Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The range of theories people use to analyze their primary materials or data
How other people connect their specific research to larger issues, questions,
or practices within the field.
The exploration has four major functions that I keep in mind as I write:
Social marketing was "born" as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and
Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to
sell products to consumers could be used to "sell" ideas, attitudes and behaviors.
Kotler and Andreasen define social marketing as "differing from other areas of
marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her
organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the
marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society." This technique
has been used extensively in international health programs, especially for
contraceptives and oral rehydration therapy (ORT), and is being used with more
frequency in advance countries especially the United States for such diverse topics
as drug abuse, heart disease and organ donation.
Social marketing strategies are becoming more sophisticated and are assuming a
greater role in efforts to improve health outcomes. One of the biggest mistakes the
society we are living today make is that they assumed that promotion of health
needs no marketing plan. Increasingly, health professionals today are turning to the
field of social marketing to develop and implement health promotion plans. Social
marketing is a technique that has been used since the early seventies to increase
public awareness of the relationship of behaviours to diseases and to influence
people to take action. This is an important mechanism for emphasizing how certain
health behaviours can prevent diseases.
Social marketing has been used in developing countries in many interventions such
as condom use, breast-feeding, and immunization programs. According to Chapman
Walsh and associates (1993, 107-108), early health applications of social marketing
emerged as part of the international development efforts and were implemented in
the third world during the 1960s and 1970s. Programs promoting immunization,
family planning, various agricultural reforms, and nutrition were conducted in
numerous countries in Africa, Asia and South America during the 1970sThe first
nationwide contraceptive program social marketing program, the Nirodh condom
project in India, began in 1967 with funding from the Ford Foundation. The
substantial increase in condom sales was attributed to the distribution and promotion
of condoms at a subsidized price. The success of the Indian experience informed
subsequent
social
marketing
interventions
such
as
the
Andreasen, A.R. (1994) Social Marketing: Its Definition and Domain, Journal
of Public Policy & Marketing, 13 (1), 108-114.
Chapman Walsh, D., Rudd, R.E., Moeykens, B.A. & Moloney, T.W. (1993)
Social marketing for public health, Health affairs.
Bryant, John & Khan, Kausar & Hyder, Adnan: Ethics, equity and renewal of
WHOs health-for-all strategy. World Health Forum, WHO Geneva. An
International Journal of Health Development, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1997.