Healthy Heroes, Magic Meals and a Visiting Alien: Community-led Assets-based Social Marketing

Abstract

Although social marketing emphasizes consumer orientation, it is only in recent years that consumers and communities have been at the center of program development and implementation. This article illustrates how, on a modest budget, social marketing and community development approaches were combined in two innovative and creative community-led projects in Edinburgh, Scotland. Community residents were integrally involved, not just as participants in research and as project beneficiaries, but as decision makers, creators, and implementers. The projects illustrate how communities have skills and assets within themselves which they can bring to bear in a social marketing framework, making it possible to apply social marketing on modest budgets, and how interventions which originate within communities and are owned by them may be more engaging and may lead to more positive health outcomes. Approaches which genuinely involve communities in development and implementation make financial, practical, and philosophical sense.