This paper contributes to emerging discourse about the ongoing challenges and opportunities of social marketing as a discipline. The paper presents a qualitative perspective on existing challenges faced by social marketing and offers suggestions for addressing these challenges. Nine semi-structured interviews with social marketing academics and practitioners from six different countries were conducted. Thematic analysis was used to analyse and interpret the qualitative data. The study provides insight into existing challenges for social marketing, classified into three key themes according to their position within or outside of the discipline: 1) poor branding of the discipline as an internal challenge, 2) competing disciplines as an external challenge, and 3) overall reach of the discipline, seen as both an internal and external challenge. The findings suggest that social marketing needs to overcome poor branding issues to sufficiently address external challenges. We conclude by arguing for a more robust marketing of the discipline. While scholars have identified the challenges and opportunities for social marketing as a discipline, they have paid little attention to examining these challenges from the viewpoint of expert practitioners and academics. This paper presents a nuanced contextual understanding of the identified challenges through a qualitative perspective and explores how social marketing can overcome these challenges.

Purpose<br/> This paper presents the first attempt to map and critically review existing social marketing planning approaches.<br/> Approach<br/> Critical literature review.<br/> Findings<br/> The discussion highlights that existing social marketing planning approaches have moved on from older product-driven models towards a more customer/ citizen-oriented, stakeholder engagement and value creation narrative. There is also a growing connection between social marketing planning approaches and theories from other disciplines. This recognises that a simple push marketing strategy, which was the working principle of many early social marketingplanning approaches, is not often effective for contemporary social marketing practice. Effective social marketing planning requires a greater emphasis on new social marketing principles derived from the new global consensus social marketing definition, such as more citizen focus, sustainable outcomes, and ethical practice, thus highlighting a need for more comprehensive social marketing planning approaches with a better understanding of recent theory development of social marketing as a field in order to be relatable and efficient.<br/> Implications<br/> The review sets out some original thinking about how planning in the field of social marketing can be strengthened through a more inclusive adoption of both system thinking analysis and integration with other fields of theory and practice that are seeking to influence behaviour for social good.<br/> Limitations<br/> This review is exploratory in nature and evaluates only 14 social marketing planning approaches; more social marketing approaches exist and could be considered in further reviews.

BackgroundThis paper examines the idea of learner identity of marketing undergraduates in the light of the widening participation agenda and identifies the challenges faced by those who enter HE by non-traditional routes.

Purpose This paper aims to develop and present a new planning framework of social marketing, known as consumer research, segmentation, design of the social programme, implementation, evaluation and sustainability (CSD-IES). Design/methodology/approach The proposed framework is based on recent theoretical developments in social marketing and is informed by the key strengths of existing social marketing planning approaches. Findings The CSD-IES planning framework incorporates emerging principles of social marketing. For example, sustainability in changed behaviour, ethical considerations in designing social marketing programmes, the need for continuous research to understand the changing needs of the priority audience during the programme and the need for explicit feedback mechanisms. Research limitations/implications The CSD-IES framework is a dynamic and flexible framework that guides social marketers, other practitioners and researchers to develop, implement and evaluate effective and sustainable social marketing programmes to influence or change specific behaviours based on available resources. Originality/value This paper makes an important contribution to social marketing theory and practice by integrating elements of behaviour maintenance, consideration of ethical perspectives and continuous feedback mechanisms in developing the CSD-IES framework, bringing it in line with the global consensus definition of social marketing.

Background While failure in social marketing practice represents an emerging research agenda, the discipline has not yet considered this concept systematically or cohesively. This lack of a clear conceptualization of failure in social marketing to aid practice thus presents a significant research gap. Focus This study aimed to conceptualize failures in social marketing practice. Methods A qualitative survey was conducted using purposive sampling to solicit expert views of well-established social marketing academics and practitioners. Participants were asked to discuss failures in social marketing practice based on their experience in the field. A total of 49 participants provided their input to the survey. Thematic analysis was used to develop four themes addressing the research question. Importance It is widely acknowledged that reflecting and learning from past failures to promote future best practices is desirable for any discipline. As an empirically based social change discipline, social marketing would benefit from the elevation of failure within its broader research agenda. Results Four themes were identified: (1) Failures occur when the target behaviors are not achieved, (2) Tactics used to measure failures, (3) Process failure, and (4) Failures either not measured or reframed as lessons learned. A conceptual framework was created to characterize the nature of failures in social marketing practice, representing a feedback loop deemed problematic for the discipline. Recommendations We call for social marketers to explicitly acknowledge and address failures when describing and reporting on their work and project outcomes. Efforts should be made to adopt a reflexive stance and examine and address internal and external factors affecting the program’s failures.