Marketing tools used in public policy may not be purely commercial but based on non-commercial marketing exchanges also. This paper aims to make a case for the practice of social marketing principles to aid the context of public policy.
The approach is to draw out the key implementable learnings (KILs) from the analysis of the five public policy initiatives in the USA, India and Sri Lanka. A case situation with the context of child labour policy in India is proposed to use these KILs.
This paper concludes that the implementation of any policy is a challenging exercise and dependent on a large number of factors. However, KILs derived from successful social marketing programs deal with umbrella campaigns, prevailing socio-cultural environment, bottom-up communication, upstream approach to engage with stakeholders and targeted media advocacy could prove useful when the objective is to induce behaviour change as a part of the policy execution.
This paper evaluates the learnings from social marketing campaigns and their relevance to public policy programs. It also considers a case to demonstrate the application of the concept.
