1 1. Reinforcing the ‘social’ in social marketing Lukas Parker and Linda Brennan SO WHAT IS SOCIAL MARKETING? Commercial marketing uses tools and techniques from a variety of disciplines to encourage people to behave in ways that achieve the aims of commercial organisations (e.g. buying products). The use of these techniques to foster socially desirable outcomes was a natural extension. This use of marketing for social purposes was eventually termed ‘social marketing’ and is now concep- tualised as: Social Marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviours that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good. Social Marketing practice is guided by ethical principles. It seeks to integrate research, best practice, theory, audience and partnership insight, to inform the delivery of competition sensitive and segmented social change pro- grammes that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable. (International Social Marketing Association, 2018) The earliest social marketing campaigns commonly used commercial market- ing practices and theories. However, the commercialisation and use of social marketing throughout the 1980s and 1990s led to much angst about the role of social marketing in addressing issues of social good (Truss, Marshall & Blair-Stevens, 2010). Social marketing is a term that was first used in the 1960s by health profes- sionals (Khan & Choldin, 1965) for family planning programmes with the goal of decreasing population growth. Social marketing was (re)appropriated into the marketing discipline by Kotler and Zaltman’s (1971) article ‘Social mar- keting: An approach to planned social change’. This article initiated the shift from family planning towards a more holistic model of marketing. This new approach cemented the conventional commercial marketing mix approach (or the ‘four Ps’ approach) as central to social marketing campaigns. Social mar- keting under this model included a greater array of Ps than merely promotion Lukas Parker and Linda Brennan - 9781786434678 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 01/26/2022 11:52:42AM via free access