When we discuss social marketing we must take into consideration differences between traditional and social marketing. Social Marketing is the application of specific tools in order to achieve social changes. Different to marketing which focuses on selling products and services, social marketing sells ideas and behaviour to promote and influence the audience to social change. It was first started being used for health issues but rapidly expanded to education, energy, philanthropy, environment, and corporate social responsibility.
In a society that increasingly prioritizes social issues, organizations that want to be competitive need to understand this change to engage publics in an effective manner. The communication between organization and publics should be based in cultural context; organizations must apply effort to understand the society it wants to reach. It’s important to have specific dialogue which would be appealing and impactful to society, helping improve the relationship between organization and publics and building the companies social reputation.
Influencing an audience to change their behaviour, also called intelligent influence, has its challenges. Behavioural changes based on voluntary actions rather than legal, economic or coercive forms of influence are difficult to achieve because you require the audiences accept. Society needs to believe the efforts applied for the change will be beneficial in a long term. The process of change in society occurs when:
- Accept a new behaviour,
- Reject a potential behaviour,
- Modify a current behaviour,
- Abandon an old behaviour.
The main problem is that sometimes organizations slightly distort facts with the purpose of having greater impact and increasing persuasion in society. These methods of persuasion are usually “forgiven” since they are being used for a noble cause. For instance campaigns aimed the reduction of energy consumption. Usually these campaigns are directed to the consumer, making them believe that their individual’s efforts can actually make a difference, when in the reality they cannot!
Furthermore we face ethical dilemmas dealing with services and products that are controversial and not well understood. For instance creating a blood donation campaign in the era of AIDS could be challenging in the sense other values and beliefs must be demystified for to achieve an effective campaign.
Organizations and agencies working with social marketing should be aware and constantly self-critical of their role in society and what they want to achieve, their purposes. The balance between ethics and effectiveness, being honest and at the same time powerful, is the important boundary that should be taken into consideration in any social marketing campaigns.
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