On Social Marketing as a Tool to Address Health Misinformation By Brian Southwell Key Takeaways: In 2021, the US Office of the Surgeon General characterized health misinformation as a direct challenge to public health. News coverage about misinformation as a challenge for healthcare and public health organizations has continued in the years since. Central to the challenges posed by health misinformation, though, are not just…
Charting the Course of Social Transformation: Mastering Narrative Change through the Lens of Equity and Power Dynamics By Dana Middleton Every organization, every brand, is an author of its own unique narrative— a chronicle that holds the potential to inspire, to motivate, and to unite. In the sphere of social marketing, these narratives aren’t merely tales we tell. They shape our reality, influencing perceptions, decisions,…
From Misinformation to Empowerment: How One Campaign Used Humor and Mariachi Music to Drive Behavior Change By Jennifer M. Gonzalez Key Takeaways: As the lead for multicultural strategy at communications agency C+C, I had the privilege of working on the “Verdades del COVID” campaign for the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates among the state’s Hispanic community. To develop an…
Update on The Future of Social Marketing: Let’s Get it in Orbit by 2025! By Nancy Lee In 2019, I launched an effort to help “Institutionalize Social Marketing” and wrote an article for Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ) on The Future of Social Marketing: Let’s Get It In Orbit by 2025. You can read the article here. The article outlined numerous indicators that we could use…
We are proud to share a new article by SMANA’s vice-president Dulce Espelosin published in the May 2021 edition of Nature Human Behavior journal, entitled “Biodiversity conservation as a promising frontier for behavioural science.” Read it here.
“Nothing About Us without Us”: Preventing Tokenism and Building Authentic Audience Inclusion in Social Marketing By: Crystal Borde When disability rights advocates marched for change in the 1960s and 1970s, they used the slogan “Nothing about us without us.” They were fighting for policies that affected their lives specifically and so naturally wanted to be included in their creation, evaluation and implementation. For social marketers,…
The Qualitative Perspective By: Vivianne Hiriart & Katrina Noelle Adding a qualitative component to social marketing initiatives is essential to get a broader understanding of a behavior and the factors that enable it. Behaviors are complex. They have a function and a meaning in people’s lives, and they are influenced by multiple factors. As such, it’s important to delve into their…
Countermarketing – Can Outrage Improve Public Health? By: P. Christopher Palmedo, PhD, MBA Can outrage be used to improve public health? The simple answer is yes. Thirty years of research has shown that health communications campaigns generating outrage among teens against Big Tobacco helped lower teen smoking rates in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. The “truth” campaign was the exemplar of this kind of work…
The Private Sector in Social Marketing and Social Change; and How to Build a Career to Make a Difference in the World By Bill Novelli Founder Business for Impact, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University I’ve been around for a while, and I’ve gone from being a commercial marketer to a social marketer to a PR maven to a general manager to a teacher. But…