Social and strategic marketing seeks to develop systematic marketing concepts with several approaches to influence behaviours that benefit individuals and society for the greater social good. Social marketing practice is guided by ethical issues. It seeks to integrate approach, best practice, theory, audience, and partnership insight to inform the delivery of competition-sensitive and segmented social change programmes that are effective, efficient, equitable, and sustainable. This case study concerns help2kids as a young and dynamic non-profit organization operating in Africa. The case study consists of reflection and discussion of the several practices, marketing strategies, social entrepreneurship topics, and multiple projects inherent to help2kids. Help2kids strives to allow children the pursuit of a better and more sustainable future. The authors intend to present different social marketing campaigns to promote behavioural change for the benefit of society and the strategies that have been followed to achieve the desired idea or behaviour.
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“Social marketing has experienced substantial growth over the last decades and its utilization has spread into various areas of social and public life” (Alves, 2010: 288). Social marketing is the “application of the tools and concepts of commercial marketing to social, health and educational problems. While it typically has been used to market public health products such as contraceptives, condoms for sexually transmitted infection control, soap and water purification tablets, it has also been used to address public health behaviours, such as smoking, drug and alcohol use and traffic safety” (Kikumbih, Hanson, Mills, Mponda & Schellenberg, 2005: 369).
Andreasen (2002: 7) suggests that social marketing can be acknowledged by an emphasis on consumer behaviour (i.e. understanding consumers and competing behaviours through research), market segmentation and target, employment of the marketing mix strategy (not just promotion) and recognition of the need for an exchange of value and benefits. According to Andreasen (2003: 296), social marketing is “the application of commercial marketing technologies to the analysis, planning, execution and evaluation of programmes designed to influence the voluntary behaviour of target audiences in order to improve their personal welfare and that of society”. Since the 1970s, social marketing, one of the areas of marketing and strategy, has been highlighted by its impact on social aspects in the areas of public health, protection of the environment and safety of communities (Kotler and Lee, 2011). According to Camilleri (2014), there is an extensive list of publications which are reporting about relevant corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices among tourism enterprises. Cause-related marketing (CRM) has proliferated as a marketing tool and is being employed by several brands across product categories (Galan Ladero et al., 2015; Sousa & Soares, 2019). Social marketing, guided by beliefs and values, is not a theory in itself, since it is a system that brings together several areas of knowledge from sociology, psychology, anthropology and promotion theoretical background (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971), in order to understand the mechanism of influence of human behavior (Camilleri, 2015; Sousa & Soares, 2019).