Is this social marketing?

Social marketing can roughly, and informally, be defined as "marketing designed to elicit behavior change" - which differentiates it from commercial marketing's goal of "eliciting purchase."

These days "social marketing" is more or less synonymous with "health marketing." Campaigns that encourage people to quit smoking, wear seat belts, get tested for AIDS, or practice safe sex are all well known examples of social marketing.

But are social movement campaigns also social marketing?

From observation they are certainly similar in a generic "doing good," sort of way. But in practice, they seem like very different types of marketing. The biggest distinguishing factor between them is how directly the target audience experiences the benefit.

If I quit smoking, I experience a direct benefit of improved health. (On a side note, I don't smoke). If I go to a public demonstration, I experience no direct benefit. If there one, it is much smaller than the benefit of quitting smoking: if I quit smoking, I could add years to my life. If I go to a rally, I might feel morally superior for an afternoon.

The situation in which health social marketing is most similar is if the demonstration is for something that directly impacts me - a strike for improved wages, let's say. In that case, I might start to get direct benefits more similar to those gained by quitters.

But the element that really fascinates me with social movements is the question of how to elicit action from people who get little to no benefit. There are a lot of good people out there who care deeply about human rights, regardless of the group in need. But how far does that support go?

Take the recent vote on Prop 8, banning gay marriage, in California. If you support gay rights and live in California, you can take an action to vote against it. Okay, easy enough, but, gay or straight, are you going to make phone calls against it when you get off work? Are you going to take time off work to support a "no" vote? If you aren't local, are you going to quit your job and fly to California to campaign against it? Are you going to spend a day at a protest where there may be angry and violent counter protesters?

Maybe not. And not doing so doesn't make you a bad person, just a normal person juggling a million priorities. And this is a great illustration of what the modern social movement communicator has to deal with. On the one hand, you have to convince people who are on your side to take time consuming and possibly dangerous actions (anyone else daunted by door-to-door canvassing?) to support you. On the other hand, you have to convince people who don't support you to vote they way you want them to anyway.

Now, I live in Massachusetts and I grew up in California. And I knew a lot of people who worked really hard to defeat that legislation. And yet it still passed. What did it need to get voted down? More support from people who got no benefit from taking action.