Social Marketing for Health: Theoretical and Conceptual Considerations

Marketing, besides education and enforcement, is a strategy to change behaviors. The most important question for commercial marketers is: "What can we do to persuade people to buy our products?" They try to use commercial marketing principles such as exchange theory, consumer orientation, competition, audience segmentation, and marketing mix, to influence customers and sell their products and services. Health is considered as an important market, and people have to pay tangible and intangible costs to buy health products, services, and behaviors. So, health professionals must know about marketing key concepts and designing programs to promote health products and changing health behavior. "Social marketing" is an approach to persuade people to accept ideas and attitudes, perform healthy behaviors, refer to health facilities, and receive health products. In this chapter, the theoretical considerations and practical steps for planning, implementing, and evaluating the interventions based on the social marketing approach will be discussed. At the end of the chapter, we will study four researches designed and implemented based on the social marketing model.