When Should You Use Social Marketing?

Resources

Social Marketing in the 21st Century
Media Advocacy and Public Health
This is where the term "upstream" originates.
Social Marketing: Principles and Practice
See chapter 3 for a discussion of social marketing and environmental changes.

The concepts of social marketing can also be used to make "upstream" changes, such as environmental or policy changes.

This can get confusing because the end beneficiary of a particular environmental or policy change isn't always the person who needs to make the behavior change. For example, you could be trying to get a school board to adopt a specific policy. The beneficiary of such a policy would be the children in the school system. In this case, the school board is the target audience and the behavior change is adopting the policy.

Environmental and policy changes can be the primary goal of your program, or they can be used with activities designed for the end user. If your program includes environmental/policy level changes and individual level changes, you will likely have two separate target audiences and two different behavior changes.

As you read about the basic principles of social marketing, think about all the possible "individuals" you might influence, and how influencing the behavior of some individuals would contribute to environmental and policy changes for your state or community.