An approach to understand social marketing unexplored potential

Abstract

This paper clarifies the definitions of the five different terms used by the companies associated to Social Marketing, in international journals. It reviews terms usually linked to social marketing practice, and to discuss their different meanings for the sake of proper adoption by marketers and scholars. The discussion is based on an exploratory research and, as such, we adopted the literature review as the main approach of study. Two scientific databases were used to identify the most commonly used expressions, which were, later on, reviewed and discussed, exploring their similarities, differences and relevance to organizational environment. The conclusion is that internal marketing is directly related to employees and different stakeholders of the institution promoting or using this strategy or management philosophy, whereas Social Marketing is related to changing behavior of target markets.