Social marketing applications in public policy programs: key learnings and applications

Abstract

Purpose

Marketing tools used in public policy may not be purely commercial but based on non-commercial marketing exchanges also. This paper aims to make a case for the practice of social marketing principles to aid the context of public policy.

Design/methodology/approach

The approach is to draw out the key implementable learnings (KILs) from the analysis of the five public policy initiatives in the USA, India and Sri Lanka. A case situation with the context of child labour policy in India is proposed to use these KILs.

Findings

This paper concludes that the implementation of any policy is a challenging exercise and dependent on a large number of factors. However, KILs derived from successful social marketing programs deal with umbrella campaigns, prevailing socio-cultural environment, bottom-up communication, upstream approach to engage with stakeholders and targeted media advocacy could prove useful when the objective is to induce behaviour change as a part of the policy execution.

Originality/value

This paper evaluates the learnings from social marketing campaigns and their relevance to public policy programs. It also considers a case to demonstrate the application of the concept.

Citation

Mishra, S. and Rishi, B. (2021), "Social marketing applications in public policy programs: key learnings and applications", Social Responsibility Journal, Vol. 17 No. 6, pp. 741-755. https://doi.org/10.1108/SRJ-03-2020-0087