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

Trend 7: Edutainment
Edutainment, a term coined from educational entertainment, is a type of entertain-
ment designed to be educational (Merriam-Webster, 2009). “Lessons” embedded in
edutainment tend to be delivered to the target audience through entertainment
formats familiar to the audience, such as entertainment shows, radio and TV pro-
grams, computer and video games, films, and Web sites.
“The entertainment-education approach to social change rests on this notion
of fluid boundaries between learning and enjoying” (Cooper-Chen, 2005, p. 5). It is
for this reason that edutainment, if used appropriately, could be an effective way to
convey social marketing messages, including those focused on public health, to the
target audience.
As demonstrated in this book, edutainment was successfully used in some so-
cial marketing campaigns. As shown in Chapter 12 on the anti–hepatitis B cam-
paign in China, for example, MTV and a campaign theme song, starring singers
popular among the public, helped catch the attention of target audiences, increase
their awareness, and reinforce their memory of the campaign messages.
A word of caution is in place here, however: Edutainment has to be used ap-
propriately in social marketing campaigns. It was reported in a study on the
fundraising effect of situating the social marketing of organ donation against a
broader backdrop of entertainment and news media coverage that the storylines
for organ donations heavily featured on broadcast television in medical and legal
dramas and soap operas actually did not work because they were highly sensa-
tional. As a result, “the marketing of organ donation for entertainment essentially
create[d] a counter-campaign to organ donation, with greater resources and reach
than social marketers [had] access to” (Harrison, Morgan, & Chewning, 2008,
p. 33).

Trend 8: Paying Attention to Social, Cultural,
and Regulatory Environments
Social marketing campaigns for public health are often affected by the social,
cultural, and regulatory environments in the countries or regions in which they
are carried out. The cases presented in this book all have one thing in common:
They were designed and carried out in a way that best fit their social, cultural,
and regulatory contexts in order to maximize their effectiveness.
Take the anti–hepatitis B campaign in China reviewed in Chapter 12, again, for
example. For more than two decades, public service advertising (PSA) has been en-
thusiastically embraced by the Chinese government and Chinese media. The first
PSA spot was aired by a Chinese TV station in 1986, and since 1996, the Chinese
government and media have been jointly hosting annual national PSA campaigns