Instruments of Developing Social Marketing in Public Health

Abstract This paper examines the way in which social marketing can be developed in public health and provides a set of practical instruments in this regard. Social marketing is an important tool in generating behavioural change and its usefulness in public health was proved by previous studies. However, it is still overlooked by many public health specialists, mainly because they lack basic instruments in this regard, especially knowledge and technical support. This study provides an opportunity to advance the implementation of social marketing and it priorly addresses to: national authorities in developing public health policies and strategies, medical curriculum developers, teachers, project managers and team members of health promotion programs. The research is interdisciplinary, applicative, descriptive, with a qualitative approach, based on logical-deductive reasoning. The novelty of the paper is expressed by the proposed total framework of implementing social marketing in public health, that comprises three dimensions: political, training and collaborative. The political dimension implies a unified application of the concept at the national level through specific strategies and encouraging program developers to use marketing techniques in influencing health behaviour. The training dimension implies courses provided at different levels and stages of training: students, master students, specialists. The collaborative dimension requires the creation of joint teams and clear distribution of roles for each member, of which at least one should be a specialist in social marketing. According to these three dimensions, the study describes three instruments (a guide, a curriculum and a sketch of the team) that were created for developing social marketing in public health in countries like the Republic of Moldova, where the concept is still not widely known and accepted. This study tends to give support for researchers in promoting social marketing techniques.