Blackwell Reference Online

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Social marketing is a tool or framework that “relies on multiple scientific disciplines to create programs designed to influence human behavior on a large scale” ( Smith 2006 , 138). It traces its roots to an article written in the 1950s by the sociologist G. D. Wiebe, who “expressed concern that marketing was not being applied to such problems as ‘selling brotherhood like soap’” ( Andreasen 2003 , 294). The idea did not grow, however, until the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars such as Philip Kotler, Sidney Levy, Gerald Zaltman, and Alan Andreasen began to write about its core principles and gave it a name ( Andreasen 2003 ). Although social marketing has been used to address a variety of social concerns, it has been most consistently used in health promotion and disease prevention ( Andreasen 2002 ), which has made it an area of special interest to scholars in health communication. Successful social marketing initiatives focused on health outcomes have included the truth® anti-smoking campaign aimed at teenagers; the Swiss Stop AIDS program, which sought to increase condom use among casual sex partners; the VERB ™ campaign, which promoted activity among 9–13 year olds; and the PREMI initiative, which increased immunization coverage in Ecuador (for more detailed examples, see Lefebvre & Flora 1988 ; Grier & Bryant 2005 ; Smith 2006 ; →  Health Communication ; Marketing ... log in or subscribe to read full text