Page 26 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

What Is Social Marketing? 19

The present author was among those energized by the freedom offered
by a broadened definition in light of the social turmoil of the 1970s, and
therefore joined a growing cadre of marketing scholars who became deeply
interested in issues broader than helping firms sell products and services
(Andreasen, 1993). These scholars slowly discovered that they could turn
their social concerns into important research projects and—as is impor-
tant to academic career advancement—found opportunities to publish
their work in top marketing journals. Many focused their attention on is-
sues such as the social responsibility of business and marketing, while
others focused on social marketing.
Hunt, however, made a significant point that those outside the market-
ing discipline still had to be convinced that marketing’s broader domain
could include subject areas they considered their purview. “Sadly, most
administrators of nonprofit organizations and many academicians in other
areas do not perceive that many problems in nonprofit organizations are
basically marketing in nature” (Hunt, 1976, p. 24). Hunt urged the field to
take on the marketing of marketing to nonmarketers, an issue that was
revisited in 2001 (Andreasen, 2001). Efforts to gain acceptance of market-
ing as a valuable approach to social change have had only limited impact.

The First Major Revision of the Kotler/Zaltman Definition

The definition offered by Kotler and Zaltman—and modest variations in
wording from others at the time—was the accepted gospel up to the 1990s.
But two factors advocated a rethinking of the characterization that could
advance the field. The first was the noted resistance to the term within
other nonbusiness disciplines. Most prominent among these was “health
communications” and “health education.” Scholars and practitioners in
these fields noted that the clear majority of field applications of social mar-
keting and much of its writing and speechmaking involved advertising
and various other communications vehicles aimed at health problems.
And they quite reasonably complained that this was their domain and,
indeed, they had already incorporated or originated many of the ap-
proaches to health promotion that social marketers were using—and brag-
ging about!
This perception was abetted—often unintentionally—by marketing au-
thors themselves, who argued that marketing could be used to advance
products, services, places, people, and ideas. Indeed, the original defini-
tion by Kotler and Zaltman specified that social marketing’s goal was to
advance “programs calculated to influence the acceptability of social
ideas.” This was a framework that was consistent at the time with other