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This paper provides a managerial overview of social marketing in India to improve the understanding about its nature and utility in addressing the needs of India's social sector.

The study employs a qualitative research methodology by conducting an extensive review of relevant theories, concepts and past studies related to social marketing, focusing on the Indian context. Select case studies have also been studied and presented to elucidate how social marketing programs are conducted by various forms of organisations in India.

First, the meaning of social marketing, its distinction from commercial marketing and some pertinent challenges faced by social marketers are discussed. Thereafter, a brief overview of the role of competition, cost and barriers towards conducting an effective social marketing program is provided. Lastly, we propose a scheme of organisations sponsoring social marketing in India and discuss the future perspectives.

The study enables a deeper understanding of social marketing discipline for policy makers, social marketing professionals and organisations sponsoring social marketing initiatives in India.

The paper contributes to the literature on social marketing in the Indian context by conducting a broad overview with the aim of improving the understanding of social marketing which may help realise its full potential in the future.

Building on the social marketing theory, this study aims to examine the relationship between family units and obesity in Nigeria; and the social marketing interventions used to reduce and prevent obesity in the Nigerian society.

This study adopted a semi-structured interview research design with 42 obese individuals in Nigeria.

The study findings show that the family unit an individual grows up in influences their consumption behaviour, which drives their obesity. The findings reveal that obese Nigerian citizens are willing to live a healthier lifestyle due to the direct and indirect medical costs associated with obesity. Furthermore, the findings disclose the social marketing interventions – local celebrity endorsements, healthy lifestyle promotions, reduced gym membership and affordable access to healthy foods and services – used to prevent and reduce the rising obesity rates in the Nigerian society.

The findings have important theoretical implication given the focus on consumption behaviour and obesity.

The study findings provide an avenue to guide government officials, policymakers and social marketers in shaping their public policy and social marketing interventions to encourage healthier consumption and lifestyle behaviours among families and individuals in the Nigerian society.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research study to investigate how family units in the emerging market of sub-Saharan Africa drive obesity and the social marketing interventions used to reduce and prevent obesity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This paper aims to expose the inadequacy of social marketing to tackle complex social problems, while proposing an expansion in the discipline’ conceptual repertoire. The goal is to incorporate complexity tools, in particular from the system dynamics field, and the promotion of mindware within a true transdisciplinary paradigm.

This paper uses literature review to support the proposed theoretical development. It also presents a short case study.

Most problems that plague our modern societies have a distinctive complex nature that is not amenable to traditional social marketing interventions. Social marketing has simplified the problem of bringing about societal change by thinking that upstream social actors can be influenced in the same way as downstream individuals. This paper shows that this is not the case while proposing a framework to close this gap.

The proposed framework is a theoretical one. It depends on further refinements and actual application to wicked problems.

Complex social problems – or wicked problems – remain widespread in modern societies. Moreover, they are getting worse over time. The paper presents a proposal to redefine the limits of the social marketing discipline so it can be more useful to tackle such problems. Practical approaches such as measuring the success of mindware in the marketplace of ideas are implied in the proposed framework.

The increase in complexity of social problems has not been accompanied by an evolution in the discipline of social marketing. The lack of proper conceptual tools has prevented the discipline from contributing to tackling these problems effectively. Some interventions may actually worsen the underlying problems, as illustrated in the paper.

This paper identifies two major gaps associated with the social marketing discipline, in particular the lack of complexity and systems thinking and the forsaking of ideas (mindware) as a legitimate goal of the discipline. This realization corroborates the claim that boundaries among disciplines are often artificial, hindering the proper understanding of complex social problems. In turn, only the use of adequate conceptual lenses makes it possible to devise interventions and programs that tackle actual causes (instead of symptoms) of complex social problems.

The social marketing literature tends to focus on upstream marketing (policy) and downstream (individual behaviour change) and has a limited view on midstream (working with partners and community groups) social marketing. The paper proposes midstream social marketing should also include an understanding of how services and service employees influence and support individual behaviour change goals. The paper presents four key services marketing principles – derived from services theory and thinking – which the paper believes to be essential for implementing effective midstream social marketing.

This is a conceptual paper that uses service theory and case-examples to show how service thinking can be used as a midstream social marketing approach.

For effective uptake and impact of social marketing services amongst people and populations, social marketers need to design programs that consider the service experience, the service employee, service quality/customer value and the active role of the customer in value creation.

Services marketing is a well-established sub-discipline of marketing which, until recently, has not interacted with social marketing. The extension and application of services theory for social marketing can enrich and propel the social marketing discipline forward. Further research is recommended to evaluate how service principles can be applied in practice.

Given that social marketing services tend not to be accessed in sufficient numbers by the people who most need them, social marketers need to think beyond the technical, cognitive, and organisational-focused goals when designing social services.

This paper identifies key service theories that social marketers should understand and use and is thus a source of fresh ideas for theory and practice.

Accomplishing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is imperative for societies to meet their grand challenges. Achieving these goals by 2030 requires sustainability change agents with a can-do-attitude. This study aims to show how institutions of higher education can become partners for social marketing in bringing forward such change agents.

Taking a case study approach, this paper examines a master’s programme to identify factors relevant to educating sustainability change agents that can serve as a basis for a social marketing planning primer to foster the SDGs.

This study presents the social marketing discipline with a viable option for supporting the achievement of the SDGs through higher education. Its contributions are twofold. First, it is shown that when interdisciplinarity and a project-based approach are conceptualized and organized to create a motivating and meaningful learning environment with the SDGs as guiding principles, students, as sustainability change agents, can increase awareness and have the potential to generate impacts regarding the SDGs at the individual, organizational and institutional levels. Second, based on this, the paper provides guidance to social marketers regarding the planning of a campaign targeting higher education institutions. The authors argue that the aim of this campaign should be to promote the implementation of the SDGs as guiding principles above all, as this can facilitate the process of students becoming sustainability change agents who help achieve the goals in a timely manner.

Whilst single case studies are usually limited in drawing generalizations, the present study offers a starting point for investigating the role of universities as a target group for social marketing in fostering further sustainable development. Building on its findings, future research could test the proposed social marketing planning primer and evaluate the impact on the SDGs at a larger scale than only one university.

It is proposed to use the findings of the study to model a social marketing campaign aimed at universities to motivate them to help develop sustainability change agents in all disciplines by integrating the SDGs as guiding principles for study programmes.

Students’ impacts range from leading peers to buy sustainable products and consume less to influencing a company to adopt sustainable packaging, thereby contributing to social change.

This study is among the first to examine the possible effect of a study programme on the SDGs at different societal levels by taking the perspectives of multiple stakeholders into account and combining the theory of higher education with sustainability and social marketing.

This paper aims to describe the comparison of two tools in assessing social marketing campaigns.

Using data collected from the campaign planners of 31 alcohol misuse prevention campaigns, two tools were compared; the Social Marketing Indicator (SMI) and Andreasen’s Benchmark Criteria.

In the case of the benchmarks, 26 per cent of the campaigns fulfilled four or more criteria and no criterion was fulfilled by more than 70 per cent. The main differences between current practices and social marketing are the often-missing segmentation and an explicit exchange. The SMI found a lower degree of resemblance between current practices and social marketing. In this case, the major differences lie in the use of behavioral theory and the absence of an exchange.

The SMI allows a more precise description of an intervention. This represents an advantage, as a campaign’s resemblance to social marketing can be reported by directly pointing out the process steps that make the difference. This is important for understanding the research evidence base in social marketing.

Although the benchmark criteria are based on a conceptual approach, the SMI is built around a core procedure. The SMI can thus help program planners from the onset of a project to make sure they do social marketing as it is defined.

This is the first empirical test comparing a new tool against the well-established, frequently critiqued, Benchmark Criteria, in gauging “social marketing” practice in health campaigns.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of experience levels on consumers' value perceptions in their use of a social marketing preventative health service. The study uses services thinking to investigate customer value in a social marketing consumption situation.

An online, self-completion survey was conducted on n=853 Australian women who were users of breastscreening services.

Experienced users derived higher levels of functional and emotional value than novice users and reported higher levels of satisfaction and behavioural intentions to use the service again. However, path analysis indicated that satisfaction was a stronger driver of behavioural intentions for novice users.

The findings highlight the need to understand and segment target audiences in more meaningful ways beyond traditional demographic segmentation. There is a need to understand the value benefits that target audiences seek and acknowledge that these value and service experience perceptions are likely to change over time as target audiences transition from novice to experienced users. This is useful in allowing health services to consider ways of providing a degree of customisation to target audiences, resulting in higher levels of satisfaction, particularly amongst novice users, leading to behavioural intentions to return.

Two novel approaches are used to understand social marketing behaviour: value theory and a services perspective. Through the examination of experience levels, this study acknowledges the enduring nature of many social marketing behaviours, allowing social marketers to examine differences in target audiences' experiences based on whether they are new to or familiar with a behaviour. This provides a fresh perspective in understanding target audiences in social marketing through an understanding of their value perceptions which influence their behaviour, and how these value perceptions are likely to change over time.

Despite social marketing being widely adopted in English-speaking countries, there is limited evidence of it being adopted in German language countries. Alcohol misuse is a social problem that has been the topic of health campaigns globally. The purpose of this paper is to understand the level of knowledge and adoption of social marketing among alcohol misuse prevention campaign planners, to understand current practices in campaigns, and to examine the use adoption of social marketing in such campaigns in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Campaigns were identified through bibliographic databases, online search engines, and expert inquiry. A survey was administered to campaign planners to retrieve primary data about campaigns. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Practices were compared to social marketing using Andreasen's six social marketing benchmark criteria.

In total, 31 campaigns were included in the review. Some 55 per cent of planners reported knowing about social marketing and 52 per cent reported using it in the reviewed campaign. Relative to the benchmark criteria, social marketing was rarely adopted, with one campaign attaining all six criteria and eight meeting at least four of them.

The paper is the first to provide an overview of the use of social marketing in alcohol misuse prevention campaigns in German language countries. It generates information on knowledge and adoption of social marketing and contributes to understanding the diffusion of social marketing in a sample of European countries.

The purpose of this paper is to report on research designed to assess the impact of sponsorship financing of social marketing initiatives on the evaluation of those social marketing programs.

The research utilizes an in-depth, multi-method case study of the Canadian Mental Health Association Calgary Region (CMHA-CR) who carried out a social marketing campaign concerning mental health behaviors that was largely financed by sponsors.

The sponsorship of the CMHA-CR social marketing program was complex with a total of 15 stakeholders involved as sponsors, partners and grantors. The research reveals that while there is considerable sharing of objectives among the stakeholders in this sponsorship, not all objectives are shared between sponsors and sponsees, and not all objectives are shared between the public and private sector sponsors of the program.

The research showed that because sponsors and sponsees share in many of the objectives of the social marketing campaign, the evaluation of the social marketing campaign, particularly its ability to achieve the social marketing-specific objectives, is of interest to all the stakeholder parties, and effective social marketing evaluation must also incorporate evaluation of the non-shared objectives of all sponsorship stakeholders.

Increasing social needs, accompanied by reduced government funding and increased competition amongst not-for-profit (NFP) organizations for that funding, are driving NFPs to seek innovative approaches to financing their social programs. The research reports initial findings critical in this environment, as well as raises issues and questions related to future research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature and role of the critical dimension social marketing and its place within marketing scholarly thought. It is posited that such activity can be defined as “critical social marketing” and a formal definition is offered.

The ability of critical social marketing to inform the research and evidence base, as well as upstream and downstream activity is discussed. Scholarly debate on the role of critical social marketing within the social marketing and critical marketing paradigms, both of which heavily inform the concept, are reviewed. The application of a critical social marketing framework to the study of the impact of tobacco and food marketing is examined.

The paper demonstrates the utility of a critical social marketing framework in real‐world environments. Important considerations on who critical social marketers are and where the concept is located within marketing thought are addressed. The paper concludes by arguing that critical social marketing is a valid and established sub‐set of marketing thought within its own right, and should henceforth be regarded as such.

Offering a definition of critical social marketing formalises its position within marketing thought. Discussing the tensions surrounding the critical dimension of social marketing within the social marketing and critical marketing paradigms demonstrates the difficulty in locating concepts within existing literature. A review of the application of critical social marketing demonstrates its validity. Positing that critical social marketing should be located as a sub‐set within social marketing contributes to the marketing discipline and the organisation of marketing ideas and concepts.