different groups of the population. The purpose of dividing up an
audience into segments is to make social marketing program more effective and to
use resources wisely. Program developed for the "general public" will likely not be
really effective for any one person or group. But, by tailoring efforts to a particular
segment, the social marketer can greatly improve effectiveness because it allowed
using the programming, communication channels, and messages that are most
relevant segment.
For example, completely different programs would be designed for these two
segments:
1. Overweight adults who do not enjoy physical activity and are not motivated to
participate in it. (The program for this segment would need to address the target
audience's motivation before behavior change can be expected.)
2. Overweight adults who like physical activity and are motivated to do it.
Influencing Behavior
Social marketing focuses on behavior (what people actually do, a pattern of actions
over time; the action or reaction of something under specific circumstances). The
"bottom line” of social marketing is behavior change. Similar to commercial-sector
marketers, who sell goods and services, social marketers sell behaviors. the bottom
line for the social marketer is whether the target audience “buys” the behavior.
Social marketers perform activities to change believes and attitudes which lead to
behavioral change.
Social marketers typically want to influence target audiences to do one of four
things:
(a) accept a new behavior (e.g., composting food waste);
(b) reject a potentially undesirable behavior (e.g., starting smoking),
(c) modify a current behavior (e.g., increase physical activity from three to five days
of the week or decrease the number of fat grams consumed); or
(d) abandon an old undesirable behavior (e.g., talking on a cell phone while driving).
The purpose of social marketing is to develop constructive approaches to support
desired behavior changes. The basic principle is to increase the audience’s perception
that the benefits of the new behavior outweigh the costs of adopting it. The new
behavior must be seen as having higher value than the current behavior. For example,
to get someone to consider giving up smoking, there are two broad approaches
(1) Increase the perception of the benefits of the desired behavior (such as by
emphasizing to young people how their breathing is better when they engage in
sports and give up smoking)
(2) Increase the costs of the undesirable behavior (such as by raising the tax on
cigarettes).
Social marketers, like their counterparts in commercial marketing, use the four Ps
—product, price, place, and promotion—to encourage purchase or adoption of
behaviors.
 They improve the attractiveness of the behavior and sometimes offer goods or
services to support the behavior (product).
 They alter the price or cost of one behavior versus another (price).
 They make it easier to move into the new behavior (place).
 They promote the short-term and long-term benefits of the new behavior
(promotion).
Competition
Social marketing, like commercial marketing, takes place in a competitive
environment. In commercial marketing, competition refers to products and
companies that try to satisfy similar wants and needs as the product being
promoted. In social marketing, the term refers to the "behaviors and related benefits
that the target audience is accustomed to—or may prefer—to the behavior
promoting. The target audience is doing something instead of the behavior we want
them to do.
Example
Possible competing activities for physical activity
Watching TV
Playing on the computer
Talking on the phone
Going to the mall/shopping
Spending time with friends
Doing homework
Participating in after-school programs.
Exchange
The objective of the commercial marketing specialist is to facilitate mutually
satisfying exchanges between consumers and companies. A consumer receives a
product or services he or she values, and the company makes money.
Exchange theory, the linchpin of the marketing approach, indicates that by using the
right promotion techniques to offer the right product at the right price, through the
right distribution channels, potential buyers will exchange or give up what they
currently have, use, or believe for what is offered.
The social marketing discipline is based on the idea that all marketing is an
exchange, if you want people to change their behavior, you have to offer them
something. If you want someone to give up, or modify, an old behavior or accept a
new one, you must offer that person something very appealing in return.
The Marketing mix (4 P’s)
Product
The social marketing product might be very intangible like a belief or behavior and
it is a lot harder to formulate a product concept. The social product can either
represent an idea, a practice or a concrete object.
 The idea can then be a belief, an attitude or a value.
 A practice can be an act and the repeated act turn in to behavior like using
contraceptives.
 The tangible object could be any contraceptive products like pills, condom etc.
Price
 Price doesn’t necessarily to be monetary but can also be non-monetary like time,
effort, and change in life style
Place
• Place is where and when the target marketing will perform the desired behavior,
acquire any related tangible objects, and receive any associated services.
Channel for information include:
• Where service is provided
• Where information is received
• Where tangible product is purchased
Promotion
 Promotion involves persuasion to influence attitudes or/and behavior
 To persuade effectively the social marketer should capture the attention of the
target audience because there are many other competition sources like another
person, radio, television, noise and the like
 Commercial Marketing Vs Social Marketing
There are several important differences between social and commercial marketing:
 In the case of commercial marketing, the marketing process aims to sell a
tangible product or service. In the case of social marketing, the marketing
process is used to sell a desired behavior.
 Not surprisingly, in the commercial sector, the primary aim is financial gain. In
social marketing, the primary aim is individual or societal gain. Commercial
marketers choose target audiences that will provide the greatest volume of
profitable sales. In social marketing, segments are selected based on a different
set of criteria, such as what will produce the greatest amount of behavior change.
In both cases, however, marketers seek to gain the greatest returns for their
investment of resources.
 Competitors are very different. The commercial marketer sees competitors as
other organizations offering similar goods and services, or ones that satisfy
similar needs. Social marketers see. The competition as the current or preferred
behavior of the target audience and the perceived benefits and costs of that
behavior. This includes any organizations that sell or promote competing
behaviors (such as the tobacco industry).

similarities between the social and commercial sector

o A customer orientation is critical. The marketer knows that the offer (product,
price, and place) needs to appeal to the target audience, solving a problem they
have or satisfying a want or need.
o Exchange theory is fundamental. The target audience must perceive benefits that
equal or exceed the perceived costs.
o Marketing research is used throughout the process. Only by researching and
understanding the specific needs, desires, beliefs, and attitudes of target adopters
can the marketer build effective strategies.
o Audiences are segmented.
o All Four Ps are considered.
o Results are measured and used for improvement.
Social Marketing Applicable Areas
Social marketing should be used when voluntary behavior change is the social
marketer’s goal and he/she desire an audience-focused program. Social marketing
principles and techniques can be used to benefit society in general and the target
audience in particular in several ways. There are four major arenas that social
marketing efforts have focused on over the years:
Health promotion–related behavioral issues that could benefit from social
marketing include tobacco use, heavy/binge drinking, obesity, teen pregnancy,
HIV/AIDS, fruit and vegetable intake, high cholesterol, breastfeeding, cancers,
birth defects, immunizations, oral health, diabetes, blood pressure, and eating
disorders.
Injury prevention–related behavioral issues that could benefit from social
marketing include drinking and driving, seatbelts, head injuries, proper safety
restraints for children in cars, suicide etc.
Environmental protection–related behavioral issues that could benefit from
social marketing include waste reduction, wildlife habitat protection, forest
destruction, toxic fertilizers and pesticides, water conservation, air pollution from
automobiles.
Community mobilization–related behavioral issues that could benefit from social
marketing include organ donation, blood donation, voting, literacy, identity theft,
Generally, some issues have been addressed with
social marketing includes the following:
 HIV/AIDS
 Breast cancer
 Family planning
 Immunization
 High blood pressure
 Breastfeeding
 Drug abuse
 Energy conservation
 Smoking
 Child abuse
 Physical activity
 Recycling
 Pollution prevention etc
END