Social Marketing Defined

Social Marketing

Mention “Social Marketing“  today and chances are that you will quickly have someone giving you tips and techniques on how to market you product or idea through the social media. But there is a decided difference between the original term of “social marketing” and “social media marketing.”

Defining Social Marketing

Everyone knows that marketing is a tool for promoting a product or service, and most companies use marketing in order to increase their market share, and most understand that social media marketing is marketing specifically to social networking sites in order to increase one’s customer base. Social marketing, however, is an entirely different concern.
Social Marketing is the use of marketing applications (along with a number of other techniques) that are combined to encourage the promotion of behavioral goals which are for the good of society as a whole. Examples of social marketing campaigns can be seen in the anti-smoking and anti-drug ads that discourage the use of hard drugs or cigarettes in order to promote the well-being of society in general.

Different Types of Social Marketing

While it is true that social marketing many times uses regular marketing techniques to achieve non-commercial goals (such as cessation of smoking) social marketing is not, by definition, the opposite of commercial marketing (which uses marketing techniques in order to sell a product).
While social marketing is primarily used by groups and government agencies that are looking to promote specific goals (smoking cessation, seat belt usage, flu vaccines etc.) these are not by any means the only types of organizations that can take advantage of social marketing, and by no means are ‘public goals’ the only things that can be promoted through social marketing.
It is quite possible to promote specific goods or services through the use of social marketing. In fact, many companies will use social marketing as a means of engaging potential customer’s interest and concern in a topic, and then introducing a product or service as an answer to solving the problem. An example of this would be in introducing the dangers of smoking to a potential customer and then sliding in one’s own product (such as nicotine patches) as an answer to the problem facing society, though technically this type of approach is closer to using a “social marketing concept” to encourage the purchase of the product as a form of social responsibility.

A Short History of Social Marketing

Social marketing has been used ever since the power of the printed (and spoken) word has been recognized. Examples of social marketing campaigns (even though it was not officially recognized as such) can be found as far back as the encouragement of inoculation against smallpox during the early 1700’s as well as the push for the use of birth control pills during the 1960’s.
As a formal discipline, however, social marketing was not recognized until 1971 when the Journal of Marketing published the article “Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change” which correlated the concepts needed to enact social marketing as a means to achieving specific ends for the good of society as a whole. The rest, as they say, is history.