Social Marketing

Marketing, like most business disciplines, has its fair share of concepts and terms that have been adequately misunderstood and extensively misused. I wish to talk about one such misunderstood tem – Social Marketing. I have not seen this being used in India adequately far less being misused!

What is Social Marketing?

Comprehension of this term varies from public service ads released by leading brands (drink so-many gallons of water everyday; message brought in public interest by x brand) to ‘grow more trees’ campaign unleashed by some NGO.

The answer lies somewhere in-between.

The term social marketing was first coined by Philip Kotler and Zaltman in 1971 to refer to application of marketing to solution of social and health problems. The basic premise went something like this: Marketing has been successful in encouraging people to buy products such as Pepsi, Rolex, Ford, Nike etc., so, the argument was, it can also encourage people to adopt behaviour that will enhance their own - and their fellow citizens’ - lives.

They defined social marketing 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."

That translated into plain English reads something like this: ‘Social Marketing is the use of marketing and communication techniques to sell social messages.’

A good example of Social Marketing in the Indian context is the ‘Aids’ campaign that was so popular that it is still referred as the ‘Pulliraja’ campaign! If you could recall, that campaign was run like any other marketing campaign. It had its own positioning, personality, logo, baseline, advertising strategy etc., and was run with the singular objective of popularizing the AIDS message to the target consumer.

In other words, message about AIDS was the brand and selling this idea to the target was the objective much like how marketing happens for many products and services. This, ladies and gentleman, is Social Marketing as defined by Kotler and Zaltman!

Social marketing, like generic marketing, is not a theory in itself. Rather, it is a framework or structure that draws from many other bodies of knowledge such as psychology, sociology, anthropology and communications theory to understand how to influence people’s behaviour add Kotler and Zaltman.

However, social marketing is less different and more difficult than generic marketing. It involves changing intractable behaviours, in complex economic, social and political climates with often very limited resources (Lefebvre and Flora, 1988).

Furthermore, while, for generic marketing the ultimate goal is to meet shareholder objectives, for the social marketer the bottom line is to meet society’s desire to improve its citizens’ quality of life. This is a much more ambitious - and more blurred - bottom line.

There are some important differences between social and commercial marketing though. Specifically, in social marketing:

• The products tend to be more complex.
• Demand is more varied.
• Target groups are more challenging to reach.
• Consumer involvement is more intense.
• The competition is more subtle and varied.

Finally, one of the most serious forms of competition for Social Marketing comes from commercial marketing itself when it attempts to sell unhealthful or unsocial behaviours. For instance, for every small voice that urges people not to drink or smoke there is a huge scream from the marketers who urge you to smoke and drink.

Thank God we don’t have legalized prostitution yet in this country to take head-on the AIDS campaign. Imagine if we had it and there were enough ‘brothel’ brands vying for people’s attention. We could well see the following Press ad (no pun intended).

“Chosen from the finest among the fairer sex. Visit Slam bam Services, India’s finest brothel centre. Fill it. Shut it. Forget it”!

Social Marketing, then, would have met its match!