On Social Marketing and Social Change

This website is a resource for social marketing information and opinion as it can be applied to social change. It includes a list of articles specific to social marketing entitled "What is social marketing?", a group of posted articles, and a biography of the author with a slideshare of 4 presentations, which may be viewed online or downloaded. The site looks at contemporary social marketing strategies and critiques the field of social marketing.

The slide share presentation topics in MS Powerpoint format include:

1. "Evaluating Social Marketing in the Context of Financial Literacy and Education Programs"
   
2. "A Global Social Marketing Organization"
   
3. "Design Thinking and Behavior Change Take One”
   
4. "The Assessment of Use Engagement with EHealth Content: The EHealth Engagement Scale"

The section “What is social marketing?" includes "A Social Marketing Manifesto" which is a critique of the restricted applications and methodologies of social marketing and the following recommendations for the field:

• Focusing on audiences, their wants and needs, aspirations, lifestyle, freedom of choice;
  
• Targeting aggregated behaviour change - priority segments of the population, not individuals, need to be the focus of programmes;
  
• Designing behaviours that fit the audiences' reality - "...We need to bring to behavior change the same insight, thought and rigor that designers bring to their work in developing products, services and experiences";
  
• Rebalancing incentives and costs for maintaining or changing behaviours - "...adjusting the environment, policies and marketplace whenever possible to shift power to the individual to have freedom to choose and basic human rights";
  
• Creating opportunities and access to try, practice, and sustain behaviours - "...People do not think or choose their way to new behaviors - they must have access to the information they need to make informed choices (in ways, places and times that literacy, cultural and other considerations should inherently inform: relevance should never be an afterthought in social marketing). And they must have the opportunities to try new behaviors, practice them and then be able to sustain them. Behavior change is not a one-off proposition"; and
  
• Communicating these behaviours, incentives, and opportunities to priority audiences and letting people experience them - "...the technological revolutions we are experiencing in communications will lead to the adoption of modern communication models to frame our thinking and activities..."
  

In a subsequent section called: "Making Change Happen: The Marketing Approach", the author considers health communication and the attempts to apply previous social marketing in a "cookbook"-style approach. He emphasises that, instead, "it is a map - not focused on the topology of your specific problem, not highlighting the shortest or even best route to a solution, but a reminder of the space you are in as you attempt to make change happen among people in need, organizations that serve them and community leaders and policymakers who create the opportunities and allocate the resources to support these efforts. The idea is to begin at the center and then work your way out to the edges where the program elements (tactics) take shape." The website includes "Planning a Social Marketing Program" with an outline of a model compiled by a number of social marketers and presented at the World Social Marketing Conference, England, 2008. It also includes "The Change We Need: New Ways of Thinking About Social Issues" on rediscovering social innovation, "When Is It Social Marketing?", and “Health Communications, Social Marketing and Coke", discussing marketing and social marketing similarities.