Bit by Bit (Part I)

Having accomplished much of my preliminary research, I've pulled most of the relevant bits into a mostly coherent paper. It turned out to be a little long, so I'll break it into a few parts. Below is an introduction and definition of social movement marketing - and an actual definition, not a go-off-on-some-crazy-tangent-like-before definition. Some of it is a little repetitive from old posts, but please, bear with me.

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Overview of Social Movement Marketing
In 1951, G.D. Wiebe put forth the question that is at the root of all non-commercial marketing, “Why can't you sell brotherhood and rational thinking like you sell soap?" (Wiebe, 1951). This question still resonates as social movements, non-profits, health campaigns, and others seek to apply increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques to their issues.

Defining Social Movement Marketing
Social marketing, which currently looks almost exclusively at marketing healthier lifestyles, is the most developed non-commercial field. However, while many social marketing techniques can be applied to other forms of non-commercial marketing, social marketing does not encompass all marketing where profit is not the primary goal.

When Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman coined the term "social marketing" in 1971, they defined it as: “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.” (Kotler, 1971)

This broad definition would certainly include social movement marketing, however as social marketing has evolved, it has also become more specialized. By 2006, social marketing was defined as “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). This definition clearly points to a field that is related to, but not the same as, social movement marketing.

Social movements are defined as a “sustained campaign in support of a social goal, typically either the implementation or the prevention of a change in society’s structure or values. Although social movements differ in size, they are all essentially collective” (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Building off the definitions for social marketing and social movements, social movement marketing can be defined as:
A process that applies marketing principals and techniques to create, communicate, and deliver value in order to elicit from the target audience an action designed to support a social goal.