Social Marketing: Are We Fiddling While Rome Burns?

This article follows in the recent tradition of calls for marketers to become more engaged in social marketing. Given that public health represents the core of social marketing's domain, it is suggested that any entry into social marketing ought to begin with a review of the public health marketing literature. Such an analysis reveals that much of the work done to date has involved macroexperiments aimed at changing the individual's health‐related behaviors. This approach is linked to a more conservative structural–functional tradition. It is argued that there is a need for a more radical approach in social marketing that emphasizes efforts to change the negative or constraining social structural influences on individual behavior, particularly those that originate as a function of marketing activities. This approach is tied to the more radical critical theory paradigm. Those with interests in microexperimental design are urged to become engaged in such an endeavor.