social marketing essay

social marketing essay

The Power of Social Marketing: Harnessing Digital Platforms for Positive Change

1. Introduction to Social Marketing

These threats largely derive from human behavior—what we buy, what we use and waste, what we choose and refuse, what we learn and teach, and, more generally, how we relate to our planet and to each other. The adoption of healthier and more sustainable behaviors is instrumental in addressing these threats. Marketing’s contributions in favor of such a change in behavior is a relevant part of the solution to upwards of 60-65% of human health and wellbeing challenges worldwide, while also contributing to economic growth, social cohesion, and environmental protection. It is the early origin and sustained actuation of this same human behavior which is driving our societies at an increasing pace to sickness and suffering, on the one hand, and environmental degradation and decline, on the other. The time has come for social marketing to come into its own and make a more central and decisive impact on the lives and livelihoods of people in diverse societies around the world. Social marketing is the application of marketing by individuals and organizations that contributes to individual and collective societal wellbeing. It is indispensable in our world of collective aspirations and actions to improve collectively our personal, people, and planet.

During times of social or environmental crisis, we often wonder how our world could have been better prepared so that we had to face a smaller degree of suffering and sacrifice. We also reflect on how the world could be rebuilt to be stronger and fairer in the post-crisis future. COVID-19 has been such a major crisis. It has and continues to challenge systems and societies to their extreme limits. It is excessive for households and businesses, and for the healthcare and other essential service systems. Given that the causes and consequences of COVID-19 are largely a consequence of human behavior, there is of course a role for marketing in terms of effective communication, behavior change, and reassurance. The continuing and long-lasting presence of social inequities and environmental degradation are, however, even bigger and broader emergent threats to the health and welfare of global society. These threats pre-existed the COVID-19 crisis and the pressing need to address them is confirmed.

2. Key Concepts and Strategies in Social Marketing

Like commercial marketing, social marketing specifies broad behavioral objectives and targets audience segments. Success in influencing an audience to adopt the marketing mix to benefit itself or its community starts with a comprehensive understanding of the target audience. A needs assessment evaluates key components and elements of the lives of the audience. This includes situations, feelings, norms, beliefs, relationships, skills, and resources that may be both facilitators as well as constraints of desired social behaviors. The exchange benefit considerations are far different than traditional commercial marketing. The primary behavior change is the traded good. With social marketing, willingness to change behavior is the desired transaction, relative to enhancing progress through a continuum of stages. Users commonly recognize that the behavior change provides them with a personal or communal benefit that exceeds their effort, sacrifice, perceived risk, or stigmatization. A product that enables them to believe in the desired outcome, as well as alters social acceptability, is also an important component of social benefit. Reinforcement support for pro-social behavior can include peer modeling as well as other incentives, and can vary over the stages of initial commitment to the behavior and provisional behavior change. Influencing internal, external, and self-reflective factors that drive a person to a certain decision within a specific context can be tailored to address different hesitancies. Barriers to change and potential obstacles in the closed-loop commitment-insight-feedback behavioral change process further guide communication and situational leveraging strategies. Successful self-sustaining behavior change creates new norms, expands individual and community networks, and can in turn accelerate an upward spiraling process.

The word “social” in social marketing originates from the theory’s foundation in social science disciplines and a mission to benefit society. Social marketing theory is a framework of fundamental marketing and social science concepts, combined in ways that are novel and relatively unique, for the purpose of influencing behaviors that benefit individuals and communities for the greater good. Social marketing achieves positive behavior change by applying the marketing mix for the greater good. Beyond adaptation and application of the traditional commercial marketing mix, three distinct bottom-line concepts are integrated into successful social marketing strategies. These are (1) increasing the availability of opportunities to benefit from the desired behavior, (2) delivering specific social benefits from the behavior, and (3) explicitly addressing relevant barriers to behavior initiation and maintenance.

3. Case Studies of Successful Social Marketing Campaigns

Meanwhile, NEC SME, an enterprise development program operated by NEC, Tigo’s parent company in Senegal, is committed to supporting the expansion of small businesses, and increasingly makes use of social marketing tools. The NEC SME program is currently active in Mali and Senegal in West Africa and has over 130,000 registered members. When businesses that are part of NEC’s SME community or who rate particularly well within the membership are identified, they are informed via SMS of some of the special commercial arrangements that exist with NEC, such as price reductions or extra services. These opportunities are flagged as available for a limited period. This messaging has been so popular that businesses are increasingly contacting NEC themselves in order to be included in similar future offerings, with demand for the favored partnerships of the brand growing significantly.

Supermodels4Africa is a digital platform that is working to address the youth unemployment crisis in South Africa. Fewer than 10 per cent of young black African women in South Africa are employed in the formal sector, and in the townships surrounding Cape Town where Supermodels4Africa is based, the unemployment rate is over 60 per cent for women in their early 20s. The supermodel program prepares young women for employment in fields that align with their talents and aspirations, increasing their access to opportunities. The platform uses the power of the supermodel role and provides each participant with coaching and financial literacy training, creating a blend of two proven models for increasing the level of organizational support.

4. Ethical Considerations in Social Marketing

4.2 Data ownership – Even in countries with very strong non-profit data protection rules, participants’ data will typically belong to the parent organization rather than an external digital marketing provider. This arrangement allows explicit consent to be obtained for membership-related text, phone, or email publicity, and for data to be shared for scholarly evaluation or advocacy on request. Nonetheless, stricter rules may apply for NGOs operating overseas, and gaining the public’s trust may still be delayed through fears over special interests within particular countries or industries, intelligence agency surveillance, data breaches, or the wider cross-border trade in Online Behavioral Tracking. Participants are typically more concerned about privacy while sharing data for health or social causes, especially when biometric measurements become involved. We may also encounter participants who do not want their data to be shared with any organization, regardless of third-party privacy rules, despite audits revealing that such partners are often as secure as the organization itself, certainly more than most consumers.

4.1 Privacy – Users may share private or sensitive information when responding to marketing campaigns on social media or official online survey platforms. This data may be sold to commercial organizations by intermediaries or advertisers, something deemed unacceptable in a marketing campaign funded by public or third sector organizations. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (2016) is therefore particularly important in this context, while charitable sector ethical guidelines typically rule out inter-organizational exchanges that might compromise donor privacy. In the UK, the Fundraising Preference Service (2015), the Code of Fundraising Practice (Institute of Fundraising, 2016), and the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive all impose further constraints in this domain, and privacy regulation is likely to become stronger globally in the future, limiting social marketer access to donor data.

This chapter concludes by discussing several key ethical considerations around the use of digital platforms for social marketing.

5. The Future of Social Marketing: Trends and Innovations

Traditional social marketing, developed alongside product marketing, mostly used traditional platforms: mail, telephone, and the nature of the campaigns led to a certain amount of notoriety (the hallmark of traditional advertising). But, something happened as online experiences started to develop: people wanted to be more than just customers. They wanted a more involved role in the sales process, they wanted products targeted to them, and they wanted to support things that would make the world a better place. This research is about how you can help them do both. With the speed at which technology is advancing and increasing availability of tools, consumers are getting even more involved in both the causes and the products they support. At the same time, company success and reputation are more linked to the causes they support and the ways they support them.

Social marketing pioneers have always been innovators – they just had a product that was not-for-profit or had more of a community benefit. Mind you, there have been people from both camps who have found ways to add accolades and income. But, the days when you could slap a donation sticker onto your product and still get business don’t seem to be happening anymore. The demand for authenticity is higher than it’s ever been, with customers – and employees – wanting companies to show a commitment to charitable causes and show real results.