Page 22 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

What Is Social Marketing? 15

government sectors who thought that the poor and destitute ought not to
be charged for such important life-enhancing products. Similar campaigns
around nutrition in the developing world were developed by Richard
Manoff, who subsequently published one of the early books on social mar-
keting (Manoff, 1985).
The pioneering Nirodh campaign in India led to the creation of one
of the first social marketing organizations—Population Services Inter-
national—led by Philip Harvey and Tim Black. The organization obtained
a contract from USAID for a condom marketing program in Kenya, a pro-
ject that both furthered the spread of the approach and was the first to
prove social marketing’s effectiveness through carefully controlled inter-
ventions in test sites matched to program-free areas. A second feature of
the enterprise was that although a non-profit, it also sought out private
sector customers—in his case, for branded condoms.
Black and Harvey offered a simple definition of social marketing in a
1976 report on their Kenya project: “Social marketing is simply the ap-
plication of commercial marketing concepts to social endeavors” (Black &
Harvey, p. 101).

Turmoil in the Academic Marketing World

Ironically, the emergence of social marketing contributed to a rethinking of
the definition of the basic field of marketing itself. The aforementioned
pioneering social marketing innovations in India and Africa were un-
doubtedly in the minds of young faculty members at Northwestern
University’s Kellogg School of Business as they contemplated the core
definition and boundaries of the marketing discipline itself. The ensuing
intellectual ferment at Northwestern resulted in two seminal articles:
“Broadening the Concept of Marketing,” by Philip Kotler and Sidney Levy
(1969), and “Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change,”
by Kotler and Gerald Zaltman (1971). It is the latter article that first de-
fined the term “social marketing” in academic circles and was intended to
help nonprofit practitioners become more successful (Kotler, 1979).
Professor Kotler and his colleagues expected that broadening the defini-
tion would lead to the recognition of new issues and the development of
new concepts, generating more “attention and respect” to the field of mar-
keting and attracting a new cadre of students in the process. They defined
social marketing as “the design, implementation and control of programs
calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas and involving con-
sideration of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution, and
marketing research” (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971, p. 5).