Page 164 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

156 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

interventions include water sanitation, smoking cessation campaigns, use
of vaccinations for a variety of health risks, and condom distribution in
schools to lower the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and to reduce
unwanted pregnancies. Many of these public health initiatives were pro-
moted by social marketing campaigns designed to “sell” the recommended
interventions to a reluctant or uniformed public. To growing numbers of
observers, public health and social marketing are a logical combination
and should be brought together as matter-of-factly as the traditional uses
of marketing are employed to win audiences over with regard to any
number of products or services (see Grier & Bryant, 2005). Indeed, a re-
cent survey designed to measure the level of interest in forming a profes-
sional association for social marketing in the United States found that the
highest percentage of respondents identified their primary focus as health
communications (31 percent); this was followed by social marketing (28
percent); and health promotion (20 percent; see Marshall & Sundstrom,
2010).
The use of social marketing techniques to push public health initiatives
into areas traditionally dealt with from a sociological perspective—espe-
cially with regard to various social problems, rather than medicine per
se—has continued to proliferate. Examples of such uses of social market-
ing to redefine social problems as medical or public health problems in-
clude high-risk drinking among college students (Glassman & Braun,
2010; Gomberg, Schneider, & DeJong, 2001); obesity (Herrick, 2007);
integration of cell phones and mobile technologies into public health prac-
tice (Lefebvre, 2009); maximizing life satisfaction among the citizenry
(Sirgy, Morris, & Coskun Samli, 1985); problem gambling (Powell &
Tapp, 2009); and the growth of employee assistance programs (EAPs) for
dealing with problematic human relations in the workplace (Weiss, 2005).
An area ripe for the newest social marketing initiatives in the redefinition
of social problems as medical problems is the problem of gun violence,
especially since the tragic mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary
School, where 26 people were killed, including 20 elementary school chil-
dren. New initiatives under the Affordable Care Act (also known as
“Obamacare”) may even go so far as to have doctors engage in routine
screening of patients on the subject of gun safety in the home.
Although this chapter has discussed a number of authors who have
written papers supportive of the use of social marketing to implement any
number of interventions considered to be advantageous to the health and
well-being of society, not all observers are convinced that such approaches
are effective. For example, in her paper recommending strategies to achieve
more comprehensive implementation of policies addressing the threat of