Social Marketing

 - Nikita Chowdhary

Social marketing which is also commonly known as causal marketing is an approach to target the market with a hope, that the market will undergo a behavioral change soon. The idea behind these campaigns is to do good for society.

People often get confused between Social Marketing and Social Media Marketing, well they are completely different things. Where the first one aims at marketing for social causes the latter focuses on using social media to market and create awareness.

CSR activities are a compulsory as instructed by the government authorities, however when it comes to Social Marketing, it is simply a way the brands target us as being emotional audiences.

One of the best examples of Social Marketing are seen by Procter and Gamble (P&G), where the “Shiksha” campaign was simply a hit. The tagline being Parega India, Bharega India! Created a new buzz where the customers and consumers felt responsible and proud of helping the organization build schools in various parts of the country.

Social marketing aims at targeting the audience emotionally and tries to change their buying behavior. After watching a few of these advertisements automatically our minds would want to select a product that would be under the P&G umbrella when given an option. A simply amazing example is the ad Video of Bittu, where it showed a 75 years old man goes and attends school with kids, simply because in his village it took more than 75 years for a school to be built (Video for reference below).

After watching this kind of touching advertisement would you as a customer opt P&G next time?

The answer for a majority would be yes! And that is exactly what happened my friend, not only did the campaign gain popularity and schools started to be build but P&G products started growing at an exceptional rate, and the company saw an increase in sales and sold over 20 lakhs products with the Shiksha sticker on it in April 2003.

Even after the increase in the profitability, the best part for the country was, it impacted more than 11000 lives in just one campaign. Well, now even I think we did a good job purchasing from P&G. Various distributors still leverage the campaign to sell P&G products.

Do you want to feel more proud of yourself? Let’s talk about ITC, ever purchased a Classmate notebook?

In case, you haven’t known let me tell you the benefits it carries. First, it is a premium and a good quality notebook for students. Second, on every four books, you get ITC directly contributes ₹1 for the primary education of children around various parts of the country. Well, stationery directly shows the link towards education, and hence the initiative of ITC’s Classmate brand is a strategic approach.

Classmate not just encourages students to be one of a kind and celebrate their uniqueness, it also targets the audience with an emotional font, leading to higher sales units. Well, Classmate is just another brand under ITC, we have advertisements doing social marketing for the entire house of the brand. (Video advertisement below)

 

 Does ITC impact you as well?

I am sure next time we need a product and P&G or ITC competes with other brands on shelves, we might just want to purchase either of their product feeling proud of them and us together.

Even if that is not the case, there is something which every Indian has used somewhere down the line, "Jio ka internet", do you think Jio Platforms Limited which is a subsidiary of the famous Reliance Industries Limited, did social marketing? Read on to form an opinion.

Well, Jio did introduce the internet free of cost to each and every Indian citizen. Was there any behavioral change?

Did we not start using the internet waaaay more than we used to? Jio did focus on our prime minister's view on digitalization, was a major contributor too. But what about profits?

Well for that we all know where Jio Platforms and RIL stand now in terms of profits... It is definitely known for being the first net debt-free country in India. 

Hence, Behaviour change - check; development - check; profit - check....

I guess we all know the answer to Jio being a product for Social Marketing or not by now. Be proud of using free internet is what I would say!

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Author: Nikita Chowdhary