ABSTRACT
Social marketing is concerned with each element in the marketing mix—product, price, promotion, and distribution—marketers have focused largely on promotions. It is easier to see how promotion functions in social change efforts, than to specify how to apply pricing theory to social marketing. Marketers bring a fragmented approach to the pricing of social products, in part because the tools and techniques they use, which are effective in a competitive marketplace, do not fit the requirements of social marketing. Prices have an allocative function in economic (capital, resource, and product/service) markets. Pricing strategists generally focus on the monetary costs incurred by the consumer, and gives little attention to the nonmonetary costs inherent in every exchange. The main challenge for the social marketer is to quantify social prices and assign them to a particular social change program. Attempts at measurement must also reflect the temporal nature of adopting a given social change.
