Impact of social marketing

The top 4 lessons from social marketing that can help policy makers in their efforts to address the social determinants of health

1. Social marketing can help to focus on the specific priority behaviours we can realistically influence today while also mobilizing public demand for the environmental changes that are needed to influence the wider social determinants of health.

2. Social marketing programmes have a greater chance of sustained success if they take a 2-pronged approach to try and influence the internal (psychological) and external (environmental) factors that influence how we behave.  For example, any programmes designed to motivate responsible alcohol consumption must also address key environmental factors such as accessibility, price and the intensive marketing of competing products.

3. Social marketing can help to make the most cost-effective use of limited public resources by:

• Utilizing existing strengths, resources and opportunities from within communities
• Pre-testing effective approaches at a local scale
• Taking preventative action to address emerging social problems

4. Social marketing can provide government agencies, NGOs and the private sector with a transparent platform for working together because it is clearly based on providing evidence of sustained behaviour change as the bottom-line indicator of success.