Guest editorial

We are very grateful to the editors and publishers of the Journal of Social Marketing for giving us the opportunity to showcase the papers in this special section exploring the important role that social marketing plays in shaping our engagement with vulnerable populations and improving their quality of life.

Increasingly, social marketing is called upon to realign market structures with wider societal values. Instead of merely applying business models to the day-to-day management of social problems (Hastings and Domegan, 2018) or concentrating on behaviour change (Saunders et al., 2015), social marketing focusses on participatory social...