Social Marketing: A Tale of Beer, Marriage, and Public Health

Beer, marriage, and public health may seem like odd bedfellows and the links to social marketing obscure – but this chapter shows how they are all intimately connected. It starts with an incident in a local bar which shows how an expert marketer goes about influencing behavior on a very small scale (and with no budget). From here we go on to explore eight key principles of social marketing: objective setting; navigational research; the role of theory; the power of motivation; targeting and segmentation; the marketing mix, upstream thinking and competitive analysis. Finally we discuss how these ideas can and should be brought together in strategic planning. In this way the chapter demonstrates that social marketing cannot just help us to bring about small-scale behavior change, but large-scale social change – and, given the challenges that public health faces, this is much to be welcomed.