The ESMA review

In their October Newsletter 2016, my dear fellows from European Social Marketing Association made a very good comment about my book. Thank you. As Mark Twain have said: «Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.» They say:

«“Social Marketing in a Country. The British Experience” by Carlos Oliveira Santos, PhD, is a comprehensive account of the British national social marketing strategy. The book uses a cognitive approach, to examine the genesis, evolution, and implementation of that policy process that led to an important development in British public health policy. In mapping this experience the book provides a useful resource for those seeking to contribute to the conception and development of similar policy solutions in other situations and countries.

Carlos Oliveira Santos is an assistant professor at the University of Lisbon (Portugal), PhD in Political Science (Public Policy) by New University of Lisbon. Since 1992, he has pioneered the study and teaching of social marketing in Portugal and has created the Marketing Social Portugal website. Previous publications have included Melhorar a Vida, Um Guia de Marketing Social (Improving Life, A Social Marketing Guide, 2004), the first social marketing textbook in Portuguese. Outside this field, he has published several books with studies about some of the biggest Portuguese enterprises as Amorim Group, Galp Energia, Mota-Engil and Pestana Hotels & Resorts Group, among others.»

Stephan Dahl in Lisbon

Stephan Dahl chooses Lisbon for his sabbatical year. One of the world authorities on social marketing, Stephan is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Hull University Business School in England, and Adjunct Associate Professor at James Cook University in Australia. Before joining Hull, he has worked in media, media management, marketing and PR both for non-profit and commercial companies in the UK, Belgium, Germany and Spain.

He is the author of a Social Media Marketing: Theories and Applications (Sage, December 2014) and co-author of books on Social Marketing (Pearson, 2013) and Marketing Communication (Routledge, 2014) and has leaded the development of an edited Marketing Ethics (Sage, 2015) book.

Social marketing and development

Our dear friend Professor Jeff French put me the question that social marketing as an inevitable consequence of social development can be one of my book’s conclusions. I told him that it was very important for me the Popper's position (see The Poverty of Historicism) about the science's power of bringing about a more reasonable world, which generates his concept of piecemeal social engineering, trying to conciliate social interventionism with freedom. In this Popperian sense, social marketing generates an open and permanent search for the improvement of societies and is also a natural result of their needs for improvement.

As social marketers we are sons of a great political mix that I try to characterize with the four political grounds [(1)Anglo-Saxon political philosophy; (2) piecemeal social engineering; (3) American pragmatism; and (4) freedom and democracy), including the important John Stuart Mill's constant search for the wellbeing of society and the idea of government as the promotion of the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves. In this sense, my clear intention was to found social marketing concepts not only in a mere technique of marketing but in a more profound idea of how to conduct and develop our lives together.