Using Social Marketing as a Theoretical Framework to Understand Citizen Participation in Health Promotion

The concept of broad-based public participation is a fundamental element of health promotion and citizenship. There is a gap, however, between the promise and reality of citizen participation in health promotion. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the utility of social marketing concepts in analyzing and better understanding the complexities of citizen participation. The data are drawn from a study on citizen participation during a recent health reform policy designed to foster health promotion in British Columbia, Canada. A social marketing framework was used to interpret the data and make sense of citizen participation in a post-hoc analysis, particularly using the concepts of understanding the consumer perspective, exchange, marketing mix and segmentation. The results contradict the frequent criticism in health promotion that social marketing tends to ignore the broader context of individual behavior. This paper argues that social marketing yielded new insights into understanding the societal circumstances that inhibited or fostered citizen participation and offers a discussion of the potential of social marketing as a tool for furthering citizen participation in health promotion planning.