Social Marketing

Social marketing is the process of marketing goods and services through the relationships that people use to create and recreate their social relations—that is, the way that we speak to and behave toward other people to repeatedly show that they are family members, friends, colleagues, or strangers. Marketing can insert itself in these processes by various means in the hope that the marketed goods will be trusted and accepted much more easily if they appear to be coming from known people. Since online social networks now occur with much greater efficiency and complexity, social marketing and social media marketing is now much more likely to be encountered online at well-known and visible websites such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). Social marketing may be used for commercial and noncommercial purposes—in capitalist economies, social change might be brought about by market-based activities.

Background

The purpose of social marketing is to take advantage of friendly relations between network members who routinely provide much more private information to a trusted website than they would be comfortable doing with the marketing team of a commercial company. Yet with often no more than cursory considerations of security or privacy, many people will happily reveal their family members’ likes and dislikes, their own online surfing activity, their response to public events, and so forth. This is information that can be of great value to marketing departments who, in the same way that Amazon.com uses customers’ browsing history through automatically applied algorithms to recommend other products that might be of interest, can generate advertising designed to appeal to network members on an individual basis.

This lack of privacy represents a problem for online social marketers that is partially ethical in nature and partially practical. The ethical component relates to the willingness of companies to collect and use information derived from ways that might be considered to be covert. Most people realize that they must live in a world in which items will be marketed to them consistently, but they may resist this if they feel a personal relationship is being exploited. The practical component of the problem relates to the fact that the public will often judge a community of businesses in light of the worst forms of behavior associated with any member of the community. As a result, even a company that behaves in an ethically acceptable manner may find its reputation besmirched by the lower standards adopted by some other companies.

Overview

The main division in techniques in social marketing is that between push and pull methods. The second of these, the pull technique, is rather passive in nature and involves establishing a presence on a social network and then waiting for people to find it by chance or design. When people do visit, they might be interested or entertained in a number of different ways with a view to establishing a relationship that will eventually lead to sales. Push techniques, on the other hand, are much more active in nature and involve sending messages or communications to potential or actual customers or stakeholders with a view to establishing such a relationship much more swiftly and effectively. The mode of communication involved might be one that is more playful and informal, in line with the nature of the network involved. It might be the case that unsuspecting people—children, for example, who are able to access such sites even if age restrictions formally exist—might be drawn into a commercial transaction without being able to give informed consent. Organizations involved in these kinds of activities should make their intentions clear at the outset and take care to ensure they market and advertise their products to properly identified segments of customers.

At the heart of social marketing is the concept of communication, both as a medium to connect with stakeholders and as the message itself. Communicating with customers through online media such as Japan’s Line as well as Facebook and Twitter conveys something about the company and the value proposition it is offering, even if the limitations of some of these media requires some inventiveness to ensure that the correct message is portrayed. The challenge is to ensure that brands and products are extended to those forms of communication channels in ways that are consistent with the concept of integrated marketing communications (IMC), which requires a consistent and predictable range of communications from a company to its stakeholders. The communications involved should be understood not just as the active attempts to contact stakeholders but also passive effects arising from the behavior of company members off-duty, environmental footprint, and relationships between products and third-party users or consumers.

There is also the issue of noise—the background phenomena that are beyond the control of the signal emitter but that can affect the way the message is received. During the series of popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring, for example, it was widely believed that self-organizing demonstrators were using online media to communicate with each other. Suddenly, then, everyone else using the same media (if using the channel in a way that seemed authentic and not just opportunistic) was able to obtain some cachet from using the same medium. In contrast, the Blackberry instant messaging service received a more dubious reputation when it was accused of being responsible for helping organize the English riots of 2011.

Contemporary models of communications stress the importance of feedback loops, and this is particularly crucial with social marketing. The ease with which individuals can provide feedback to organizations and to each other means that it has become an expectation that should be met. Doing so provides a means of developing relationships and conducting research aimed at understanding consumers better.

Bibliography

DeMers, Jayson. “The Top 7 Social Media Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2014.” Forbes, 24 Sept. 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/%20jaysondemers/%202013/09/24/%20the-top-7-social-media-marketing-trends-that-will-dominate-2014/. Accessed 14 Jan. 2025.

Eagle, Lynne, et al. Social Marketing. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2013.

Hall, C. Michael. Tourism and Social Marketing. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Hastings, Gerard. Social Marketing: Why Should the Devil Get All the Best Tunes? Burlington: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007.

Hastings, Gerard, Lynn McFadyen, and Susan Anderson. “Whose Behavior Is It Anyway? The Broader Potential of Social Marketing.” Social Marketing Quarterly 6.2 (2000): 46–58.

Irmas, Aaron. “Now New-Age Social Media Marketing Is Changing and What You Need to Know.” Business.com, 16 Dec. 2024, www.business.com/articles/how-new-age-social-media-marketing-is-changing-and-what-you-need-to-know/. Accessed 14 Jan. 2025.

Kotler, Philip, and Gerald Zaltman. “Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change.” Journal of Marketing 35.3 (1971): 3–12.

Lee, Nancy R., and Philip Kotler. Social Marketing: Influencing Behaviors for Good. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2011.

Lefebvre, Craig R., and June A. Flora. “Social Marketing and Public Health Intervention.” Health Education and Behavior 15.3 (1988): 299–315.

McKenzie-Mohr, Doug. Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing. 3rd ed. Gabriola: New Society, 2012.

Tuten, Tracy L., and Michael R. Solomon. Social Media Marketing. Harlow: Pearson, 2014.