social marketing | Pursuit of Perspective

4 Things You Need to Sell Change

It was so tempting to put a clickbait title like “4 Secrets to Selling Change” on this piece but nothing’s really a secret anymore, and readers would know that two paragraphs down. People have become smarter consumers in the past two decades. As a marketer, commercial or social, it is crucial to recognize and understand this. Whether you are selling a product or behavior, your market will know–and know quickly–if you’re giving them a load of crap. With social media, consumers or in the case of social marketing, the target audience, are no longer just the market–they have become the marketers as well (French, 2011). This evolution of roles must be carefully considered when planning the 4Ps for social marketing. Now what do you need when developing a social marketing mix? Authenticity (product). While fake luxury items may have a market in surprising segments of the global population, fake social products don’t. Some people may pay some money for class A bags, but most people will most likely not bother changing their behavior for a …

Social Marketing: What it is NOT

Published by Blanche R. Fernandez

I betray my age with this but reading through the first module of Social Marketing: Changing Behaviors for Good by Nancy Lee and Philip Kotler reminded me of a popular series of TV ads in the 1980s. The commercials were about mothers shopping for soap to address their teenagers’ pimple infection, and just as they are about to pick up a beauty brand, their konsensya appears, telling them that Safeguard is the best protection against the skin germs that cause pimples. This is, of course, commercial marketing at its finest—something that skeptics like me have come to easily identify and doubt. And so to learn that marketing has historically been used for purposes nobler than to build the wealth of the already-wealthy is a revelation and a relief. Social marketing, I believe, puts the conscience in marketing. To shift from marketing for profit to marketing for public gain is a kind of poetic redemption for those of us who at one time or another have served corporate interests over common good (no judgment here, …