Social Marketing or Social Marketing Orientation? A proposal to Designate the Stage of Marketing with Social and Environmental Responsibility

Abstract

In most marketing texts, the term social marketing stage is used to explain the moment when marketing starts worrying about the effects of its actions on other stakeholders different from shareholders and customers, including the environment. This document portrays as incorrect the use in Spanish language of the term social marketing to describe that period related to the practice of socially responsible marketing. This inaccuracy is attributed to the translation of social marketing from English to Spanish; in its place, it is proposed to use the term social marketing orientation. This is because social marketing aims to modify ideas, behaviors, attitudes that are harmful to the population, which does not correspond to the meaning given to it in the literature on the subject, especially when there is an explanation of the social marketing stage. As part of the contextualization of the proposal, a review is made of the stages of evolution of marketing, beginning with the orientation stage to production.