Social marketing: ready to help revolutionise marketing education

Purpose This paper aims to explore ways through which social marketing could help to revolutionise marketing education and argues that this change is needed now. The world is confronting a variety of serious challenges, including a global pandemic, an urgent climate emergency and overdue social transformations. Social marketing, with its far-sightedness, holistic systems thinking and genuine concern for the well-being of society and the environment, is ideally positioned to step forward to help accelerate the transformation of marketing education for the next generation of marketers. Design/methodology/approach This paper is conceptual and is informed by the literature on social marketing over its 50 years history, supplemented by the wider marketing literature. A SWOT analysis is used to analyse the proposed transformation of marketing education. Findings Six strengths are proposed by which social marketing can help to revolutionise marketing education, identified under the acronym COHERE: collaboration with a diversity of disciplines and stakeholders; openness to sharing knowledge, experience and detailed case studies; a holistic approach with a longer time horizon; engaging authentically with the social good; research that breaks new ground in theory and practice; and ethics embedded at its core. Practical implications The opportunities to help revolutionise marketing education offered through these strengths are explored, the weaknesses and threats acknowledged and the implications for marketing and social marketing analysed. Originality/value This paper proposes how (through the six identified strengths) and when (now) social marketing can help revolutionise marketing education, by adopting a dual lens of social and commercial marketing.