This document discusses the effectiveness of social marketing strategies aimed at behavior change and the biases that hinder their success. It highlights that social marketers often focus on individual behavior without considering environmental factors and advocates for a broader social marketing approach that includes public health concepts. Future research is encouraged to explore integrating ideas from other fields to enhance the effectiveness of social marketing initiatives.

1. Presented to
Sir Zafar Abbas Khichi
Presented by
Mehmood Amin (19)

2. Developing more effective social
marketing strategies

3. Social marketing
 Social marketing has been defined as model for behavior change
 social marketing is a process that applies traditional marketing principles
and techniques to influence target audience behaviors that benefit society
as well as the individual
 It is a marketing function that is used by the organizations to commercially
spread a social message which can benefit to individuals and the society
by educating the people and society about a social cause to improve their
wellbeing.

5. Introduction
A central point of this paper is that many social marketers are reducing their
programs’ effectiveness because:
 their comprehension of the social problem is biased through their mental models
 they restrict their choice set of strategies to those targeting individuals while
excluding environmental factors
 when they acknowledge the presence of environmental factors, they fail to develop
a plan to remove the upstream causes of their target social problem.
this paper will discuss the relationship between social marketing and the public health
field

6. Conceptual background
Social marketing is no different from any other discipline in that its theories and
concept are based on explicit or implicit assumptions. When applying social marketing
solutions to social problems in which these assumptions are met, social marketing
solutions can produce relatively effective outcomes. When applying social marketing
solutions to social problems in which these assumptions are not met, social marketing
solutions are less effective.

7. Cont.…
By observing the academic and practitioner conceptualizations of social marketing,
their tacit assumptions appear to be
 The root cause of problems to be addressed by social marketing is unhealthy
individual behavior.
 These unhealthy behaviors tend to be habituated.
 Driving habituated unhealthy behavior is insufficient or incorrect knowledge
attitudes that reinforce the behaviors, or possibly a lack of healthy alternatives.
 Individuals have control over their behavior – individual volition.

8. Cont.
 Social marketing solutions tend to be aimed at helping individuals to change
their unhealthy behaviors to healthy behaviors (behavior modification).
 This is typically accomplished through educational campaigns to increase or
correct individual knowledge of the target
 In addition to these communication programs, social marketers sometimes offer
individual products to help individuals replace unhealthy behaviors with healthy
behaviors (e.g. condoms and nicotine gum).

9. Effectiveness of social marketing
 Effectiveness is defined as the extent to which a social marketing program achieves
its intended purpose or function
 Ten out of 18 studies aimed at increasing fruit and vegetable intake had a positive
effect.
 Eight out of 18 studies seeking to reduce dietary fat intake had a positive effect.
 Eight out of 21 studies aimed at increasing physical activity had a positive effect.
These findings were used as evidence of the effectiveness of social marketing
programs

10. Broadening the social marketing strategy
array
Social marketing scholars have become accustomed to viewing phenomena at the
individual level rather than at the community/society level. As the marketing field
broadened its scope to include consumer behavior, it was strongly influenced by the
psychology discipline focused on influencing individual consumers rather than
improving societal well-being. Over time, these orientations became tacit professional
norms and conceptual assumptions. Many marketing researchers think of their
discipline as a behavioral science rather than a social science.

11. Cont.
when corporations are asked to change, they will resist change – especially when their
profits may be reduced.
A successful advocacy campaign doesn’t make friends. It makes enemies. It points a
finger, names, and starts fight.
In dealing with alcohol-related social problems, that there is a “fundamental clash of
values between the alcohol industry and the public health community.

12. Social marketing and public health
initiatives
Social marketing has most often been used to provide solutions in the public health
Area. Therefore, social marketers would do well to inform their social marketing
framework by including concepts from the public health field rather than a strict
adherence to commercial marketing concepts more appropriate for selling consumer
goods than affecting social change
Primary prevention
 Primary prevention is an important sub-field of the public health discipline
 Primary prevention is defined as activities, programs, or policies designed to
reduce the incidence or the number of new cases of a disease or problem

13. Cont.
Primary prevention tactics are categorized into three parts
 Health promotion deals with educating and training healthy populations to lead
healthy lifestyles. Examples are campaigns that address tobacco consumption,
alcohol consumption, diet, and exercise issues.
 Disease prevention programs provide preventive services to high risk populations.
Examples include stress reduction classes, smoking cessation classes, clinical
screenings, and counseling.
 Health protection strategies are aimed at benefiting the entire population without
requiring individuals to change their behaviors, make choices, or take actions.
Health protection improves health and wellness for all by altering the environment
surrounding the community. Examples of health protection are reducing community
exposure to radiation, carcinogens, and other toxins. Other examples are motorcycle
helmet laws, seat belt laws, food safety laws, and worker safety laws.

14. Cont.
 Health promotion and disease prevention are consistent with the traditional social
marketing framework because they are aimed at individuals – to inform, to change
attitudes, and to change behaviors.
 Health protection strategies, however, diverge from traditional social marketing
thinking. Health protection’s emphasis is on the environment in which a community
lives in order to reduce or eliminate harmful and unhealthful elements in the
environment.

15. Social marketing strategy selection
Motivation
Ignorance
Pathogenic
agent
Privation
The model is presented in Figure 1. It is hierarchical.
The four labels on the pyramid model represent
categories of causes of a target social problem.
These causes, then, are also the barriers to the
amelioration of the social problem.
The lower two categories are directed Individual
at the environment (health protection).
The upper two categories are directed at the individual
(health promotion and disease prevention)
Environment

16. Cont.
1. Environmental barriers
 The presence of a privation barrier indicates that one or more variables are absent
from the environment, variables that are required for people to live with good
health and well-being.
 Pathogenic agents refer to variables present in the environment which cause an
unhealthy conditions. an example might be the presence of toxins in the ecological
or biophysical environments. Toxins in the soil, air, or water may create an
unhealthy condition. For example, living close to a petrochemical plant has been
shown to increase. Regulations to reduce the carcinogenic waste of petrochemical
facilities may be needed.

17. Cont.
2. Individual barriers
 Ignorance, In some cases, individuals may not know enough about an issue to take
corrective measures to protect themselves. For example, when individuals consider
buying a new home, how many check to see how close the home is to a high-traffic
road, high-voltage electric lines, or cell phone towers, all of which are linked to
increased cancer
 Motivation, A recent social marketing literature review reported that several
behavior change theories have been used in prior social marketing research. The
objective of these theories is to motivate individuals to change their behavior.

18. Discussion and conclusion
The most fundamental point for its effective use is that social marketing strategists
correctly understand the causality of the social problem with which they are dealing. If
social marketers have an erroneous understanding of the causality of their target social
problems, then the effectiveness of their social marketing solutions will be impaired.
Failure to understand the causality of the social problem is caused by a lack of
knowledge and misperceptions due to biases from professional norms, unmet tacit
assumptions, and so forth. There are many different biases, which impede social
marketers’ ability to understand the causality of social problems

19. Future research
 scholars are encouraged to investigate the efficacy of abandoning a fidelity to
commercial marketing concepts and instead explore the use of concepts from
other fields as discussed previously into the social marketing framework.
 Although marketing scholars are more accustomed to working on individual
behavior change issues, much more work is needed on social change issues.
 a historical analysis can be conducted which examines cases in which programs
that were only aimed at the individual are compared to cases that also targeted
environmental factors