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citizens and a general positive improvement in global health (UNICEF 2015).
citizen-centric Social Policy
e rise of citizen empowerment driven by eco- nomic development, improved health literacy and technology is leading to the development of what political philosopher Michael Sandel describes as not only new forms of government but also new kinds of citizenship (Sandel, 2009). e relation- ship between the governed and the governments
is changing rapidly to one characterized by more
dialogue and more joint resp“onsibility and co-pro- eration of what French (2011) calls ‘Forms’ and
duction of solutions to social challenges. Clarke et
al. (2007) argue this new relationship is informed by
the increasing expectation on the part of more lit-
erate and wealthy citizen governments social marketing can
to be treated with respect bring to the social policy and attention. People want need to go beyond development and imple- governments and their just using the law and mentation arena is the agencies to emulate many concept of value creation. of the customer-centric Value creation can be approaches that are now education as the default developed through the routine in the commercial options to bring about use of both rational o ers sector. People’s consumer desired changes in such as conditional cash and market experience payments for socially leads to sets of expec- behavior for social good. responsible behavior and
tations about levels of
quality of service from
public institutions. is expectation can be used to drive improved practice. People, especially those living in advanced liberal democracies, want gov- ernments to inform them, consult them, incentivize good behavior and do less disincentivizing and ban- ning when it comes to social policy interventions (Ipsos MORI, 2010).
creating Social value
Rothschild’s famous 1998 social marketing article entitled “Carrots, Sticks and Promises” made the case that governments need to go beyond just using the law and education as the default options to bring about desired changes in behavior for social good. Rothschild advocated the use of mar- keting thinking to assist the development of more
those o ers that appeal
to more intuitive rapid cognition such as the design of road systems that
slow tra c. Value can also be developed via socially sanctioned and supported disincentives such as nes or exclusion.
Key to success is that what citizens feel, say and do is taken into account when developing any mix of interventions. If social programs are not sup- ported and valued by citizens they will ultimately or o en very rapidly fail to deliver the desired social improvement. However there is still a major under-utilization and misinterpretation of market- ing and social marketing in many governments and social marketing is o en viewed as a second-or- der task in many public sector policy and strategy development circles. So before social marketing can bring vale to the policy table we need to consider how it can best be embedded into the policymaking
MarketiNg for social chaNge
value-based propositions to citizens to persuade team to adopt positive social behaviors. e cre- ation of value (Bargozzi, 1975), the importance
of service (Grönroos, 2007) and the relationship building function and process of marketing (Gum- messon, 1987) are all now well established in commercial sector marketing but much less so in social policy.
Rather than simplistic debates about applying social marketing at an operational level o en via a crude 4P approach, social marketing needs to now apply the concepts of value creation, relationship building and service combined with a consid-
‘Types’ of interventions to in uence and enhance the social policy and strategy development pro- cess. One of the central pieces of added value that
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