Social Marketing Quarterly

In their description of social marketing, Kotler and Zaltman (1971) postulate the difference between marketing and sales. Sales are defined as “finding customers for existing products and convincing them to buy these products,” whereas marketing is described as “discovering the wants of a target audience and then creating the goods and services to satisfy them” (p. 5).

The marketing mix and consideration of all its Ps (product, price, place, promotion) is a fundamental contributor to the success of marketing. A successful commercial company would never look to promote a message unless it had a product or service, at the right price, in a convenient location. Despite this knowledge, social marketing projects often focus predominantly, and sometimes solely, on the final P — promotion.

This article looks at a selection of the products and services offered in England, debates whether we are doing marketing or sales, and attempts to answer the question Bill Smith posed at the World Social Marketing Conference held in Brighton, England, in September 2008: “Where's the product?”

The issue of targeting best practice is a long-standing one in professional education and more particularly in marketing. It can be automatically brushed aside (because “we all know what marketing is about”), addressed in terms of general aims of marketing, or addressed systematically to identify in as much details as possible the tasks and responsibilities that marketers undertake in their daily activities. Apart from this issue of identifying what constitutes good practice, there is a relevant issue that needs addressing as a prerequisite: Whether social marketing is a separate discipline from mainstream marketing or not. How we respond to this question affects the method to be adopted for developing the benchmark of best practice standards. This article starts by addressing the latter issue, then identifies the contextual differences of social marketing, and finally presents the methodology for developing the best practice standards for social marketing, its general findings, and the way forward.

It is useful to note at the outset that although the project referred to in this article was undertaken by the U.K.'s Marketing and Sales Standards Setting Body, its perspective was international and involved many contributors at international level. In the final stages of the project, the resulting best practice standards were presented for final feedback at the first international conference on social marketing held in Brighton, U.K., where several hundreds of participants from around the world took part.

[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Social Marketing Quarterly for the following free supplemental resources: Appendix A: List of Social Marketing Standards of Performance; Appendix B: Example of a Unit of Performance.]

The potential of social marketing has been recognized in the United Kingdom by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) as a useful tool for behavioral change for environmental problems. The techniques of social marketing have been used successfully by health organizations to tackle current public health issues. This article describes a research project which explored the current barriers to recycling household waste and the development of a segmentation model which could be used at the local level by authorities charged with waste collection and disposal. The research makes a unique contribution to social marketing through the introduction of a competencies framework and market segmentation for recycling behaviors.

In 2008, NHS Halton & St Helens in the United Kingdom launched a Men's Health program pilot focusing on encouraging men to take better care of their health and to make more use of available health services. Targeting men living in the most deprived wards in Halton, the Men's Health program offers a wide variety of activities just for men, all designed to support and enable equal and convenient access to lifestyle and general health services.

The pilot program draws upon best practice by developing a social marketing approach that supports men to choose from a range of tailored activities designed to improve their health and well-being. The Men's Health program is part of the wider Health Improvement Team's program and has demonstrated a range of quantitative and qualitative successes in engaging men living in the most deprived wards. A key element to the design and development of the Men's Health program is the continuous dialogue and refining activities to ensure that men are encouraged to contribute in the shaping of such activities and wider delivery of the program.

Formative research was undertaken in the Illawarra region of New South Wales (south of Sydney, Australia) to identify local communication strategies to influence the help-seeking behavior of young people in relation to a new youth-focused general practice (or physician) led mental health service. Research with the target market (12–25years) revealed the need for a local campaign to address the stigma associated with the use of mental health services and the need to emphasize the central role of the general practitioner or physician to the service. The results also indicated that any overarching campaign should be complemented by segment-specific strategies which tailor not only communication variables and channels to reach different market segments, but also consider varying aspects of the product or service to reach a broad cross-section of the target group.

With the introduction of the Australian Organ Donation Register, responsibility regarding organ donation decisions primarily rests with the individual. However, family members can be instrumental in facilitating or hindering the rate of organ donation by objecting to or confirming the individual's wishes. Attitudes and beliefs of family members have been shown to be a strong influence on people's intentions to donate. Numerous studies have also demonstrated that family communication about organ donation can improve the rate of organ donation. We surveyed 23 matched pairs of undergraduate university students and their parents and found that attitudes to organ donation were positive and that there was a tendency for these dyads to give concordant responses regarding attitudes, level of family communication, and intent to donate. These findings have implications for improving Australia's organ donation rate, and recommendations for messages promoting organ donation are discussed.

General practitioner (GP) to patient ratios fall below benchmarks, particularly in rural areas. A marketing solution to this significant social problem might be to develop recruitment strategies differentiating medical practices (brands) and targeting different segments of the GP market. This article uses data gathered in Australia from practice managers, GPs, and recruitment advertisements to develop a taxonomy of family, job, and practice attributes that could be used to recruit GPs. Current recruiting strategies emphasize a mix of family, job and practice attributes, but better recruitment outcomes might be achieved by the implementation of branding principles that more clearly differentiate general practices with targeted recruitment advertisements. This research prescribes a path for future research on GP recruitment. The first step is to gather data on the relative and absolute value of different attributes within the taxonomy. These data can then be used to develop targeted marketing strategies for recruiting GPs to rural practices.

We provide an initial report and case study of product evaluation for social marketing undertaken specifically within a “community development” context. Starting Points is a highly differentiated not-for-profit development program targeting parents/caregivers of 0—4-year-olds. Parents/caregivers self select to participate in four highly interactive two-hour sessions, usually across a number of weeks, located within their own communities. The project was developed in Melbourne, Australia, and is being delivered in many communities across the nation. The service product evaluated is essentially the enhancement of parental confidence, achieved through parental/caregiver participation in the community-based programs which are initiated, marketed, and delivered by peer facilitators. The article locates such evaluation within the program evaluation and marketing audit literatures, describes the product evaluation component of the research design, and reports preliminary empirical results. These suggest that the Starting Points product is perceived both by participant parents and their partners as resulting in significant increases in parental confidence, sustained well past the immediate postparticipation period. These results provide one critical empirical element of a thorough service evaluation, itself a step toward a thorough-going social marketing auditing process.