Understanding of Social Marketing: A Conceptual Perspective

In most of the developed countries social marketing has been a well accepted concept in the non-profit arena. But in India and other developing countries where there is real need in various undisturbed social issues, the concept is not at all clear and is confined to only few family planning programmes. ‘The lack of definitional clarity and consensus is seen as a hindrance to the evolution of the discipline’ (McDermott et al., 2005). Basically this article will try to see the in sight of social marketing in various theoretical and conceptual settings. Though the social marketing approach has been developed from commercial marketing, it is a holistic approach from many disciplines from other social sciences like marketing, psychology, sociology, mass communication and economics. It is basically an art to explore new ways of analyzing problems and solving them effectively. This approach is still a debatable issue and often many of us view this approach as a matter of suspicion and argue how ‘profit motive marketing’ comes in the vicinity of non-profit? Here we have attempted to explore the social marketing framework in the light of different perspectives and theories.