Abstract

This article aims to discuss the crisis of identity and ethical issues addressed to social marketing and understand its current proposal. This is a critical paper built from researches of several publishing material such journals and books on social marketing in order to know why social marketing principles are misrepresented. It was possible to find numerous concepts addressed to social marketing, like cause related marketing, societal marketing, social responsibility, green marketing and institutional advertising. Three criticisms are emerging in social marketing: lack of focus on strategies; clear goals of organisation of the campaign producers; and the unethical pattern of the professionals. Social marketing is an alternative for improving services in social campaigns aiming at getting better results. The main purpose of social marketing is the behaviour change any other purposes do not concern social marketing. These misunderstandings about social marketing are increasingly producing misrepresentations regarding its principles.

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