Recently, social marketing has become increasingly popular, as it helps the government and various organizations to promote the changes in behavior that are expected to be extremely beneficial for the entire society. Although social marketing heavily utilizes some tools from traditional commercial marketing practices, it has developed completely different techniques that are more useful when delivering information that helps achieve non-commercial goals. COVID-19 has incentivized the development of various approaches in social marketing that can influence millions of people worldwide.
In 2020, all countries around the globe proposed their own visions of the most useful marketing efforts that drew people’s attention to the importance of basic safety measures. Recently, however, there has been a shift to the development of marketing materials that encourage citizens to get vaccinated. According to Rundle-Thiele et al. (2019), an individual psychological lens dominates in social marketing, and emphasis is placed on explaining and predicting individual behavior. The HHS has recently introduced new vaccination ads that, for the first time, utilize fear as a significant component that is capable of changing people’s attitude towards joining the efforts to fight the disease.
The approaches that the HHS used provide an excellent example of the rapid evolution of social marketing efforts. Initially, vaccination commercials and marketing materials were used to focus on positive things, such as getting back to a normal lifestyle, meeting friends and family members, helping the community. Nevertheless, it turned out that those incentives did not lead to the emergence of driving factors sufficient to make a large portion of the population take a shot. Therefore, the HHS opted for a more universal and powerful tool, which is fear. Every American already knows someone who suffered from COVID-19 and died from the virus. Thus, this way to target those who are skeptical about vaccination will prove to be beneficial.
References
Rundle-Thiele, S., David, P., Willmott, T., Pang, B., Eagle, L., & Hay, R. (2019). Social marketing theory development goals: An agenda to drive change. Journal of Marketing Management, 35(1-2), 160–181. Web.