Alan R. Andreasen’s research while affiliated with Georgetown University and other places

SOCIAL ENTERPRISES ARE CREATIVE APPROACHES to bringing about important—and some not-so-important—changes in the lives of individuals and of the societies of which they are a part. They can be carried out by corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and, in some countries, government agencies. To succeed, they need to find ways to get a wide range of individuals to take actions. Central, of course, are behaviors vital to the social enterprise’s mission—getting people to take up a recommended action such as not smoking, starting a business, allowing their daughters to get advanced schooling, washing their hands regularly, installing energy-saving appliances in their homes, and so forth. But the social enterprise has a great many other constituencies to take actions—governments to give contracts or give permission for a particular initiative, volunteers to help out, corporations to partner, foundations or philanthropists to give grants, and individuals to volunteer as advisors or board members. And finally, because they are social enterprises, they are expected to generate sales for their artist works, food services, or used clothing!

Despite the long history and increasing interest in nonprofit and social marketing, the managerial and pedagogical issues that arise in these noncommercial contexts are treated as unique cases in an intellectual environment dominated by commercial issues and applications. Its literature and basic textbooks allot only a few paragraphs or pages to nonprofit and social marketing. This essay posits the radical idea that this implicit taxonomy has the relationship upside down. The author argues that nonprofit and social marketing represent the most complex and difficult contexts in which marketing activities are carried out and that the appropriate classification of commercial applications is (only) one simplified variety of this complexity, principally the sales of products and services.

A perennial problem in social marketing and public policy is the plight of at-risk consumers. The authors define at-risk consumers as marketplace participants who, because of historical or personal circumstances or disabilities, may be harmed by marketers' practices or may be unable or unwilling to take full advantage of marketplace opportunities. This definition refers to either objective reality or perceptions. Early research focused on consumers who were at risk because they were poor, ethnic or racial minorities, immigrants, women, or elderly. Today's researchers also study consumers who are at risk because they are from religious minorities, disabled, illiterate, homeless, indigent, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. The authors identify four tensions affecting research on and policy and marketing applications for at-risk populations-, the value of focusing on (1) vulnerabilities versus strengths, (2) radical versus marginal change, (3) targeting versus nontargeting, and (4) encouraging knowledgeable versus naive consumers. They conclude with a discussion of the significance of including at-risk consumers as full marketplace participants and identify future research directions.

In this article, we propose five core areas that influence how consumers relate to food— social factors, economic issues, food literacy, emotional knowledge, and physical and psychological traits. Our goal is to formulate a vision for developing a comprehensive measure of an individual's level of Food Well-being (FWB) to facilitate investigations of how to motivate consumers to progress along the FWB continuum. With this knowledge, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners may be able to help consumers use deliberative and automatic decision making to respond to environmental food cues and set consumers on a path to advance Food Well-being.

This timely book succeeds in a number of ways. First, it symbolises the growing interest and application of social marketing approaches to an increasingly wide range of social problems where individual problem behaviours are a central focus. Second—and more important—it moves beyond the existing array of textbooks, monographs and “think pieces” to focus on a specific component of social programmes—branding. Branding, of course, is one of the central concepts and tools used in the private sector to achieve significant market shares and product and service growth. It is a shorthand device for communicating key elements of a firm’s fundamental value proposition and is, candidly, one of the key reasons brands like Coca-Cola, Nike and Tide achieve market dominance despite minimal bases in significant true product differences. In the service domain, brands like Ritz-Carlton or McDonald’s spend lavishly to position themselves as different from—

Awards: Finalist for the 2006 Berry-AMA Book Prize for best book in marketing “This is a brilliant explanation of how social marketing can address upstream issues… As the author points out, too often people think of the downstream applications of social marketing. This book is the only one in this camp, and it does a very good job of it.” —Mike Basil, University of Lethbridge, Canada Most observers and many practitioners see social marketing as a downstream approach to influencing people with “bad behaviors”—smoking, neglecting prenatal care, not recycling. However, this narrow view hugely underestimates social marketing's real potential. Social marketing is simply about influencing the behavior of target audiences. There are many more target audiences who need to act besides “problem people” if we are to solve major social problems. The goal of this cutting edge book is to reposition social marketing so that foundations, government agencies, and various nonprofits will approach social change in a way that reaches both upstream and downstream individuals in society. Author Alan R. Andreasen outlines potential roles, restates fundamental principles, and then suggests how social marketing might be applied to a sample of nontraditional challenges. Key Features: Emphasizes Broad Social Change: Repositions social marketing as an approach to social change that reaches both upstream and downstream; Reviews Social Marketing Concepts and Tools: A number of different strands of scholarship are used to provide an accessible introduction to social marketing including the evolution of social problems, the science of framing, the process of social change, and social marketing history and elements; Presents Frameworks for Influencing Behavior: Three simple frameworks are provided that anyone can use whenever there is a situation where one needs to influence another's behavior—stages of change, the BCOS model and competition. Social Marketing in the 21st Century is an excellent text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Health Promotion, Social Marketing, Social Enterprise, Social Change, Public Health, Social Welfare, and Communications. In addition, it is a valuable resource for social marketing practitioners, public health communicators, nonprofit managers, social workers, and social enterprise programs.

As social marketers seek to broaden their purview to include upstream applications, they are handicapped by the lack of examples of such applications. This article represents a retrofit of social marketing approaches developed by Andreasen to a major international intervention in Bosnia Herzegovina to reduce the array of impediments to private sector business investment and growth. The Bulldozer Initiative project, run by Herzberg, focused on two target audiences, businessmen and politicians, and sought participation by the former and support and legislative change from the latter. The Initiative was highly successful and resulted in a major change in the business climate and wide praise from an array of international agencies. Major components of the program closely conformed to ways in which social marketers would have constructed them.