Page 34 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

CHAPTER THREE

Social Psychological Foundations

of Social Marketing

Derek D. Rucker, Richard E. Petty,
and Pablo Briñol

A fundamental goal of marketing is to influence people’s behavior, such as
increasing consumers’ trial of a product, willingness to pay for a particular
brand, or their inclination to recommend a service to their friends. In the
case of social marketing, behaviors are targeted that will improve the well-
being of particular individuals or society more broadly. For example, social
marketing efforts can be aimed at improving the well-being of women by
encouraging them to perform self-administered breast exams, or at im-
proving the well-being of the population more generally by influencing
policy makers to enact laws such as bans on smoking in public or restric-
tions on the use of assault weapons.
In each of the preceding examples, there is an attempt to influence par-
ticular behaviors, such as performing self-administered breast exams or
voting to change policy. This chapter recognizes that one common and ef-
fective means to influence behavior is to change individuals’ attitudes.
That is, as people adopt more favorable attitudes toward self-administered
breast exams or specific public policies, they are more likely to engage in
attitude-relevant behaviors. The present chapter reviews the fundamental
variables and processes by which attitude change and persuasion operate.
In doing so, this chapter contributes to the bedrock of social marketing
by providing the reader with the tools to influence individuals’ volitional
behavior via attitude change. Our assumption is that the same basic