The Position of Social Marketing in the Evolution of Marketing Thought
I recently came across an article in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing that should be required reading for anyone interested in a broad, historical perspective on the evolution of marketing thought. “Scholarly research in marketing: Exploring the ‘4 Eras’ of thought development” by William Wilkie and Elizabeth Moore is NOT light reading (any article with 4 pages of double-column references should tip you off to this). However, I’m not sure you’ll find so much information about the topic in one other place and the opportunity to think about what we do (and don’t do) in social marketing.
Briefly, they note that in the 4th era in the development of marketing thought (1980 – present) social marketing has become one of the primary topics in marketing and society research. This emergence of prominence they attribute to Paul Bloom and Gregory Gundlach’s inclusion of social marketing as one of four pillars in the framework they developed for their book Handbook of Marketing and Society (link). “Formally, social marketing differs from traditional marketing in aiming to benefit the target audience directly (e.g., AIDS awareness, childhood immunization) or society as a whole (e.g., recycling programs, blood donations) rather than the firm sponsoring the program.” A certainly debatable proposition, but moving on...
Two conclusions I found interesting and worthy of your own thinking and action.
- That the “marketing and society” area is fragmented, with social marketing identified as one of six subgroups doing research on marketing and social issues (the others are public policy and marketing, macromarketing, consumer economics, marketing ethics and international consumer policy).
- Fragmentation can be both a strength and weakness, but later they make the point “…that the ideal of a broadly balanced conceptualization of marketing…has been disappearing…some portions of the substantive domain have been the losers in this process.” Primarily they fear that the cost of this fragmentation is the loss of knowledge in the field. That is, rather than accumulating knowledge over time, knowledge may actually be disappearing if it is not disseminated effectively.
Two takeaways from the article for me are:
- As we become more specialized in the field of social marketing we (a) lose sight of the century of marketing research and scholarship that could be informing our current research and practice, and (b) do not communicate well and on a regular basis with our “sister” subgroups (an issue the Innovations in Social Marketing Conference has tried to address) to extend and preserve what we are learning..
- While social marketeers often wonder whether “people” and academics take us seriously, this article demonstrates that in some quarters they most certainly do. Link here to the article and Onward!
9:15:23 PM 
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