Page 30 - Social Marketing for Public Health Global Trends and Success Stories

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Social Marketing: A Brief Overview 3

As Kotler and Lee (2008) emphasized, “social marketing is about influencing behav-
iors”; “[s]imilar to commercial sector marketers who sell goods and services, social
marketers are selling behaviors” (p. 8). As they elaborated, social marketers typically
try to influence their target audience toward four behavioral changes:

(1) accept a new behavior (e.g., composting food waste), (2) reject a potential un-
desirable behavior (e.g., starting smoking), (3) modify a current behavior (e.g.,
increasing physical activity from 3 to 5 days of the week), or (4) abandon an old
undesirable one (e.g., talking on a cell phone while driving). (p. 8)

Applications
Social marketing principles and techniques can be used to benefit society in general
and the target audience in particular in several ways. There are four major arenas
that social marketing efforts have focused on over the years: health promotion, in-
jury prevention, environmental protection, and community mobilization (Kotler &
Lee, 2008).
Health promotion–related behavioral issues that could benefit from social market-
ing include tobacco use, heavy/binge drinking, obesity, teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS,
fruit and vegetable intake, high cholesterol, breastfeeding, cancers, birth defects, im-
munizations, oral health, diabetes, blood pressure, and eating disorders.
Injury prevention–related behavioral issues that could benefit from social
marketing include drinking and driving, seatbelts, head injuries, proper safety
restraints for children in cars, suicide, drowning, domestic violence, gun storage,
school violence, fires, injuries or deaths of senior citizens caused by falls, and
household poisons.
Environmental protection–related behavioral issues that could benefit from social
marketing include waste reduction, wildlife habitat protection, forest destruction,
toxic fertilizers and pesticides, water conservation, air pollution from automobiles
and other sources, composting garbage and yard waste, unintentional fires, energy
conservation, litter (such as cigarette butts), and watershed protection.
Community mobilization–related behavioral issues that could benefit from social
marketing include organ donation, blood donation, voting, literacy, identity theft,
and animal adoption (Kotler & Lee, 2008).
For a more detailed review of these applications of social marketing, please see
Kotler and Lee’s 2008 text, Social Marketing: Influencing Behaviors for Good, pages 18–
21. In this book, we focus on the successful applications of social marketing princi-
ples and techniques on public health–related issues.