Social Marketing

Scroll through any major social media platform for fifteen minutes and you’ll almost certainly encounter it. A popular creator with hundreds of thousands of followers speaking earnestly to their camera about mental health awareness, encouraging their audience to get tested for a particular condition, promoting […]

When a government health agency designs a carefully researched, behaviorally sophisticated campaign to persuade millions of citizens to change their behavior — using emotional appeals, strategic message framing, audience segmentation, trusted messengers, and repeated exposure across multiple media channels — what exactly separates that activity […]

A well-funded international organization — headquartered in Washington, London, Geneva, or Amsterdam — identifies a health or social behavior priority for a developing country. They design a campaign, often with sophisticated research backing and genuinely talented creative professionals. They secure funding, frequently from a bilateral […]

A paradox worth sitting with for a moment. One of the most celebrated advances in social marketing practice — the move away from one-size-fits-all mass communication toward carefully targeted, precisely segmented audience approaches — might also be one of the field’s most quietly troubling blind […]

Let’s start with something that might feel uncomfortable but needs to be said out loud. People in low-income communities generally know that smoking is bad for them. They know that getting a cancer screening matters. They know that uncontrolled diabetes can kill them slowly and […]

Here’s a thought experiment that might change how you see public health forever. Imagine you’re standing beside a river and you notice people drowning one after another, being swept downstream by the current. The natural instinct is to jump in and pull them out one […]

You’re sitting on your couch watching television, and suddenly an advertisement flashes on the screen showing graphic images of blackened lungs, a cancer patient struggling to breathe through a tracheotomy tube, and a grieving family at a funeral. The voiceover says something like, “Every cigarette […]

There’s a conversation happening right now in boardrooms, university research centers, government policy offices, and public health agencies around the world. It’s not always loud. Sometimes it’s whispered between colleagues over coffee. But it’s getting harder to ignore. The question goes something like this: now […]

Why does the same public health campaign succeed brilliantly in one country and fall completely flat — or even cause offense — in another? Why do anti-smoking messages that resonate deeply with audiences in Australia barely register with communities in Southeast Asia? Why do recycling […]

Let’s be honest with each other for a second. How many times have you seen a powerful public health ad, felt genuinely moved by it, maybe even changed your behavior for a week or two — and then slowly drifted right back to your old […]