Page 212 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

204 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

the observed effect sizes. This information can help in prioritizing problems
to address, setting goals for social marketing programs, and understanding
the potential costs and benefits of alternative marketing and regulatory
strategies.
True social marketing programs can be defined in terms of multiple crite-
ria, such as designing interventions for specific target groups, aiming to
change voluntary behaviors rather than just attitudes or knowledge, and us-
ing multiple elements of the marketing mix (Andreasen, 1994; McDermott,
Stead, & Hastings, 2005). However, useful generalizations for social market-
ing purposes can come from many sources and many topics that do not in-
trinsically involve social marketing programs. Attitudes and intentions may
be important precursors to behaviors, for example, and studies that focus on
individual marketing dimensions, such as research on aggregate advertising
or price elasticities, may suggest strategies for the broader marketing mix of
a social marketing program. Therefore, this review presents findings from
research in fields such as communication, consumer behavior, criminology,
economics, environmental studies, health care, marketing, psychology, and
public policy, not just social marketing specifically.
The scope of generalizations that may be relevant to social marketing is
essentially limitless, because almost any behavior may have implications
for health and well-being. This review focuses primarily on the anteced-
ents rather than the consequences of behaviors (e.g., prices and cigarette
consumption rather than cigarette consumption and lung cancer). Types
of generalizations are grouped into several sections. The first set summa-
rizes the results for interventions designed to reduce outcomes such as
substance abuse, obesity, and school bullying or to improve outcomes
such as safe sex or organ donation. To illustrate the potential for efforts to
improve personal and social well-being, this section includes meta-ana-
lytic results for both traditional marketing mix elements and a variety of
other interventions (e.g., group meetings to promote driver safety). Social
marketing focuses on changing behaviors, but changing attitudes and in-
tentions may be essential steps toward achieving behavioral goals.
Therefore, another section summarizes the relationships between atti-
tudes, intentions, and behaviors, for research in general as well as for spe-
cific practices such as blood donation, exercise, and smoking.
Promotional efforts are often important components of social marketing
programs, so this review then examines the effects of promotional techniques
such as comparative advertising, fear appeals, and warning labels. Advertising
elasticities, which show the effects of ad spending rather than message ele-
ments, are summarized separately. Price elasticities for alcohol, cigarettes, and
other products are summarized in a fifth set of generalizations. Because