A look at the compatibility of social marketing and health promotion.
‘Social marketing’ is a buzz word in parts of public health thinking today, an approach to solving health problems in rich and poor countries alike. Department of Health, UK, has established its own centre for social marketing. But what exactly is social marketing? One could say that ironically, social marketing has failed at marketing itself to large audiences. Social marketing as a field has been said to have a communication problem because “the right wing detest the term ‘social’, and the left wing detest the term ‘marketing’”. So, what is social marketing, and how can we as health promoters relate to it?
One definition of social marketing is the following: "The systematic application of marketing, alongside other concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioural goals, for a social good". Social marketing has also been defined as "a process for increasing the benefits and reducing the barriers which people care about to behaviors which benefit both the individual and society".
From the two definitions above one can extract that (1) Social marketing has individual behaviour change as its primary goal, (2) the desired behaviour change has the purpose of benefiting the individual and the society, not the marketing agent, (3) the good that is sought is a social good, and not necessarily a health-related good, (4) social marketing takes a point of departure in people’s expressed interests and cares, and (5) marketing techniques are used as a tool to achieve the desired behaviour change.
Social marketers acknowledge that behaviour change comes at a cost. If the benefits of behaviour change do not sum up to more than the costs of acquiring it, it has no net value to the customer. Therefore it is a vital principle in social marketing to increase the benefits and reduce the barriers of desired behaviour change for the customer. This includes working with both the desired behaviour and with the competing non-desired behaviour. One can increase benefits and reduce barriers of the desired behaviours, and vice versa for the non-desired behaviour. Barriers and benefits may be related to economic costs, to practical opportunities, to social costs, and to several other areas. Working with barriers and benefits also brings social marketing closer to upstream factors – structural conditions might have to be modified in order to reduce barriers.
Does the marketing terminology make social marketing commercial? The terminology, with terms like ‘customer’, ‘marketing’, and ‘product’ certainly represents a barrier in communication with health promotion as a field. It has been of concern in recent social marketing publications that social marketers and health promoters do not do each other justice in presenting the opposite field – do we have a communication barrier to reduce?
So where can social marketing and health promotion meet? Where do social marketing and health promotion differ? Can we meet on an ideological basis? Do we share a common value basis? The ideological basis of social marketing is not well defined, at least not well marketed. The same goes for basic values of the field. Can we meet on a practical basis? Can social marketing be used to influence policy makers? Are social marketing and health promotion completely separate fields? Some people see health promotion as a field nested within social marketing. Others see social marketing as a field nested within health promotion. Or are the fields separate but overlapping with a shared area?
I invite to discussion!
The following document is a good basis for a comparison of health promotion and social marketing:
