Page 186 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

178 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

issues: beneficial, protest, and revolutionary social marketing. Beneficial
social marketing helps people achieve a higher quality of life (e.g., preven-
tive health care causes such as healthy exercise and a balanced diet). The
causes are relatively uncontroversial and apolitical, and the potential for
ethical abuses is lower than for protest and revolutionary social marketing
(Murphy et al., 1978).
In contrast, much less consensus exists about protest social marketing;
it is designed to “shift priorities and resources to a new position advocated
by the protesters” (Murphy et al., 1978, p. 198). The flat income tax, abor-
tion, gun control, and gay rights are causes that have been the focus of
protest social marketing. Because protest social marketing is “active,
change oriented, issue centered, and representative of only one segment of
society,” the potential for ethical abuse is higher than for beneficial social
marketing (Murphy et al., 1978, p. 200).
The third category, revolutionary social marketing, “proposes a funda-
mental change in the existing social system” and involves taking extreme
viewpoints that are uncompromising; as such, the potential for ethical
abuses is highest (Murphy et al., 1978, p. 198). The bloggers who precipi-
tated the Arab Spring, the series of protests occurring in the Arab world
primarily during the spring of 2011, created revolutionary social market-
ing. Promoting a change from a capitalist to a socialist system in the United
States would be another example of revolutionary social marketing. As
societal views shift and the degree of consensus increases, causes can move
from one category to another, and many causes—for example, women’s
rights, antismoking, and gay rights—have evolved from revolutionary to
protest or even beneficial social marketing as time passes and public senti-
ment changes. Note that protest and revolutionary social marketing typi-
cally qualify as political speech, and as such they enjoy First Amendment
protection.
There has long been a discussion regarding whether the term social mar-
keting is limited to public and nonprofit marketers or whether it extends to
private sector firms that promote causes (e.g., beer marketers promoting
responsible drinking, cosmetics companies promoting breast cancer
screening; Andreasen, 1994). Increasingly, companies are supporting
causes through marketing activities, and these initiatives have been labeled
with a variety of terms: corporate social marketing, cause-related market-
ing, corporate societal marketing, cause branding, mission marketing, so-
cial alliances, and issue advocacy, to name a few (Drumwright & Murphy,
2000). Regardless of the semantics, there is no doubt that companies are
participating in promoting social marketing causes in a variety of ways,
and because of this they are likely to encounter or precipitate ethical