Social marketing: ready to help revolutionise marketing education
ISSN: 2042-6763
Article publication date: 4 March 2022
Issue publication date: 6 June 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore ways through which social marketing could help to revolutionise marketing education and argues that this change is needed now. The world is confronting a variety of serious challenges, including a global pandemic, an urgent climate emergency and overdue social transformations. Social marketing, with its far-sightedness, holistic systems thinking and genuine concern for the well-being of society and the environment, is ideally positioned to step forward to help accelerate the transformation of marketing education for the next generation of marketers.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is conceptual and is informed by the literature on social marketing over its 50 years history, supplemented by the wider marketing literature. A SWOT analysis is used to analyse the proposed transformation of marketing education.
Findings
Six strengths are proposed by which social marketing can help to revolutionise marketing education, identified under the acronym COHERE: collaboration with a diversity of disciplines and stakeholders; openness to sharing knowledge, experience and detailed case studies; a holistic approach with a longer time horizon; engaging authentically with the social good; research that breaks new ground in theory and practice; and ethics embedded at its core.
Practical implications
The opportunities to help revolutionise marketing education offered through these strengths are explored, the weaknesses and threats acknowledged and the implications for marketing and social marketing analysed.
Originality/value
This paper proposes how (through the six identified strengths) and when (now) social marketing can help revolutionise marketing education, by adopting a dual lens of social and commercial marketing.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments and suggestions of three anonymous reviewers.
Funding: The author declares that no funding was used to support this work.
Citation
Harris, F. (2022), "Social marketing: ready to help revolutionise marketing education", Journal of Social Marketing, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 354-370. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSOCM-07-2021-0154
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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