Kotler Social Marketing
The other day, I was doing a bit of research on Kotler Social Marketing, and chanced upon some interesting information. Here, I thought the idea of ’social marketing’ was a relatively new term and applied to social media… Come to find out, it’s not!
Phillip Kotler wrote a book called Social Marketing back in 1989!
A quick trip to Amazon and a few days later, I started going through it so that I could understand the similarities of social media marketing and how our new digital world might apply.
Here’s what I found:
Social marketing was “born” as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to “sell” ideas, attitudes and behaviors.
This is not unlike social media marketing, where ideas and thoughts are streamed through status updates and tweets. Those thoughts and ideas are usually accompanied by a link that let us know where we can go for more information.
Kotler then defines social marketing as “differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society.”
In social media, you can’t pound someone over the head with your marketing message. It can’t be blatantly spammy because your are technically marketing to friends and fans rather than people off the street. In that way, it’s better to ‘influence behaviors and actions’ as in the Kotler Social Marketing method.
Like commercial marketing, the primary focus is on the consumer–on learning what people want and need rather than trying to persuade them to buy what we happen to be producing. Marketing talks to the consumer, not about the product. The planning process takes this consumer focus into account by addressing the elements of the “marketing mix.”
As we travel down the path to Internet businesses, you’re going to see more and more of a focus being put on asking clients what they want or ‘would buy’ if it was produced. In the Internet marketing world, the most popular tactic is to survey someone’s following or reader base and learn what issues they’re having. Then, that’s grounds to develop a product that will sell from day one.
The social marketing “product” is not necessarily a physical offering. A continuum of products exists, ranging from tangible, physical products to services, practices and finally, more intangible ideas.
In order to have a viable product, people must first perceive that they have a genuine problem, and that the product offering is a good solution for that problem. The role of research here is to discover the consumers’ perceptions of the problem and the product, and to determine how important they feel it is to take action against the problem.
The deeper the need or want, the more likely consumers will take action when it’s needed!
For more tips on how Kotler Social Marketing can influence your success through social media marketing, make sure you sign up for the free social media marketing video in the upper right hand sidebar!
