Social marketing applications in public policy programs: key learnings and applications

Purpose Marketing tools used in public policy may not be purely commercial but based on non-commercial marketing exchanges also. This paper aims to make a case for the practice of social marketing principles to aid the context of public policy. Design/methodology/approach The approach is to draw out the key implementable learnings (KILs) from the analysis of the five public policy initiatives in the USA, India and Sri Lanka. A case situation with the context of child labour policy in India is proposed to use these KILs. Findings This paper concludes that the implementation of any policy is a challenging exercise and dependent on a large number of factors. However, KILs derived from successful social marketing programs deal with umbrella campaigns, prevailing socio-cultural environment, bottom-up communication, upstream approach to engage with stakeholders and targeted media advocacy could prove useful when the objective is to induce behaviour change as a part of the policy execution. Originality/value This paper evaluates the learnings from social marketing campaigns and their relevance to public policy programs. It also considers a case to demonstrate the application of the concept.