Marketing Principals and Concepts - Essay Example

Roll Number MARKETING PRINCIPALS AND CONCEPTS   Total words 500 This paper gives an overview of what actually social marketing is, how effective is it for a marketer to know basic concepts and principles of marketing? Moreover it also includes some examples of companies and organizations that succeeded because they have followed basic social marketing principles. Social marketing is an effective tool of achieving specific behavioral objectives for social good by using other techniques and concepts. Sometimes it is only used to get viable marketing practices to get non commercial ambitions. So the main difference between social and commercial marketing is that the basic objective of social marketing is “social good” whereas in case of commercial marketing the sole purpose is to get “finance”. Social marketing was introduces as discipline in 1970.Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman were the fathers of social marketing who thought of using marketing principles to “sell ideas, stance and behaviors” rather than selling goods with a sole purpose to benefit the target audience by influencing social behaviors .But before that social marketing was used as a tool to control birth rate in INDIA. Marketing itself has 4P’s that are: Product, price, place and promotion whereas social marketing has some additional P’s that include publics, partnership, policy and purse strings. Furthermore publics are divided into two groups: external and internal group. Internal publics are the one who are somehow involved in endorsement or accomplishment of program whereas external publics might include target audience, resultant audience, strategy makers or gatekeepers. A resource guide of social marketing believes that’ “Social marketing is basically applying commercial marketing principles to health and human service programs”. Promotions in social marketing are mixture of activities as (Rob Donovan, Principles and Practice of Social Marketing: An International Perspective) says, “it includes advertising, direct marketing, personal selling, sponsorships, sales promotion and public relations”. There are also two t’s of social marketing process, according to (Earle) “The Two T’s are: The Key to a Cause Campaign that succeeds Target & Tone. He believes that marketer should “Just Say No” to an uncertain Target.” Mainly there are six basic steps of social marketing process .Firstly you have to define your issue and have to do research regarding public attitude toward the issue. After knowing your target issue you should plan and develop your strategy. While planning and developing strategy one should keep his target audience in mind so that he could select the most effective techniques to get the desired result. Once you are done with the strategy and planning, you have to develop your material which includes message construction and plan media activities or any other tool to promote your idea. Now you have to make your communication plan which is the forth and one of the most important steps of social marketing process. In this step marketer has to note the issues, objectives, benefits to audience, possible problem and evaluation methods. You can say that this step is the road map which leads to your destination. The road-map should be in writing. After completing the paper work you have to launch your idea or campaign and final step is of assessment. It is difficult for an organization to gain health or social changes all by itself so they need help of other agencies in order to get the desired output so they seek for an organization working on same issue for a combine effort that proves to be more effective. Media advocacy could be very helpful to make social marketing program successful and the most important thing to run a social marketing program is to arrange funds. We can get many examples of social marketing campaigns around us. Marketers are using many effective tools to reach their targeted audience and getting the desired outcome. A Uk based company Equater media is one of the successful social marketing agencies that is running several effective campaigns. “BREATHE” is one of these campaigns, run be channel 4 to provoke teenagers to quit smoking. There methodology sounds quite interesting that is they invite teenagers to send their film ideas to the channel and shortlisted contestants are invited to attend a two day workshop at channel 4. The winning idea is produced in form of a short film for internet and mobiles. CLIMART ™ (THE CLIMATE CHANGE CAMPAIGN) is also an example of such campaigns.It invites the public of UK to imagine how world will look like in 2050. There are many organizations that are working on climate issue but CLIMART stands out just because of the interesting strategy it has selected to spread the awareness regarding the issue. They have engaged the audience itself to make them aware of the specific issue. It is a competetion and has five different categories to combat climate change: animation and film, illustrations or paintings, music, photography and ideas. Moreover they are also ruuning some other campaigns which include cancer research, city academy, DATUM, genius, OXHA, AFFORD, TALK TO FRANK, channel4 and enterprise right. They are working with collaboration of some other relevant organizations and this is one of the reasons of there success that they know partnership will help them to get the expected outcomes. There are many other organizations in UK who are working in the same area but the reason behind their success is the systematic procedure they have followed to make the campaign effective and succesful.They have a trianed staff who know its job and had good grasp of social marketing tools. Secondly they have used P’s of marketing effectively, there campaign was focused and moreover face to face marketing made this campaign succesful. Most of the well knowned organizations know the importance of social marketing thats why they somehow keep on participating in social events by sponcering them or arranging them. A UK based organization NHS has established a roaster of 19 agencies in july,2009.They had responsibilty of over 24 primary care trusts, 23 acute trusts, eight mental health trusts, seven specialist trusts including childern care and learning disability.NHS ambulance is also a great contribution to social sevice. Basically they help organizations to develop status of a complete foundation.There might be other organizations who are funding any health organization but NHS is different as it supports diferent trusts and primary care trusts to improve their services and making their service more accesible to general public.Moreover it also help them train their workforce. Instead of direct fundings they help these organizations to make their work force more powerful which will directly benefit the mass public.They have also launched many succesful social service projects that include 100 wishes, echoes of the hearts, park royal landmark,Patric clement clinic, and rainbow childern clinic. All the projects mentioned above were arranged in middlesex hospital for the benefit of patients, staff and other work force just to maintain the good will of organization.They made these projects possible by getting funds from different reputable organizations and also invite general public to raise funds if they can Organizations like NHS help in facilitating general public without any personal benefit like getting financeas it is a fact that social marketing is more about subordinating obstructions and escalating facilitators to behavior than about messages and promotions. There services to benefit general public helped them in portraying their good will. Many other organizations have joined hand with NHS after seeing the public image of NHS. NHS can also run more social marketing projects other then arts which could directly help the general public like planting trees, giving funds to other needy organizations or people, making free dispencery for needy people or special health packages for poor people. Currently most of there projects are for their patients or other work force which also no doubt is a contribution in social marketing service as German proverb says, “charity sees the need, not the cause”. Social media plays an mportant role in success of a social marketing project but the most challenging part of marketer’s job is to change the behaivior of a person or public toward specific issue.(Marvin E. Goldberg) says, many socialmarketing behaviors have important personal benefits such as losing weight, getting off drugs, and spacing childern.on the other hand , an important subset of behaviors have costs to the individuals, but the benefits produced are largely accruing to others”. There are some benefits that are obvious for general public like quit smoking but there are some issues that might be seem unobseravable to general public like what if a bachelor is not switching to a low cholestrol diet. Moreover campaigns are designed according to there validity period. Some projects need one tme change of behavior whereas other needs to be continued for example vaccination against malaria or measles need one time behavior change or are one time event where as long term projects like quit smoking requires repeat attempts. Another important barrier that a social marketer face is about engaging the targetted audience in the project. It is difficult for himto raise a sense of self efficacy in public as some behaviors are only in control of individuals like drive slow.A marketer needs a different approach to change different behaviors to become a successful marketer. So if we summarize social marketing it needs a proper planning of program to change behaviors that is based on research in order to understand the point of view of audience. So in order to bring a social change a marketer should know exactly what change he wants to bring, should know his target audience, should clearly think about the benefits, costs and change. Most importantly the marketer should know when and how to enter the right frame of mind, place and time. If an organization or marketer keep the above mentioned points in mind and work according to these principles then surely he will face all the issues and difficulties boldly and would be able to make correct decisions at correct time. REFERENCES Earle, Richard. "The How, When, & Why!s of effective social marketing campaigns." The Regis Group, Inc. Sacramento, CA, November,2007. Marvin E. Goldberg, Martin Fishbein. Social marketing: theoretical and practical perspectives. Susan E. Middlestadt: Routledge, 1997. Rob Donovan, Nadine Henley. Principles and Practice of Social Marketing: An International Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Read More