Social Marketing and Activism

Social Marketing and Activisim


For this topic, we were given a presentation by an NGO activist. We learnt how Ngo’s have increased significantly and are now huge, powerful and deserve to be looked at with a critical eye.
NGO's mainly aim to create change and put a lot of pressure to obtain this change.
Some of the tactics used are social marketing and activism. Social marketing focuses on motivating individual change.
Most public health issues involve availability of resources and public policy decisions regarding restrictions on industry practice (as in the case of smoking) or access to health resources (as in the case of cancer and other forms of screening).
Concentrating public health resources and public funds on social marketing efforts deflects attention from the public policy decisions that would make the larger public health impacts. Worse, the focus on changing individual behaviour rather than public policy in a sense blames victims of public policy. By focusing on the need of the at-risk population to change their behaviour , the need for public policy change is obscured.


Social marketing has a short life span. Without sustained support it is unlikely that the full potential of such social marketing or health promotion efforts can be realised.
It does not work/change would not occur where persons do not recognise , or deny a health issue in their own lives thus the need for activism. Such adoption however requires political interventions
to support these efforts. Often, the most important interventions involve political decisions such as the willingness to enforce alcohol beverage control regulations or laws regarding youth access to tobacco products.