Back when I was a newbie social marketer, the Social Marketing Quarterly had just started up and something called the Society for Social Marketing was also brand new. I attended a SSM meeting at one of the first few Social Marketing in Public Health conferences (around 1993?) and even got a mug with its logo. And that was pretty much the last I ever heard of it.
Then came the founding of the Social Marketing Institute in 1999 run by social marketing heavyhitter Alan Andreasen of Georgetown University with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It was designed to “learn, develop and facilitate the application of the very best social marketing practices in a wide range of settings all over the world.” It was an exciting point in the evolution of the field, and held a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the Institute was not refunded when the grant ended in 2001 for various reasons, including the departure of key player Bill Novelli to the AARP and the decision that “the focus of social marketing — and therefore the design of the institute — was too narrow, and what was really needed was a new language and model to affect social change that combined the principles of social marketing with media relations, partnership building and public policy advocacy.”
In addition to the annual Social Marketing in Public Health Conference, which has the same basic structure from year to year, the field also has an invitation-only Innovations in Social Marketing conference. Although I attended and presented at this conference in 1999, since it became a private affair for the social marketing in-crowd in 2001 I and many others have not been deemed worthy to be part of this elite event. It feels like junior high all over again. (Yes, I know, they have their reasons, keep it small and for “advanced” social marketers, etc etc.)
So when in 2003 or 2004, it was announced on the social marketing listserve that a new American Social Marketing Association was starting, based in California, I was very excited. I joined right away. It had officers, various committees starting, it seemed like the real thing. But then I waited…and waited…and waited to see what this new association would do. I think when I sent in my membership form, I had offered to be on one of the committees. But nothing happened. A year went by and still nothing. So I waited to renew until there was some evidence that my membership fee was paying for something. Eventually I found out that there had been some ASMA events around California but after a brief burst of activity it seemed to disappear. And here we are. The URL that they had reserved (americansocialmarketingassociation.org) has since expired, and so this again has come and gone. Around the same time, a group of Canadian social marketers started the Canadian Social Marketing Association, but that too seems to have fizzled (at least judging by their website).
So my question is: Why can’t the field of social marketing sustain a professional association? It would seem that there are enough people doing social marketing and identifying themselves as social marketers to create this type of group.
- Is it that social marketers come from different professions and identify more with those (i.e., health education, marketing, nonprofit communications, etc)?
- Is it because there is already a journal, conference and informal listserve that social marketers feel there is no need to formalize the profession with an association?
- Is it because we are all too busy to take on the burden of starting and sustaining (and, yes, marketing) this type of association?
- Is it because we work on so many different topics and with so many different types of organizations that we do not see the commonalities in the work we do?
If you have been involved in ASMA and can explain what happened to it, or if you have ideas for how we as a profession can get ourselves organized to promote social marketing as an effective approach for health and social change, please let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
What a great, gutsy post. I think the field has failed to do so because, as you suggest, there is a yawning chasm between the narrow, academic “social marketing” set and small nonprofits or government staff, who are just trying to keep afloat and apply a “P” or two when they can. Most of the nonprofit sector, which is my world, consists of small and relatively unsophisticated organizations that need simple marketing help, not debates about the nuances of the social marketing field. It’s interesting that RWJF says as much in their grant results report. I think it’s too hard to try to pull together both these different worlds under a ‘social marketing’ umbrella, because they are two different audiences with two different sets of needs. As a member of the non-academic audience, my approach would be to add social marketing as a dimension to something already thriving in the nonprofit marketing field, like the American Marketing Association Foundation.