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Hands-On Social Marketing with Nedra Kline Weinreich
By chris | October 15, 2007
Social Marketing is a fast growing field in nonprofit marketing you need to take a look at. There are so many applications of this form of behavior marketing that the chances are high there is a place for social marketing strategy in your organization. Often nonprofits read marketing books that come from the business world and try without much success to translate profit driven marketing into their context. With social marketing, there’s little need for translation, as it is made for the nonprofit context.
Hands-On Social Marketing demystifies the process of developing and implementing a social marketing campaign. Author Nedra Kline Weinreich is a pioneer in social marketing who also leads a social marketing training course twice a year called Social Marketing University.
We asked Nedra to unpack some of the basics of social marketing for us.
Where did social marketing get started? How did you land in the social marketing field?
Back in the 1950s, a marketer named Gerhard Wiebe asked “Why can’t you sell brotherhood like you sell soap?” and the concept of social marketing was born. It became more formalized as a field in the 1970s, with large-scale international development programs using social marketing to promote things like family planning and child survival. In the 1980s, social marketing spread to the level of the US federal government and lead to campaigns on everything from traffic safety (anyone remember Vince and Larry, the crash test dummies?) to mammography. It’s only recently that social marketing has become known and applied by people at the local community level.
I came to social marketing from a background in public health. I had always been interested in figuring out how to use the mass media to promote health. When I found out about the field of social marketing (back in 1992), it made so much sense to me. We know how effective commercial marketers are in bringing about purchasing behavior, why not use the same tools to promote healthy and pro-social behaviors?
Topics: MinistryCOM |