write an article on the significance of social marketing Paper must be at least 1750 words
It was primarily consolidated that social marketing could be understood as part of an effort to broaden the domain of marketing beyond the traditional frameworks in order to establish what could be called generic marketing (Kotler & Levy, 1969. Kotler & Zaltman, 1971. also see Andreasen . 2000). While marketing can be defined as “a universal business philosophy [claiming] that customers become the pivotal point around which the entire operations of business revolve” (Neelamegham 1994, p.21), the term “social marketing” denotes the marketing of commodities enjoying social priority” (p 836). Social marketing could be differentiated from commercial marketing on the ground that social marketing .is the application of commercial marketing concepts and tools to .programs .designed to influence the voluntary behaviour of target audiences where the primary objective is to improve the welfare of the target audiences and/or the society of which they are a part (Andreasen 1994. p 110). According to Pilkington (2007), an important difference between commercial and social marketing lies in the determinants of success. “[W]hereas commercial marketing depends on the effective identification of a selling opportunity successfully seized and exploited, social marketing requires the involvement of the whole society” (328). He adds that “failure in social marketing is never on part of the consumer but of society” (342).
Kotler and Lee (2009) observe the purpose of social marketing as developing “constructive approaches to support desired behaviour changes” (48). For them, the basic principle in this context is to increase the audience’s perception that the benefits of the new behaviour outweigh the costs of adopting it. The new behaviour must be seen as having a higher value than the current behaviour. Hence the authors depict the behavioural transformation envisaged by the programme and the value of such changes through the market-oriented cost-benefit analysis. .The basic motivational factors in social marketing moves much beyond the traditional goals of customer satisfaction and profit set by the commercial marketing enterprises to human welfare at large although it uses similar themes of commercial marketing in terms of planning, pricing, communication and analysis. . .