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.

Its goal is to to deliver competition sensitive and segmented social change programs that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable.

Increasingly, social marketing is being described as having "two parents"—a "social parent", including social science and social policy approaches, and a "marketing parent", including commercial and public sector marketing approaches. Recent years have also witnessed a broader focus in social marketing beyond the influences on and changing individual behaviour, to socio-cultural and structural influences on social issues. Consequently, social marketing scholars are beginning to advocate for a broader definition of social marketing, beyond behavioural change, which is equally concerned with the effects (efficiency and effectiveness) and the process (equity, fairness and sustainability) of social marketing programs.

The first documented evidence of the deliberate use of marketing to address a social issue comes from a 1963 reproductive health program led by K. T. Chandy at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, India. Chandy and colleagues proposed, and subsequently implemented, a national family planning program with high quality, government brand condoms distributed and sold throughout the country at low cost. The program included an integrated consumer marketing campaign run with active point of sale promotion, retailers trained to sell the product aggressively, and a new organization created with the responsibility of implementing the program. In developing countries, the use of social marketing expanded to HIV prevention, control of childhood diarrhea (through the use of oral re-hydration therapies), malaria control and treatment, point-of-use water treatment, on-site sanitation methods and the provision of basic health services.

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