Abstract

For a subject that is only just over 40 years in the making social marketing has attracted a considerable amount of controversy and confusion over its actual definition. As a term social marketing appears to have been formally used for the first time by Kotler and Zaltmann (1971) who viewed marketing as a technological process which in turn was to have implications for how they viewed social marketing. As Andreasen (2003) argues, the initial views of social marketing culminating in the definition in 1971 grew from early post-war ideas in the USA which saw the birth of marketing as a professional activity as a response to a growing consumer market (Truss et al. 2009). Social scientists such as Wiebe (1952) whilst acknowledging the power and effectiveness of marketing saw other opportunities for shifting such techniques from the selling of commodities through to the domain of social change. He went on to propose a series of processes and social mechanisms which would be required to mount a successful programme of social change via marketing.