Excited to Join the <i>SMQ</i> Family

Excited to Join the SMQ FamilySeventeen years ago, fresh off the boat, professor Michael Rothschild of the University of Wisconsin-Madison exposed me to the exciting world of social marketing.I took to social marketing like an Indian to spice, because I was impressed by what this framework could do to facilitate behavior change.As I read through the academic writings of Andreasen and Rothschild and case studies from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Anglo-American world, I noticed that social marketing had gone through tremendous positive changes; yet some things, unfortunately, remained the same.On the positive side, the field has grown in several directions.Dozens of universities and educational institutions around the world now offer semester-long courses, host research centers, and encourage their staff and students to conduct research studies that use social marketing to tackle social issues.Two academic journals are dedicated exclusively to the field, including Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ), currently celebrating 20 years of publication.Several social marketing associations operate at regional and international levels, organizing conferences to bring together passionate individuals.And organizations of all types-including governments, foundations, nonprofits, and businesses-are slowly but surely embracing a social marketing framework in their behavior change efforts.On the academic front, we are witnessing the maturation of the social marketing evidence base, which is increasingly being expanded through better evaluation approaches including systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and applied using theory from diverse disciplines such as behavioral economics, neuroscience, and anthropology.However, fundamental challenges to the understanding of the social marketing framework remain.Issues with positioning of what social marketing stands for have existed from its origins and vary from region to region.In the Anglo-American world, social marketing is perceived as a communication-only strategy, while in Asia and Africa, social marketing is perceived as useful only in promoting contraceptives for family planning and preventing sexually transmitted diseases.Both of these perceptions prevent the sector from growing.Using the label of social marketing, some managers employ communication-only strategies to influence behavior; with a few exceptions, most of them end up being ineffective and inefficient, as they ignore core concepts such as audience orientation, marketing strategy, and behavioral evaluation.As a result, other social change managers write off the framework.Additionally, when social marketing is perceived to promote only contraceptives, social change actors in sectors including environment, injury prevention, peace building, governance, and financial savings neglect its rich and useful learnings.Social marketing also suffers from a lack of its own theoretical foundations.We continue to remain heavily indebted to the conceptual contributions of commercial marketing and health communications, and we have yet to branch out on our own.Numerous committed academics and practitioners, too many to name here, are making valiant efforts to address some of these misperceptions, improve our positioning, and enable social marketing to establish a true identity.Through research, teaching, and training, I attempt, in my humble way, to aid that process.I would like to use my platform as the newly minted coeditor of SMQ to further these efforts.SMQ has a rich tradition of serving as the hub of excellence for both the theory and practice of social marketing.Our editorial team remains dedicated to furthering these twin objectives.In my short tenure

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