Have you tried social marketing?

According to the Social Marketing Institute , social marketing is the planning and implementation of programs designed to bring about social change using concepts from commercial marketing.

Social marketing was "born" as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to "sell" ideas, attitudes and behaviors. Kotler and Andreasen define social marketing as "differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society” (Weinreich Communications).

So what exactly does all of this mean? After diligently searching through tons of Web sites I found a great article on About.com - Strategic Social Marketing for Nonprofits by Nedra Kline Weinreich the president and founder of Weinreich Communications (also mentioned above)and the author of Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide. In this article Weinrich says “Social marketing uses the same tools and techniques of commercial marketing, but its purpose is to bring about positive health and social change. Social marketing's bottom line is behavior change.” The article is excellent and lends an avenue for a better understanding of what social change really is all about.

Today social marketing is rampant. See example social marketing campaigns at http://www.wwu.edu/chw/preventionandwellness/grantpages/socialmarketing.htm.