What is social marketing? According to Kotler, it can be defined as making use of marketing strategies to influence a targeted group to accept, modify or abandon in a voluntary way in order to obtain an advantage for society as a whole.
Several companies engage in social marketing as part of their CSR.
I found an interesting and fun social marketing campaign adopted by Nestlè in 2014: it’s a rap video featuring super babies extolling the benefits of breastfeeding. Each of the individual characters takes life and represent one of the benefits: for instance Lil Wiz about brain and development, Germ Stoppa about the immunity gain from his mother’s milk.
In this video Nestle has had the ability to focus only con customers and their well being without mentioning indirectly the brand or promoting one of their products. In addition, these types of videos can easily go viral since they deliver an educational content but they are fun at the same time: super babies in their diapers dancing and singing rap. There are a number of different characters so that parents and children can identify themselves with.
The video gained an enormous success since it was launched coinciding with Nestlè “Start Healthy breastfeeding week” campaign that garnered community support and media exposure.
Surely, Nestle has been capable to reinvigorate his image and brand strength, indirectly, and get closer into a binding relationship to the local community thanks to his social marketing campaigns.