Defining “Social Marketing”

Social Marketing Book

I’m in an academic mood today.

It all started with a great breakfast with my friend Randy this morning where he shared some classic articles from his father who was a marketing VP and marketing professor in Milwaukee some years ago and was highlighted by a comment in a LinkedIn group where a Shaklee representative called out the percieved “vision” of this 50+ year old company in their effective trademarking of the term “social marketing”. I don’t know, but let’s pretend that her comment was slanted to say “look, they were visionary by TM’ing this phrase well before it became so popular…potentially referring to “social media marketing” which is quite different from “social marketing”, but nevermind, it makes it look like they were smart”.

I told you that this was going to be academic.

As someone who’s a huge fan of both disciplines, let’s dig into this a bit and sort out a few details.

As I stated in my reply on the LinkedIn group, there are many nuances to this “social marketing” bit, with the advent of social media and all and people interchanging the terms, the waters have become a bit muddy. First, let’s look at the definition of “social marketing”. I’m looking straight at the definition from Kotler’s 3rd edition of the book that I have on my desk, but Wikipedia has a passable version of it. According to Wikipedia “Social marketing can be applied to promote merit goods, or to make a society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote society’s well being as a whole. For example, this may include asking people not to smoke in public areas, asking them to use seat belts, or prompting to make them follow speed limits.” Moreover, “Social marketing” was also originally defined as “the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good.”

While I’m not an attorney, I find it interesting that the TM (actually, they’re using an SM, though they put it on their site as a TM…interesting) was granted to Shaklee in April of ’08 where there is significant “prior art”, including a textbook by the same name “social marketing” written by Philip Kotler, (one of the gentlemen who originated the term back in 1971, in the journal “Social Marketing Quarterly“) and Nancy R. Lee. If there’s an IP or TM attorney that would like to comment on how this may have passed or on what legal nuance I’m ignoring here, I’d really appreciate that.

To muddy the waters further, Shaklee defines social marketing as “facilitating the exchange of referrals of an individual’s family and friends to our business for financial compensation, the referrals being to aid the individuals in sale of dietary and nutritional supplements, cosmetics, toiletries, personal care products, environmentally friendly household cleaners, and water and air purification products“. So, basically, they use the nice phrase “social marketing” to mask their version of the MLM game.  How touching.

On the other end of the spectrum is “social media marketing”, the “cousin” of social marketing (not really a cousin, but making them sound related is in fashion today) that’s defined as follows. Again, according to Wikipedia: “Social media marketing also known as social influence marketing is the act of using social influencers, social media platforms, online communities for marketing, publication relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. In the context of Internet marketing, social media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the property (e.g. the vast majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees).”

So, basically, it boils down to “marketing for social good” vs. “marketing through influencers using social media platforms”, or something like that. It could be said that social marketing is best enabled by social media marketing or that you can use social media marketing to support, enhance and augment social marketing efforts. Fascinating semantics!

All this because of one little LinkedIn group entry? Yes. This is a topic worth discussing.

For example, I had a wonderful meeting with a local non-profit service organization to discuss social media marketing. Now, had we conducted a meeting about social marketing vs. social media marketing, our conversation would have been decided different and it’s a good thing that all involved understood the terms.

At the end of the day, words matter, definitions matter and the intelligent use of words (or, the “abuse” of words & terms) can precipitate lucid discussion or cause rank confusion.
Personally, I prefer the nearly 40 year old definition and not the recent incarnation, but that’s just me…

All very fascinating!!!