Social marketing: an appropriate strategy to reduce oral health inequalities?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Social marketing appears to offer a structured approach to the delivery of public health interventions. It uses the principles of marketing to understand health-related behaviour and tailor appropriate and effective interventions to population subgroups. Whilst commercial marketing capitalises on current demand for a tangible benefit, social marketing relies on stimulating behavioural change for future health gain. This means that the value placed on the product must be seen to be attractive enough to stimulate demand. In contrast, many public health interventions rely on ‘top-down’ diffusion of health information. As a result, the relevance of the message conveyed is often limited and does not produce exchange. As both individuals and communities should be placed at the centre of action to reduce health inequalities, this paper examines whether social marketing could provide a conceptual framework for behaviour change to improve oral health.