Page 28 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

What Is Social Marketing? 21

result in more sales often lead to a change in ad agency and a reassignment
of brand managers!
The focus on behavior today is captured well in the book title and the
set of definitions accumulated by Craig Lefebrve in his major summary of
the field, Social Marketing and Social Change (2013). The definitions he
cites are reproduced in Table 2.1.

The Next Advance: Beyond the Immediate Target Audience

An important expansion of the areas of application for social marketing
thinking and planning came about in the early 21st century. A number of
scholars at that point—especially when thinking about problems such as
childhood obesity—recognized the obvious fact that focusing solely on the
individual with the “problem behavior” was only one part of an “impact sys-
tem” designed to yield social improvements (Newton-Ward et al., 2004). The
authors stated that a key to this new look at program structures is to “identify
a comprehensive range of audiences, including decision-makers, who will
need to adopt observable behaviors, actions, or decisions in order for [desir-
able social] outcomes to be achieved” (p. 19). In the case of childhood obe-
sity, for example, obese children need access to healthier food, so parents,
school cafeteria managers, and McDonald’s planners need to change their
offerings. Parents or other caregivers have to provide nutritious meal and
snacking options. Law officers and politicians need to make schoolyards,
neighborhood parks, and streets safer for children to exercise or simply take
a walk. Software innovators need to create computer websites and programs
that teach kids and parents healthful practices and ways to make children’s
time at their computers or on their cell phones an opportunity for exercise.
The revelation emerging from this third rethinking of social marketing
is that social marketing concepts and tools can apply to key players in each
of these “upstream” domains. Models in the field and best practices can be
adapted to any target audience where behavioral change will yield health-
ier and happier lives for broader populations—the ultimate target audi-
ences of interest to social marketers.

Where to Next?

In the second decade of the 21st century, a number of scholars have revived
two fundamental definitional issues. The first is the continuing question of
the relationship of social to commercial marketing (cf. Lefebvre, 2013), and
the second is defining the outer limits of social marketing theorizing and
application (Andreasen, 2012). In the first instance, it continues to be the