Editorial Reflections After Rotterdam: The 2nd ESMA Conference A warm welcome to this special edition of Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ). In this issue, we focus on European perspectives on social marketing, with contributions that originated as papers in the European Social Marketing Association Conference of 2014. Thanks to Nadina Luca and Natalie Rangelov for their thoughtful reviewing of the material that has led to this special edition. I’ll get to those in a moment but firstly many thanks to our hosts for having Europeans as guests! Of course, we regularly make contributions to SMQ, but it is nice to take this opportunity for me in this editorial to offer one or views on the notion of a distinctly ‘‘European’’ take on social marketing. I should preface these views by saying firstly that they are my own and haven’t been ‘‘road tested’’ extensively with Euro colleagues—so there may be disagreement. Feel free to get in touch and put me right. Secondly, I’m conscious of the accusation that European, ‘‘American,’’ ‘‘Asian,’’ ‘‘Australian,’’ or indeed perspectives from around the world are bound to be simplistic heuristics for a more complex reality. You may go further and disagree that there is any underlying reality to them at all. Again—do get in touch. As we know, academic social marketing, like the academic field of marketing itself, originated in the United States. Early European pioneers included the Hastings group, now at Stirling University in Scotland, whose origins reach back to the 1980s. Recent years have seen European social marketing developing into the increasingly consolidated multinational group of academics we have now that in turn support growing professional interest in social marketing across the continent of Europe as well as the United Kingdom. What seems to be going on over here in Europe? There’s growing interest I think in examining the wider behavior change contexts in which social marketing operates. Matt Wood’s article in this edition is a typical example: Can we make better use of social ecological models in the development of social marketing as a discipline? Models like this lift our heads up and force us to consider wider determi- nants of behavior—wider social and physical structures like road design, urban density, speed limits, and driver penalties all have massive effects on the uptake of cycling, for example. Across so many sectors, traditional foci on individual behavior are increasingly feeling inappropriate when faced with these macrosocial forces that we now increasingly know influence us. Can I tiptoe into the warm water of cultural differences between continents by opining that this strand of European interest may originate in our (relative to countries such as the United States) tendency to live in collectivist societies? The work of scholars such as Hofstede and Desai demonstrates how individualistic- oriented societies value things like self-reliance, independence, autonomy, and personal achievement, while collectivist cultures might prioritize cooperation, solidarity, and conformity. In collective cul- tures, therefore, autonomy may come second to relationships with others. I wonder if these cultural norms influence our growing academic interests in relationship within social marketing here in Eur- ope. Perhaps exchange theory and relationship theory within social marketing can grow hand in hand, better reflecting our day-to-day behaviors. Perhaps people iterate in their daily lives between making ‘‘trades’’ based on self-interest while also behaving according to communal or even societal expec- tations: In Denmark, for example, there are strong cultural pressures not to ‘‘stand out from society’’ in ways that might seem odd in more individually oriented societies. Bringing these debates back to the brass tacks of our field, I’ve noticed increasing interest in the idea of social marketers, at least here in Social Marketing Quarterly 2016, Vol. 22(2) 87-88 ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1524500416645009 smq.sagepub.com