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Peter Drucker, management consultant, said that “the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells Itself’. Marketing is more often used to sell a product or a service but it can also be used to Influence consumers’ behaviour. It is called social marketing. For Kotler and Andreasen (1991), It “seeks to Influence social behaviours not to benefit the marketer, ut to benefit the target audience and the general society”.
It is a way to sell” Ideas, attitudes and behaviours. Social marketing Is more often used by governments to solve, tor instance, health and environmental problems. However, changing people’s behaviour can be very difficult to do. In this paper we will see that there are different war, for marketing to succeed a behavioural change. not always on his own. Also, there are other alternatives needed to achieve this change. How marketing can change behaviour? Social marketing has an important place in the behavioural change. To reach this change. companies. governments or policy makers have. t first. to understand consumers’ needs and why people behave the way they do, An effective social marketing campaign is built on an important research and on group consultation to understand their needs and motivations. Thus, they have to think about a message that can reflect the different target groups in order to be able to influence them. For instance, to reduce binge drinking among teenagers, the first thing todo would be to alk to local young people to understand why they are drinking alcohol and how we can persuade them to Stop (Perspectives in Public Health. 009, p2). A social marketing campaign can succeed f it iS well-targetecf Segmentation can sometimes be a problem because everyone does not react in the same way. We cannot promote a social campaign to all, it does not answer to everyone’s needs. some people will not be as easily influenced than others. segmentation accentuate individual differences. one of social marketing principles is that the audience has be understood.
Because even f the pont of the campaign will remain the same, the reason why people want to change their behaviour is dfferent from a person to another. We are not going to use the same ideas and arguments to convince them. The campaign will be different. For example, people vary n their levels ot concern about pro-envlronmental behaviour (Corner and Randall. 2011, page 1009). Some are engaged in environmental behaviour because they are really concerned about the Earth’s future whereas other people are only engaged because they want to save money.