Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
5
The application of social
marketing to tourism
Gareth Shaw, Stewart Barr and Julie Wooler
The evolution of social marketing
For a subject that is only just over 40 years in the making social marketing has attracted a
considerable amount of controversy and confusion over its actual defi nition. As a term social
marketing appears to have been formally used for the fi rst time by Kotler and Zaltmann (1971)
who viewed marketing as a technological process which in turn was to have implications for
how they viewed social marketing. As Andreasen (2003) argues, the initial views of social
marketing culminating in the defi nition in 1971 grew from early post-war ideas in the USA
which saw the birth of marketing as a professional activity as a response to a growing consumer
market (Truss
et al
. 2009). Social scientists such as Wiebe (1952) whilst acknowledging the
power and effectiveness of marketing saw other opportunities for shifting such techniques from
the selling of commodities through to the domain of social change. He went on to propose a
series of processes and social mechanisms which would be required to mount a successful
programme of social change via marketing.
Wiebe (1952) identifi ed the following key processes: force, direction, social mechanism,
adequacy and compatibility, along with compatibility and distance. The fi rst mechanism of
'force' was needed and referred to there being suffi cient motivation from an individual to give
attention to information being provided and equally to be strong enough to carry through to
an action. The idea of 'direction' concerns how the individual could achieve the desired
outcome, i.e. what type of behaviour was needed. 'Social mechanism' is that which needs to be
put into place to achieve the outcome. This relates to perhaps structural changes to facilitate
change, whilst 'adequacy and compatibility' relate to whether existing structures are suffi cient
enough to deal with the processes of change. Finally, 'distance' was defi ned by Wiebe (1952) as
the physical or psychological distance from one type of behaviour to another. He concluded that
it should be possible to 'market' social goals since principles are similar to those used to change
consumer purchasing habits.
It was these ideas that Kotler and Zaltman (1971) extended into the notion of social marketing
which they saw as a framework or structure. Their work opened up a debate about not only the
defi nition of social marketing but also its legitimacy as a distinct discipline. Thus, Luck (1974)
argued that social marketing would struggle to be recognized as a discipline whilst its defi nition
