Charities Undervalue Social-Marketing Approaches, Book Says

Social Marketing in the 21st Century
by Alan R. Andreasen

Nonprofit organizations can use many of the concepts of commercial marketing to promote social change, writes Alan R. Andreasen, a professor of marketing at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, in Washington. “Social marketing can be applied wherever one has a target audience and a behavior one wants to influence,” he says.

Many charitable groups, however, view such marketing as a “downstream approach,” in Mr. Andreasen’s words, best suited to sway people with habits that could hurt themselves and others, such as smoking or littering. Social marketing has the potential to prevent social ills in the first place, he says.

This book suggests methods to encourage people and institutions to collaborate to solve social problems.

Its chief example centers on childhood obesity, a social problem that in Mr. Andreasen’s view lends itself to collaboration between government, business, and nonprofit groups.

Government, he suggests, could require schools to serve healthy, portion-controlled lunches and could levy financial penalties on the institutions if they don’t provide adequate exercise options for overweight students. Simultaneously, food producers could manufacture tasty snacks that are low in calories and fat, while video-game companies could develop games that require physical activity.

Mr. Andreasen urges nonprofit groups to view social change as most effective when education, social marketing, and government policy intersect. “It would seem self-evident that these approaches ought to be seen—and treated—as complementary,” he writes. “Unfortunately, it seems that too many potential partners see them as competitors.”

Publisher: Sage Publications, 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, Calif. 91320; (805) 499-0721; fax (805) 499-0871; info@sagepub.com; http://www.sagepub.com; 264 pages; $34.95; ISBN 1-4129-1634-8.