How to Combat the Negative Side of Consumer Behavior With Societal Marketing

Social marketing is a specialized marketing campaign that sells important messages about healthy living and safety, and provides important information. Social marketing is the combination of social progression and consumer marketing, selling information about health and improved lifestyle choices as if they were physical products. This sales technique allows groups to directly influence the consumer behaviors of individuals and work to avoid the negative consumer choices that they might otherwise make. Social marketing is a tool for governments and organizations to positively influence social decision making by consumers.

Instructions

• 1

  Focus your efforts toward a specific group of consumers but provide additional information and encouragement for other individuals as well. Use this targeted approach to focus on specific consumer behaviors related to your focus group. For instance, the DanceSafe social marketing campaign focuses on youth who enjoy the dancing and partying environment but who are not addicted to various substances. The campaign provides information and resources aimed at informing non-addicted youth about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, while providing an environment where youth can ask questions without judgment.

• 2

  Provide resources that are not available elsewhere to assist your focus group. This includes information and services that empower the public to make informed decisions. As an example, DanceSafe provides booths in some night clubs and rave events where they offer safe sex necessities such as condoms, and provide adulterant screening for pills. Adulterant screening is the process of testing a pill and determining if it includes harmful chemicals that could pose an unexpected health risks to users. This screening process checks if a pill contains ecstasy-like chemicals or other harmful poisons, preventing the purchase of harmful or unwanted drugs.

• 3

  Use a comprehensive lifestyle shift as part of your marketing, suggesting that individuals make numerous changes to their current lifestyles to improve their health. Combine similar actions and ideas and suggest easy ways to begin living the better lifestyle. For instance, the Choosing Health program suggests a lifestyle that is generally healthy, including regular exercise, participating in outdoor events, improving dieting techniques and living a chemically free life. While the number of changes with these programs can be daunting, these social marketing programs ascribe to an idea of total health for all individuals.

• 4

  Provide actionable information to government offices that suggest specific things they can do to help you in your efforts. This help might include passing specific laws to promote your cause or providing incentives for people to choose a better lifestyle. As an example, the Choosing Health program works to reduce public smoking through direct anti-smoking legislation. These actions directly limit negative consumer behaviors by limiting consumer access to these dangers.