Societal Marketing is based on the principle of societal welfare. It emphasizes that an organization must make strategic marketing decisions keeping in mind the consumer wants, the organizational needs and most important the long term interests of the society.
Societal Marketing is nothing but an outgrowth of the principles of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable development. It underlines that an organization should not ignore the society’s long term welfare so as to achieve it’s mission and vision. An organization should have moral and environmentally friendly strategies and should ensure that proper acts and laws are implemented.
In today’s world of increasing environmental destruction, scarcity of resources, rapidly increasing population, and abandoned social services. the societal concept of marketing is doubted. It is questioned that “Are organizations doing an outstanding task of customer satisfaction in line with meeting long run societal welfare ?”.
Consider example of a fast food industry. They do provide yummy food but this food is full of health concerns. The burgers are rich in fat and so are the fries and pies too. Such products are packed in handy form and packaging generating lot of waste. Thereby, in the process of satisfying customer, these fast food outlets are creating increasing health concerns as well as environmental issues.
Societal marketing should take into account the following things:
- The consumer’s needs are of utmost significance.
- Genuine, modern and continuous developments in the products should be executed so as to increase the product’s life and value.
- Emphasize on building long term customer relationship and not on doing business. Do societal good. In short, an organization should market the product keeping in mind the consumer, organizational and long term societal needs and welfare.
The Societal marketing concept is significant because of the following advantages it has:
- It ensures that all the economic resources are channelized in the right direction.
- It develops enterpreneurs as well as managers in a specified society.
- It raises the living standard of the people.
- It increases the speed of economic development of society.
- It makes economic planning more significant and more fruitful to people’s life.
The closer the organizations move towards their customers, the more evidently they realize the fact that the objective of any organizational business lies outside the business, i.e. in the society. Thus, this drives the organizations to make a remarkable contribution for the society’s welfare and upliftment.
A very good example of an organization following societal marketing concept is the Body Shop: Body Shop is a cosmetic company founded by Anita Roddick in 1976.. The company uses only natural, vegetable based materials as ingredients for it’s products. It is totally against animal testing, advocates community trade, as well as complete protection of planet. Thus it totally engrosses the concept of Societal Marketing.
Another example is Ariel. It is a detergent produced by Procter and Gamble. Ariel runs special fund raising campaigns for less privilege classes of the world, mainly the developing countries. It also contributes a share of its profits from every bag sold for the societal development.
To conclude,we can say that societal marketing concept states that a company’s job is to assess the needs and wants of the target markets and to provide optimum satisfaction to it’s customers ensuring both consumers as well as societal welfare.In short,an equilibrium has to be maintained by the marketers among organizational profits,consumers satisfaction as well as social well being.
