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Using Social Marketing for Public Health: Global Trends 5

p. 360), and will “play a bigger role in public health” (p. 358). For example, it has
been used to:

• Reduce AIDS risk behaviors.
• Prevent teen smoking.
• Fight child abuse.
• Increase utilization of public health services.
• Combat various chronic diseases.
• Promote family planning, breastfeeding, good nutrition, physical exercise,
contraceptive use, infant weaning foods, childhood immunizations, and
oral rehydration therapy. (Coreil, Bryant, & Henderson, 2001)

Today, social marketing has been applied to an even broader array of public health
activities and programs—from the safe drinking water campaign in Madagascar, to
the promotion of mosquito nets in Nigeria, and then to the anti–drink driving pro-
gram in Australia (yes, drink driving!), to mention but a few of the cases covered in
this book.
Social marketing has offered public health professionals “an effective approach
for developing programs to promote healthy behaviors” (Coreil et al., 2001, p. 231).
It has also provided public health with “a new institutional mindset,” in which “so-
lutions to problems are solicited from consumers” (p. 231), mainly through forma-
tive research that obtains insights into target audience’s needs and wants. An
organization that has adopted the social marketing mindset “continually evaluates
and remakes itself so as to increase the likelihood that it is meeting the needs of its
ever-changing constituency” (p. 231).

U S I N G S O C I A L M A R KE TI N G F O R P U B L I C H E A LTH:
GL O B A L TR END S

A major purpose of this book is to identify some global trends in using social
marketing for public health. Due to limited space, we could only cover cases
from 15 countries, carefully selected. These cases speak volumes for what is go-
ing on in today’s world regarding how social marketing is being applied in pub-
lic health. At least 10 trends are noteworthy in our view.

Trend 1: Going Global for Public Health
Social marketing can be seen as an “American invention” in the 20th century, be-
cause the concept was initially formulated in the United States (see Kotler & Levy,
1969), and the term was then coined by U.S. scholars (see Kotler & Zaltman, 1971).