Page 28 - Social Marketing for Public Health Global Trends and Success Stories

57977_CH01_final.qxd:Cheng 11/5/09 4:32 PM Page 1

1

C H APT E R

Social Marketing

for Public Health

An Introduction

Hong Cheng, Philip Kotler, and Nancy R. Lee

S O C IAL MAR KETI N G: A B R I E F OVE RVI EW

Evolution and Definition
When this book was completed in 2009, it had been exactly 40 years since the pub-
lication of Kotler and Levy’s (1969) pioneering article, “Broadening the Concept of
Marketing.” It was in this article that the idea of social marketing was first intro-
duced and discussed. Kotler and Levy clearly proposed that as “a pervasive societal
activity,” marketing “goes considerably beyond the selling of toothpaste, soap, and
steel,” urging marketing researchers and practitioners to consider “whether tradi-
tional marketing principles are transferable to the marketing of organizations, per-
sons, and ideas” (p. 10).
Subsequently, the term social marketing was formally introduced in 1971 (e.g.,
Basil, 2007; Kotler & Lee, 2008), when Kotler and Zaltman (1971) coined the term.