Page 8 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

David W. Stewart

Social marketing has emerged as an important sub-discipline of marketing
over the past two decades, though its roots run far back in time. Some schol-
ars would even go so far as to differentiate social marketing from the more
general discipline of marketing, arguing that commercial firms by definition
must always subordinate broader contributions to social welfare to business
success and shareholder value (Hastings & Angus, 2011). Therefore, the
argument goes, any social marketing activities of commercial organizations
are suspect. It is certainly the case that many scholars and practitioners of
social marketing define the objectives of social marketing in more noble
terms than those of commercial marketing, even if they acknowledge that
the tools and techniques are similar (Kotler & Lee, 2009). Still others sug-
gest that social marketing has two parent disciplines—social science and
social policy on one hand, and marketing on the other (Truss, Marshall, &
Blair-Stevens, 2010)—and that it is therefore a hybrid discipline. Finally,
there are scholars who argue that social marketing is really the more general
discipline and commercial marketing is a special case of this broader disci-
pline that happens to focus on financial returns to the marketer (Lazer &
Kelley, 1973; Andreasen & Kotler, 2008; Andreasen, 2012).
In the face of such disagreement about the discipline it is not surprising
that there is also disagreement about the scope of the discipline. Andreasen
(1994) has defined social marketing as “the application of commercial
marketing technologies to the analysis, planning, execution and evalua-
tion of programs designed to influence the voluntary behavior of target
audiences in order to improve their personal welfare and that of society of
which they are a part” (p. 110). Note that this definition limits social