Page 30 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

What Is Social Marketing? 23

case that, from the perspective of mainstream marketing scholars and prac-
titioners, social marketing is merely an interesting application area. There
continue to be a number of efforts to rethink what is meant by marketing—
whether it is a “science” and whether it is merely a descriptive term or an
action verb implying that there are effective and ineffective ways of carrying
it out. A recent wave of interest in the fundamental nature of marketing was
triggered by a series of articles by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch promot-
ing a service-dominant concept of marketing (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) and
noting that, historically, both practitioners and academics had conceived
products as the essence of what marketers offered, with services seen as a
special case where few or no products were involved. Vargo and Lusch of-
fered the revelatory perspective that customers do not seek products for
what they comprise—the physical entity—but rather what they deliver, or
the service they provide. People do not want TV sets, but they want great
pictures with many viewing options, chances to entertain others, sports
events to watch, and so on. TV sets deliver entertainment services.
A 2012 article in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing suggested a
further rethinking of social and nonprofit marketing in light of the Vargo
and Lusch framework:

The major proposition advanced here is that nonprofit and social marketing
do not comprise a special (and minor) set of marketing applications. Rather,
marketing, in both commercial and social settings, is ultimately about influ-
encing behaviors, whether these behaviors are consumer purchases or peo-
ple taking up more healthful lifestyles. More critically, it proposes that the
managerial challenges that nonprofit and social marketing managers face are
significantly more complex than those faced in the commercial sector. Such
managers typically need to simultaneously promote sales (e.g., Goodwill
clothing, charity t-shirts, opera attendance), corporate support, volunteer-
ing, individual giving and grants, and contracts from foundations and gov-
ernment agencies. The targets of each of these marketing challenges respond
to different and often unique tactics and strategies and are evaluated in terms
of different outcomes. Given that, it is proposed that commercial marketing
should be viewed as a simplified, special type of marketing management
with only one broad primary objective: maximizing sales. Therefore, non-
profit and social marketing comprise not minor applications of commercial
concepts and tools but rather the most complex cases; commercial market-
ing is the special, narrower application. (Andreasen, 2012, p. 37)

In essence, this description of the field says that nonprofit and social
marketing should be viewed as the dominant paradigm and commercial
marketing should be regarded as a special case with only one kind of target
and a focus on the delivery of products and/or services as the objective.