Social marketing uses principles from commercial marketing and the social sciences to change people’s behaviour for the social good – to benefit both individuals and wider society.
Think about some of the biggest challenges that face the world today. For example, health issues like obesity, or environmental problems like climate change. Such issues are often caused by human behaviour, and as a result, they can only be tackled if people change their lifestyles and poor habits.
1. Behaviour
Social marketing involves trying to change people’s actual behaviour – not just their attitudes or awareness.
2. Customer orientation
As social marketers, we must stand in the shoes of the people whose behaviour we are trying to change: to understand their lives and their behaviours from their perspective, not what we might think or experience.
3. Theory
We use behavioural theories to help us understand behaviour and to inform the interventions that we develop.
4. Insight
Conducting research into the behaviours of the people we are interested in, to develop actionable insights that inform the development of interventions to change their behaviour.
5. Exchange
Changing behaviour usually involves people giving something up (costs) to gain something else (benefits). We need to understand how people perceive rewards, benefits, costs and barriers associated with both desired and problem behaviours. We can then consider what might be done to incentivise the desired behaviour and disincentivise the problem behaviour.
6. Competition
In designing behaviour change interventions, we need to consider what else competes for our audience’s time, attention, and their tendency to behave in a certain way.
7. Segmentation
Not everyone is the same, so a ‘one size fits all’ approach is rarely best. Good customer insight allows us to identify audience segments, grouping together people with common characteristics, and to tailor interventions accordingly.
8. Methods mix
Social marketing – like commercial marketing - involves using all of the Marketing Mix i.e. the ‘7Ps’: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Process, Physical Evidence and People. It’s about much more than just raising awareness.
From experience, we know that changing behaviour is challenging. We choose from a range of tools and frameworks to help the process, – dependent on each brief. For example, we find MINDSPACE, The Behaviour Change Wheel, and Behavioural Insight Team’s ‘EAST’ Framework all useful when thinking about encouraging behaviour change.
Social marketing is not commercial marketing but it draws on marketing principles and techniques. The American Marketing Association’s definition of marketing is:
“The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
Social marketing should not be confused with social media marketing, for example using Facebook and Twitter, but it often is. Social media is often a promotional tool or channel used to help to deliver social marketing campaigns and interventions.
Social Marketing Gateway
Find out more about SMG, and how we could help your organisation to deliver an impactful social marketing project.