15.Mar.2010 Do you know Social Marketing?

Recently I have been interested in Social Marketing, since I stumbled upon it on the internet. On the website I found a team from the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany describe the project they are running, which supports all efforts of industrial countries towards climate protection. But more about this later.

So I asked myself what the big difference is between common marketing and social marketing. To put it simply marketing usually tries to sell a product to a certain group of people. Social marketing tries to sell something else: a set of values. Those values are often different to the once which are rooted in society – they try to raise the bar. Otherwise why would there be a need to market them? Social marketing appears on the scene when the government, law and administration reach their limits. So it’s left to private enterprises, social lobbies or the media. That’s why social marketing is often used as an equivalent to Non-Profit-Marketing or the marketing of Non-Profit-Organisations.

Traditional marketing is directed towards a target group, but social marketing is aimed at the whole population, since the aim must be to convince as many people as possible about the desired values. But sometimes a Non-Profit-Organisation chooses a target group as a focus, because this group is in special need of the support. That’s often done when it comes to children. For example D.A.R.E. the drug abuse resistance education is focused on children and teenagers.

The methods and tools are free to choose, but since it should influence people to change their values, which are obviously not that easy to change, it must be a very powerful tool. That’s why TV commercials are frequently utilized, although those are very expensive and you may asked yourself if that’s not a waste of money when you want to feed kids in Africa. But this is a conflict in social marketing itself: to change values you need to reach as many people as possible in order to really help, but in the process of reaching many people you need to spend money and critics will scrutinize if that money is well spend.

Since there is no transaction involved (you get an ipod for small money), the person is not able to achieve an economic advantage, that’s why something else must be the perceived benefit, for example a personal or social motives. In order to know how to create a successful social marketing campaign, there is a need to know how people behave and why. So once again, just like traditional marketing, insights from social psychology are required.

Here I come back to the project of the University Kiel. This project is called Nordlicht. On the website they post articles about climate protection intervention from a social psychological point of view and call their strategy participatory social marketing. They coined this term, because they not only want to influence the person to save energy and via that protect the climate, they additionally want this person to persuade others to act the same. Like that the person should become a part of the climate protection campaign.

But how do you change individual behaviour to that extent?

Dr. Friedemann Prose, who is running this project, explains that climate protection should be perceived as a personally important problem and crucial for the common good (now and in the future). And can only be achieved through a process which comes from inside the person itself.

Unfortunately his articles and the Nordlicht website only exist in German language, but maybe that will chance soon.