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Social marketing: social change
Edited by Sally Dibb and Marylyn Carrigan
Introduction
Social marketing aims to encourage behaviour changes for the greater good of the population and has been shown to positively affect knowledge, awareness, attitudes and behaviour in a number of areas ([16] Gordon et al. , 2006; [51] Stead et al. , 2007). However, although recognition of the importance of consumer-community oriented and evidence based public health approaches has increased, those interventions that predominantly rely on communication and education have failed to reduce the gap in health status between different socio-economic groups ([43] Ram, 2006; [56] Zimmerman and Bell, 2006). One possible explanation for this disparity lies in the increased awareness of economic, environmental and social influences in determining an individual's health ([2] Andreasen, 2002).
[55] Wymer (2011) argues that social marketing practitioners and scholars have failed to consider the effects of the environment and appropriate institutions in delivering positive behaviour changes. Hence, for social marketing programmes to achieve the aim of delivering behaviour change, there is a need to address an individual's inter-relationships within their environment. Yet these inter-relationships remain unclear and difficult to act on ([38] Noar and Zimmerman, 2005), despite calls for an increased research focus on contextual and social influences on health ([24] Koh et al. , 2010; [31] Marmot et al. , 2008).
The Social Ecological Model of health behaviour (SEM) addresses these criticisms, by providing a theoretical framework to understand environmental inter-related influences affecting an individual's health related behaviours ([47] Sallis et al. , 2008). Such is the prevalence of the SEM in public health discourse that its application is recommended by the World Health Organisation ([3] Blas and Kurup, 2010), while the Institute of Medicine and the Association of Schools of Public Health calls for the SEM to be taught to students as an effective means of achieving health behaviour change ([13] Gebbie et al. , 2003).
Considering the importance of the SEM and its application to inter-related influences that affect health related behaviour, research into their application in social marketing is limited. For example, [15] Golden and Earp (2012) reviewed the application of the SEM to health behaviours over the period 1989-2008 and noted that despite calls for a more comprehensive approach to understanding how...