Mediaboss Marketing

Social marketing campaigns are those that borrow from commercial marketing techniques for social engagement influencing a target audience to change their social behaviours and to benefit society.

The importance of social marketing cannot be underestimated because it often raises awareness of far-reaching topics that are often out of the sight and mind of the mainstream population.

Whether its related to the environment, public health, safety, or community development, marketing for good is a methodology for creating change.

As a formal discipline, social marketing started in 1971 when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman published their article Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change in the Journal of Marketing.

Since then, marketers have been playing with social marketing ideas, refining the strategies, and working on the most effective means of spurring widespread changes in social behaviour in a variety of fields.

In , public health and environmental concerns top the list of most used social marketing topics.

There are many approaches to obtaining a societal change through effective social cause marketingprograms. Still, the central tenant always remains the same: the social good is always the primary focus.

Whether its trying to convince the public to stop smoking or encouraging men in developing counties to use condoms, the focus is always on the public good first.

The concept of societal marketing, therefore, revolves around driving change to local, national, and international communities in creative ways, for the public interest.

Social marketing, therefore, should not be confused with other similar terms: social media marketing, green or sustainable marketing, and commercial marketing with a social focus.

According to the Institute for Social Marketing, these are the most important social marketing strategies and techniques:

The best examples of social cause marketing campaigns, which result in actual change, are the ones designed to shock, provoke, inform, and remind all at once!

Social marketing campaigns are not limited to advertising either; for example, they often get used in magazine covers too.

One example of this includes a series by the National Geographic calledPlanet or Plastic, published in June 2018.

In this campaign, NatGeo featured a photo of a plastic bag in the form of an iceberg as their front cover, to raise awareness ofthe billions of plastic wastage polluting the oceans.

Similarly, newspapers also engage in social cause marketing for the public interest.

An example of this includes when mainstream Australian newspapers blacked-out their front pages in October 2019, to raise awareness against government clampdown of media freedom.

Or most commonly, social good marketing campaigns come in the form of placards, used by activists during boycotts, demonstrations, and other forms of protests, like the Business As Usual = Death poster by the Extinction Rebellion.

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Original post:
What Is Social Marketing? (Including 17 Examples)