Social marketers use the tools of commercial marketing, but we face additional challenges that a business marketing its products or services probably does not need to address. I write about these challenges in my column today at Marketing Profs Daily Fix:

Back in the 50s, Gerhart Wiebe asked the question "Why can't you sell brotherhood like you sell soap?" and thus the field of social marketing was born.

This question has formed the basis of wide-ranging efforts addressing issues like preventing youth smoking, promoting mammography, staving off bacterial infections from chitterlings, stopping domestic violence, encouraging physical activity and healthy eating habits, touting recycling and many more successful campaigns....

(I'm not including cause marketing here, which usually involves the purchase of commercial products, and benefits a partnering nonprofit.)

So, is the answer that brotherhood and soap are, indeed, pretty much equivalent products to be marketed? Well, yes and no.

Yes, in that we can think about healthy or pro-social behaviors as products we want people to adopt and use. Purchasing a commercial product is a behavior too. We can use the same marketing tools to promote colonoscopies as Coke uses to sell its colas.

But there are some key differences that social marketers run into that complicate the transfer of the business marketing model to selling health and social behaviors.

Read the rest of the article at the Daily Fix to find out what some of those differences are, and some ideas for how to address those challenges.

While you are over at the Marketing Profs site, come join in on the Book Club discussion (free registration req.) about Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba's new book Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message. It's about the brave new world of social media that's empowering ordinary people to influence and promote their favorite brands (or out problems with their not so favorite brands) by creating their own content. I will be soon be reviewing the book here from the point of view of how to apply its concepts to social marketing. I've posted a discussion question at the Book Club to try to collect some examples of how citizen marketing has been used to promote health and social issues. Come on over and put in your two cents and learn more about this great book.

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