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From the Periphery to the Core
and strategy development process.
from the Periphery to the core
One of the challenges faced by every social mar- keter is how to embed social marketing in the heart of the organization that they work for and to sustain its in uence on the organization’s strategy over time. is is true for government, state, regional or local public institutions.
Without an acceptance of the principles of social marketing and the need to build them into the DNA of social programs, the social marketer is forever playing a game of peripheral in uence and discon- nected social marketing project delivery. Whilst it is not a bad thing to attempt to convince organizations on a project-by-project basis to apply a social mar- keting approach, it is a recipe for getting stuck in an active and or ‘add on’ mode of operation. e prob- able impact of such an approach is that potential of social marketing’s contribution to social policy and strategy delivery will be greatly diminished.
What we need to do as a core part of our social marketing practice is advocate for what can be called ‘strategic social marketing.’ French & Blair-Stevens (2010) and others have called this approach ‘mac- ro-social marketing,’ while Wymer (2011), Domegan (2008), and Kenny & Parsons (2012) have termed
it ‘up-stream social marketing’ (Stead et al., 2007).
In essence, all these authors and many others make the case for applying a more strategic approach and moving beyond social marketing being viewed as a second-order operational delivery component to a core part of all social policy and strategy. A strategic social marketing approach is focused on shaping the nature of the social policy and subsequent strategy as well making a contribution to operational deliv- ery. See Figure 1, which illustrates the four levels of governmental and not for pro t policy selection and development, strategy development, tactical selec- tion and operational delivery. Social marketing can
and should be applied at all of these levels. For ease of description the term ‘strategic social marketing’ is used in this article to refer to the total contribution of social marketing principles across all four levels and the term ‘operational social marketing’ is used to indicate the application of social marketing prin- ciples in the areas of tactical selection and program implementation.
e rst challenge then is to embed social mar- keting into the cultural and technical DNA of social organizations. e second challenge is to build a case for sustaining a focus on social marketing principles as a core part of all future strategic planning and operational delivery of all social programs.
embedding Marketing in Social Policy and Strategy
ere are now some good examples from around the world about how to get social marketing taken seriously by public sector organizations and governments and embedded into the policy and strategic process. e long experience pioneered by Mintz and colleagues in Canada (2005) to embed social marketing principles into Health Canada, the development of a national social marketing strategy in the UK between 2004-2009 (French & Mayo, 2006), the inclusion of social marketing standards within the new American 2020 health strategy, the inclusion of social marketing as core principles in the French Epode program and the Netherlands JOGG program, and the inclusion of social marketing in the new WHO Europe health 20/20 program are
all good examples of successfully embedding social
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fig. 1: strategic and operational social Marketing