The evolution of social marketing

Now that I've informally compared social marketing as it is most widely practiced today with social movement marketing, it is important that I take some time to look more formally at social marketing.

The term "social marketing" was coined in 1971 with the publishing of Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman's article, Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change. In it Kotler and Zalman define social marketing as:

Social marketing is 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.

Thus, it is the explicit use of marketing skills to help translate present social action efforts into more effectively designed and communicated programs that elicit audience response.

I was very surprised to read how broad the original definition was. Unlike the definition I gave in the last post, where social marketing seems to be primarily focused on behavior change, this definition says simply - social marketing is the marketing of social ideas or the construction of more effective social actions. Under this definition, it seems clear that social marketing includes the marketing of social movements.

But let's compare this 1971 definition to modern scholarly definitions. In Kotler and Lee's text book, Social Marketing, Influencing Behaviors for Good, they are kind enough to give us a few definitions to choose from:

Social Marketing is a process that applies marketing principals 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)

Social Marketing is a process for creating, communicating and delivering benefits that a target audience(s) wants in exchange for audience behavior that benefits society without financial profit to the marketer. (Bill Smith, 2006)

Social marketing is the application of commercial marketing technologies to the analysis, planning, execution, and evaluation of programs designed to influence the voluntary behavior of target audiences in order to improve their personal welfare and that of society. (Alan Andreasen, 1995)

Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioral goals relevant to a social good. (Jeff French and Clive Blair-Stevens, 2005)

Now, this is more like the social marketing I am familiar with. The definitions all agree that social marketing is about influencing behaviors to better society. But beyond that, there is another important point - only one definition doesn't include benefits for the target audience.

As we've already discussed, in social movements most participants often get little benefit from participation. So, while social movement marketing fits the 1971 definition of social marketing, it already seems outside modern definitions.

In the next post, I'll examine the role of behavior change in social marketing and social movement marketing.