From Magical Insights to Alchemy: Broadening the Social Marketing Change Agenda

Social marketers face a myriad of wicked issues from obesity to sustainability with no magic wands to create a healthy society. However, magical insights do exist which if nurtured will produce alchemic strategies in the... [ view full abstract ]

Social marketers face a myriad of wicked issues from obesity to sustainability with no magic wands to create a healthy society. However, magical insights do exist which if nurtured will produce alchemic strategies in the future. This alchemy has begun, Goldberg (1995) called for a radical approaches in social marketing, a magical insight which has changed the way we perceive change. Twenty years later his call has evolved into a broadened change agenda within social marketing. This broadened agenda has reignited the magical powers of social marketing refocusing change agents to adopt a systematic approach to change. However little research has been conducted on the theoretical and practical considerations of this broadened approach. This paper presents the magical insights arising from the application of Interactive Management, a problem solving methodology, within a broadened change agenda. Interactive management was applied within the context of obesity. The findings illustrate that social marketing has two fundamentally different behavioural change states – the first, a behavioural change state characterised by the individual, 4 P’s of the marketing mix, an intervention, segmentation and targeting. The second Behavioural Change state, Social Change, characterised by strategies incorporating the individual and environment.