Q: We’re a group of graduating college students majoring in marketing. One elective course we enrolled in for our last semester was “Social Marketing.”
Next week is the last week of the semester and after which is graduation. Our professor has told us to use as our reference textbook the Senior MRx-er’s first edition social marketing book co-authored with Philip Kotler.
Our professor also mentioned that she was the Senior MRx-er’s student at AIM. As she has experienced it in AIM, she teaches social marketing using cases.
But those cases were a mix of “social marketing” and “social enterprise marketing” as our professor had categorized them. When we asked what’s the difference between the two, our professor threw the question back at us and told us it’s a question for us to answer for ourselves and we should do so from the cases we’ve taken up.
What we’ve concluded as the difference is in the application. Social marketing looks like it’s marketing as applied by nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and government organizations (GOs) on anti-poverty campaigns, anti-RH bill campaigns and the like.
On the other hand, social enterprise marketing is marketing that NGOs and GOs also do but for its money-making projects like its micro-finance projects.
Will you please share with us your answer to our question about how social marketing really differs from social enterprise marketing?
A: It’s good that you’re asking your question on the last week of the semester of your graduation year. If this were at the start of the semester, we would not answer for obvious reason. It’s not fair to your professor and also not fair to you as students.
In the interest of closure, we’ll answer your question. The difference you’ve arrived at is in the right direction. When it comes to matters of definition, we like to differentiate along three aspects: for what behavior, by whom, and for what purpose.
In the Senior MRx-er’s graduate course on social marketing and in his public seminars on it, he defines social marketing as simply about changing social behavior among the intended stakeholders of NGOs and GOs in order to solve a defined social problem.
On the other hand, social enterprise marketing is about influencing the purchase and usage behavior among the intended customers for the products and/or services of an NGO’s or a GO’s “business enterprise.”
The Senior MRx-er has a forthcoming book on social marketing research. In this book, social marketing is more specifically defined as “the process of changing social behavior of intended beneficiaries: (1) from harmful to beneficial, (2) from bad to good or (3) from good to better, and to sustain the changed behavior.”
This concept of social marketing distinguishes among three kinds and levels of behavior change. The first is illustrated in the case of drug addiction and that’s changing a harmful behavior to a beneficial one. The second is the case of alcohol addiction and calls for changing a bad behavior into a good one. The third is the case of a hypertensive who exercises but do so irregularly. The desired behavior change here is from a good behavior to a better one.
In our social marketing research and consulting work with NGOs and GOs, we’re often been asked to also help in their “business and marketing ventures.”
For example, the Department of Agrarian Reform once sought the Senior MRx-er’s assistance in conducting a seminar for its farmers who had just been awarded their farm lands so that they can do a monetarily successful marketing and selling of the lands’ produce like rice, corn, vegetables and fruits as well as processed and packaged farm goods such as jams, pies, cakes and condiments.
NGOs that are into assisting micro-entrepreneurs have similar ventures over and above the help they offer to marginalized families in the areas of health, hygiene, and other social services.
Social marketing’s involvement with NGOs’ and GOs’ business and marketing ventures came to be known as “social enterprise marketing.”
It was Professor Ed Morato who coined the label in the early 1990s.
Professor Jim Austin of the Harvard Business School, when visiting AIM, later adopted the brand name when HBS decided to help NGOs and GOs do a good job at their business and marketing ventures.
In a good number of occasions, we’ve been asked whether social enterprise marketing applies to the community and social projects that large companies like Coca-Cola, San Miguel and Jollibee do as part of their CSR [corporate social responsibility] mission.
These projects started picking up and scaling up in the late 90s and early 2000s. When such projects were intended to empower families or groups of families in a community to be financially on their own, we agreed to use the social enterprise marketing label.
In the past three to four years, several companies wanted to draw a distinction. It’s clear to them that the business and marketing ventures that NGOs and GOs are into constitute social enterprise marketing. But often and in almost all instances, a corporation’s CSR community and social project is serving local NGOs and GOs as its intended beneficiaries.
At that point, we started referring to what these companies are doing as “Corporate Social Marketing.” Some companies have accepted the branding although there were a good number that were after a “more suitable and fitting” label.
Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at MarketingRx@pldtDSL.net or drnedmarketingrx@gmail.com. God bless!