Social Marketing Anniversary-Phil Kotler's Thoughts!

As I wrote in my July 6th posting, this month marks the 38th anniversary of the birth of social marketing--the anniversary of Kotler and Zaltman's article "Social Marketing:  An Approach to Planned Social Change," (the Journal of Marketing, Vol. 35, pp. 3-12, July 6, 1971) in which they first conceptualized social marketing !

I was interested in Kotler's thoughts about social marketing now, after 'lo these many years. Here is what you had to say.

"In the 1970s, a few of us academic marketers at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University started to assert that marketing can be applied to a broader range of issues beyond the marketing of goods and services.  Marketing could help create interest in places, persons, organizations, ideas, and causes.  In the last case, Professor Gerald Zaltman and I had been exchanging ideas about social change and social movements.  We decided to research and write an article on how marketing could be used to "sell" better behaviors, such as "say no to drugs," "don't litter,"  "exercise regularly," and so on.  We chose the name "social marketing" to help the public's gain a better view of marketing.  In retrospect, we could have called it "cause marketing" or "social cause marketing."   

 

The field of social marketing grew slowly at first.  Ned Roberto and I wrote the first book, Social Marketing, on the subject. Eventually social marketing drew the interest of the Center for Disease Control, the World Bank, World Vision, Population Services International, the Population and Community Development Association of Thailand, and other organizations.  Social and health oriented advocates began to appear from different countries.  Alan Andreasen and others wrote books on social marketing and organized annual meetings.  This culminated with the launching of the World's First Social Marketing Conference in Brighton England in late September 2008 which drew 700 attendees.  In July 2009, Nancy Lee and I published Up and Out of Poverty: The Social Marketing Solution, the first book applying social marketing to a specific and grave problem, poverty. 

 

It appears that social marketing has passed the take-off stage and is entering a period of steady growth." 

When I asked him the current practice of calling social media "social marketing," he had this to say:

We wish that those who talk about social media use that term [i.e. social media].  They can call it social media marketing.  But it shouldn't be abbreviated to social marketing. 

So, there is a brief history of social marketing from one of its fathers!  And the next time you hear someone say "social marketing" when they are talking about social media, resist the impulse to throttle them (or not!)--whip out the quote from Dr. Philip Kotler!

Comments

[Mike Newton-Ward]

Thanks for adding this background, Craig. We who now practice social marketing do indeed have a "goodly heritage," both in print and in practice!

[Craig]

Phil and I have talked about this chronology before, but for your readers, the social marketing books and publications that preceeded his book with Roberto include:
The Marketing of Ideas and Social Issues by Seymour Fine (1981), Marketing Health Behavior (1984); Frederiksen, Solomon & Brehony), Richard Manoff’s Social Marketing: New Imperative for Public Health (1985), Social Marketing and Public Health Intervention in Health Education Quarterly by Craig Lefebvre & June Flora (1988), and then Social Marketing by Kotler & Roberto in 1989.

And many in the international world will rightly argue that the first applications of marketing to social issues, particularly family planning, occurred in India a few years before Phil and Gerald coined the term.