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2 CHAPTER 1 ■ Social Marketing for Public Health: An Introduction

In their article, they provided a clear definition for social marketing, discussed the
requisite conditions for effective social marketing, elaborated on the social market-
ing approach, outlined the social marketing planning process, and deliberated on
the social implications of social marketing.
Kotler and Zaltman (1971) 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. (p. 5)
Over the years, modifications have been made to the definition of social mar-
keting (e.g., Andreasen, 1995; French & Blair-Stevens, 2005; Kotler & Roberto,
1989). Although wording in the definitions of social marketing varies, the
essence of social marketing remains unchanged. In this book, we adopt the fol-
lowing definition:
Social marketing is a process that applies marketing principles and techniques to
create, communicate, and deliver value in order to influence target audience be-
haviors that benefit society as well as the target audience. (P. Kotler, N. R. Lee, &
M. Rothschild, personal communication, September 19, 2006)
As indicated in this definition, several features are essential to social marketing:

• It is a distinct discipline within the field of marketing.
• It is for the good of society as well as the target audience.
• It relies on the principles and techniques developed by commercial
marketing, especially the marketing mix strategies, conventionally called the
4Ps—product, price, place, and promotion.
Here, two points deserve more of our attention—one is the integration of the 4Ps;
the other is the focus on behavior change in any social marketing campaign. As Bill
Smith of the Academy for Educational Development, a Washington, DC–based
nonprofit organization “working globally to improve education, health, civil soci-
ety, and economic development” (AED, 2009), aptly observed:

the genius of modern marketing is not the 4Ps, or audience research, or even ex-
change, but rather the management paradigm that studies, selects, balances, and
manipulates the 4Ps to achieve behavior change. We keep shortening “The
Marketing Mix” to the 4Ps.... [I]t is the “mix” that matters most. This is exactly
what all the message campaigns miss—they never ask about the other 3Ps and that
is why so many of them fail. (Kotler & Lee, 2008, p. 3)