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marketers or the marketing discipline. As a result, the marketing field is
limited in its understanding of (and voice within) the upstream process
that drives policy—and ultimately corporate—change. Deeper insights are
needed into the efforts and process of upstream social marketing and how
it influences the policy decision makers (e.g, government officials, CEOs)
and important publics (e.g., consumers, taxpayers, nongovernmental or-
ganizations [NGOs]) who are the key players in the change process.
This chapter first examines the nature of upstream social marketing
action and highlights both the importance of policy-driven efforts to
the marketing domain and marketing’s potential contribution to under-
standing the policy process. We believe that what takes place in the policy
domain is vital to all marketers (not just social marketers). To argue
that political issues are by their very nature outside of marketing’s
domain is to take an overly narrow view of marketing’s scope. Second, this
chapter proposes that marketing can make a substantive contribution to
the theory and practice of policy realization. In a democracy, whether or
not a proposed policy comes into being is most often strongly influenced
by whether or not voters and other publics support or oppose it. In the
language of marketing, policy passage is influenced by the extent to which
key influencers favor or disfavor the exchange explicit or implicit in the
policy. Finally, this chapter proposes a framework in an attempt to start
to diagram and create a dialogue about this influential upstream social
marketing process.
Before proceeding, it is important to note that the scope of upstream
remedies addressed in this paper includes all the remedies that Rothschild
(1999) would label “marketing” and “law,” plus those “education” reme-
dies where either a private party is forced to communicate or significant
public dollars are employed. Rothschild’s widely used remedy taxonomy is
consumer-centric; simplified definitions follow (see Rothschild, 1999, for
an in-depth discussion).
Education includes messages that inform or persuade; these messages
can encourage a person to make an exchange but cannot change the mate-
rial benefits and costs associated with the exchange. Marketing alters the
terms of the exchange by enhancing the benefits associated with the ex-
change and/or reducing the cost of engaging in the exchange. Law most
often entails restricting a person’s choices or increasing the costs associated
with an option. Often, the cost will be punishment. To illustrate the differ-
ences, consider the example of drunk driving. Education tells people that
“buzzed” driving is dangerous, marketing provides free rides home for
intoxicated drivers, and the law uses police checkpoints and jail time to
catch and punish violators.