Social Marketing Approach In Health Care: A Review Study

Social marketing has been utilized in recent years to influence health behaviors. This paper reviews available experiences in applying social marketing in health research and aims to explore the extent of its application, methods of application and the reported success rate of these studies in changing health behaviors. Hence, it provides guidelines for researchers who plan to utilize this framework in health promotion and education interventions in the future. This review study applies specific key words in search engines including Google Scholar, PubMed, Science direct, SID, and also health research databases, related papers and reports available in English and Farsi were identified. Data was extracted from the content and were qualitatively analyzed. :Although the main focus of the papers was nutrition, but social marketing have been applied in researches related toheart health, helmet, safety belts and sun protection. In these studies, not only the behavior of consumption of a specific product has been studied, but knowledge, attitude, and health status have also been examined. The reported success rate in changing behavior varies from 10% in saturated oils consumption to 30% in the consumption of Soy sauce. It seems that health promotion interventions utilizing social marketing in changing health behaviors that require the consumption of a healthy product and are significantly influenced by attitudes and individual decisions can achieve significant success. Studies have reported different degrees of success, but it is not clear why the success rates are so different. More studies are needed to answer this question.