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Here we look at the specific case of social marketing in a cross-cultural context.

Increasingly multicultural communities in developed economies have led to a culturally adapted provision of healthcare e.g. Seabrooke and Milne (2004) and Blackburn (2004). This has been accompanied by a recognition that social marketing and health promotion campaigns also need to take into account cultural issues. Because of cultural factors, people differ in terms of how they respond to the marketers’ stimuli, the bases of these variations will need to be understood in order to effectively access and influence groups of people who would otherwise be hard to reach using mass communication methods (Committee on Communication for Behaviour Change 2002). 

The cases and examples on the right show how such adaptation can be undertaken. There are lessons here from the field of international marketing.

The straight extension type option where campaigns for minority cultural groups are the same as those for the cultural majority may be effective where there are low cultural differences between the two and they'll also have the benefit of being low cost and they'll gain from economies of scale. On the other hand they won't benefit so much where there are significant cultural differences between the two groups. In the latter instance not only may the communications need to be adapted but also the actual social marketing programme itself. Going further along the continuum the social marketing programme may need to be invented from scratch.

References