What is Benefit Marketing? Marketing principles used to "sell" ideas,attitudes and behaviors.

s. Usually the term marketing refers to selling or promoting a product or service. Here, it is promoting an idea or a behavior. It is to achieve specific socially relevant goals for social good. The motive over here is just not to sell the product / service and enjoy the monetary benefits , major aim is to promote and spread social attitude or idea with monetary gains taking the secondary position. For eg: Save trees. Go green. Stop Aids. No smoking etc. Benefit Marketing inturn benefits the brand that is being marketed or advertised. It associates the brand with socially accepted ideologies. It relates to the goodwill of the people. BM Does not necessarily increase sales, but increases/improves your brand image.

For eg: A helmet company years back had shown an advertisement that had the social idea behind promoting the helmet. It showed a Coconut shell being hammered and it broke easily into pieces. Whereas in the next slide, a helmet was placed on the Coconut shell and this time the shell was intact. This showed that wearing a helmet can save life. Here both the helmet as well as the social idea behind using it was depicted that could relate to the masses strongly. Inculcating a sense of Responsibility among people to change for improvement Increasing the trust of people on Your Brand Should be used only for Brand Recall

Difficulties in BM: 1. Message selected should be/get disputed. e.g. Idea Telecoms Walk when you Talk Advertisement. Walking is good for health but when your using a phone and then walking on a busy street, the idea would be conflicting as you tend to lose concentration and may not take care of yourself. 2. Appropriate media selection Among all the media choices available, it is necessary to chose the appropriate one in order to reach your message in the desired and proper way. 3. Representation of message the stages or cycle of the message should be in proper order while representing it so that it is not misunderstood. 4. Potential / Practical Difficulties in actual implementation by individuals or society Since it is revolves around a social idea or cause or attitude, conflicts are bound to arise. One should be prepared to fight these odds. Drawbacks: Benefit Marketing cannot completely replace Commercial Marketing Message might not be clearly understood or too complex to understand or might not serve the intended purpose Might require longer time to see visible changes.

Definition: Kotler, Roberto and Lee (2002) contributed to the contemporary social marketing debate by offering the following definition:

The use of marketing principles and techniques to influence a target audience to voluntarily accept, reject, modify, or abandon their behaviour for the benefit of individuals, groups or society as a whole. The Marketing Component of Benefit Marketing or Common Traits between Commercial and Benefit Mktg: As part of the overall marketing discipline, benefit marketing shares common traits with broader commercial marketing applications. The adoption of the customer centric marketing philosophy which puts the needs of the client at the centre of organisational activities. In social marketing, this represents the focus on the voluntary change by the individual to create broad changes in society. By understanding and addressing the consumption process through a consumer centric focus, change can be leveled at the appropriate consumption process. This can occur through changing an attitude or introducing a substitute behaviour or product to enable the consumer to act on the social change idea. Market research based decision making and tracking of campaigns. Consumer centric campaigns are dependent on an understanding of the consumer, their attitudes, opinions, knowledge and behaviours. For social marketing to be most effective, it needs to include information from the consumer, rather than assumptions from experts as to how the consumer thinks. Segmentation of target audiences which is based around the implementation of social change at the individual level. Segmentation is used to cluster the social change candidates by a key factor. Commercial marketing is based predominantly on the assumption of direct or restricted exchange (products for money), social/benefit marketing derives benefits from the broadest exchange where the exchange occurs between the individual and the society. For example, where the social message of antispeeding is adopted by the individual, society benefits from the safer driving for example, in reduced health costs, and the driver benefits by avoiding penalties (speeding fines), reducing their accident risk. The use of all elements of the "marketing mix" rather than focusing on an individual component such as promotional campaigns, or pricing through offering free products. Careful attention to positioning the organisations "product" relative to its competition. Positioning in social marketing is a question of determining the competition for the social marketing message for example, skin cancer awareness campaigns face competition from beach holiday advertising showing happy tanned models without appropriate skin protection. In addition to the adoption of commercial marketing methods, there is the need for the adaptation of the techniques.

Overall, the fundamental difference between social marketing and commercial marketing has been a matter of focus. Commercial marketing has a bottom line of direct benefit measured in dollar values. Benefit marketing has a bottom line measured according to whether or not the target adopter changes their behaviour. The benefit marketing campaign may succeed where change occurs, does not draw a direct benefit to the social marketer.