Social Marketing

Marketing is defined as follows: Marketing is the process of interesting potential customers and clients in your products or services. In this essay, I am going to address the concept of “social marketing” and how does social marketing differ from “societal marketing” or “socially responsible marketing” in the first part, and in the second part, I am going to provide examples of each of the three approaches to marketing and analyse how these represent a departure from traditional marketing practice.

Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good.1 Social marketing is the design, implementation, and control of programs calculated to affect the acceptability of social ideas and involving considerations of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution, and marketing research. Basically, a social marketing campaign or programme contains a consumer orientation, an exchange and a long-term planning outlook. Consumer orientation is probably the key element of all forms of marketing. Different from the sales orientation, the marketing concept seeks to change the organisation’s aim to fit one or more particular groups of customers who have almost the same needs. At this point, it is useful to distinguish between customers and consumers. Customers are the people who buy the product and consumers are those who consume it. Moreover, customers could be called consumers as well. A parent buying toys for a child is a typical example that the parent is not only a customer, but also a consumer. Exchange is a fundamental and universal aspect of human behaviour. The basic concept of marketing is an exchange of resource or values b...

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...but not the least, social marketing can help to spread information to increase visibility. All businesses aim to increase their audience. Social marketing has now taken over as the online version of word of mouth. Harnessing it in the right way results in more customers, more sales, and a higher level of visibility online than ever before.

Works Cited

1. National Social Marketing Centre 2006

2. Business Dictionary—long-term planning

3. Wikipedia—Societal marketing

4. hubpages.com

5. Andreasen A. Marketing social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1995

6. Kotler, P., and Zaltman, G. (1971) Social marketing: and approach to planned social change, Journal of marketing, 35, 3-12.

7. Andreasen A.R. (1994) “Social Marketing: Its Definition and Domain.” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 13, 1, 108-114.

8. Business Studies1, Volume One, 3, 1, 211-212.