ABSTRACT

A key premise of macro-social marketing is that, to address entrenched social problems, macro-social marketers must direct change efforts towards different parts of the problem’s embedding network (upstream and downstream). We expand upon this description to suggest that efforts to create change in different parts of the network should adopt a co-creative approach. We begin the chapter by introducing human-centred design (HCD) as a way to structure macro-social marketing approaches. Principles of HCD are frequently implicit in scholarship on macro-social marketing, and we articulate some of the ways in which it can be used to explicitly guide macro-social marketing efforts. Next, we describe a case study of a partnership between a U.S. university and an East African nonprofit, which illustrates the co-creation framework. Finally, we describe some criteria that can be considered at each step in the human-centred design process, bridging the literatures on HCD and macro-social marketing, to highlight elements to consider as best practices.