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and semantics remained blurred and imprecise. The debates and discussions from the 1960s
through to the 1970s, according to Andreasen (2003), caused confusion on two fronts. First
confusion grew over uses and the terminology of practice with 'social marketing', 'not for profi t
marketing' and 'responsible marketing' all being considered similar. Second, there was a tendency
to confuse social marketing 'with just plain social advertising, public relations or most simply,
mere education' (Andreasen 2003: 295).
It was only during the 1990s that social marketing overcame its identity crises when as a
subject it became more focussed on one of its key defi ning features, that of behaviour change
(Andreasen 1999; 2003; Hornik 2002). This aspect of behaviour change in turn encouraged links
with the theoretical work on change behaviour, whilst at the same time such perspectives led to
the recognition of the key features of social marketing (Stead
et al
. 2007).
Table 5.1
highlights
four of these key characteristics and in doing so draws attention to the essence of social marketing
as used in this chapter.
Table 5.1
Key principles of social marketing
Principle
Description
1. Customer or consumer
placed at the centre
All interventions are based around and directly respond to the needs
and wants of the person, rather than the person having to fit around
the needs of the service or intervention. Social marketing seeks to
understand 'where the person is now' rather than 'where someone
might think they are or should be'.
2. Clear behavioural goals
Social marketing aims to achieve measurable impacts on what
people actually do, not just their knowledge, awareness or beliefs
about an issue.
3. Developing 'insight'
Social marketing is driven by '
actionable insights
' that are able to
provide a practical steer for the selection and development of
interventions. This means moving beyond demographic or
epidemiological data to ask
why
people behave in the way that
they do.
4. 'The exchange'
Social marketing aims to maximize the potential 'offer' of a
behavioural intervention, and its value to the audience, while
minimizing all the 'costs' of adopting, maintaining or changing a
particular behaviour. This involves considering ways to increase
incentives and remove barriers to the positive behaviour, while doing
the opposite for the negative or problematic behaviour.
5. 'The competition'
Social marketing uses the concept of 'competition' to examine all the
factors that compete for people's attention and willingness or ability
to adopt a desired behaviour.
6. Segmentation
Social marketing uses a 'segmentation' approach that ensures
interventions can be tailored to people's different needs. In particular
it looks at how different people are responding to an issue, and what
motivates them.
7. The 'marketing mix'
Single interventions are generally less effective than multi-
interventions, although multi-interventions are more time consuming
and effortful. It is important to consider the relative mix between
interventions selected.
Source
: French
et al
. (2010) and Corner and Randall (2011)
