Rethinking the Relationship between Social/Nonprofit Marketing and Commercial Marketing

Abstract

Despite the long history and increasing interest in nonprofit and social marketing, the managerial and pedagogical issues that arise in these noncommercial contexts are treated as unique cases in an intellectual environment dominated by commercial issues and applications. Its literature and basic textbooks allot only a few paragraphs or pages to nonprofit and social marketing. This essay posits the radical idea that this implicit taxonomy has the relationship upside down. The author argues that nonprofit and social marketing represent the most complex and difficult contexts in which marketing activities are carried out and that the appropriate classification of commercial applications is (only) one simplified variety of this complexity, principally the sales of products and services.