Social marketing: thoughts from an empathetic outsider

ABSTRACT

Social marketing holds great hope for promoting well-being and social good. Yet, as a ‘master’s tools’ strategy it must be deployed carefully and critically to ensure campaigns are not co-opted by the individualising and issue shaping forces of mainstream marketing. Moreover, social marketing strategies should go beyond promoting better and healthier choices for individuals, and be deployed to encourage critical thinking, political engagement and social action.

KEYWORDS:

• Social marketing
• critical thinking
• individualisation
• advertising

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The actual quote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1852, p. 1).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joel Bakan

Joel Bakan is a professor of law at the University of British Columbia. He is author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, and writer and co-creator (with Mark Achbar) of the feature documentary film, The Corporation, based on the book. Other work includes Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs (1997), and Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children (2012), as well as textbooks, edited collections, and articles in legal and social science journals.