The study of consumer behavior can be applied to improving marketing strategies, shaping public policies, influencing society, and improving consumer knowledge.
Public policy, as government action, is generally known as the principled guide to action taken by the administrative or executive branches of the state with regard to a class of issues in a manner consistent with law and institutional customs. In the United States, this concept refers not only to the result of policies, but more broadly to the decision making and analysis of governmental decisions. Public policy is commonly embodied in constitutions, legislative acts, and judicial decisions.
Shaping public policy is a complex and multifaceted process that involves the interplay of numerous individuals and interest groups competing and collaborating to influence policymakers to act in a particular way. These individuals and groups use a variety of tactics and tools to advance their aims, including advocating their positions publicly, attempting to educate supporters, opponents and consumers, and mobilizing allies on a particular issue.
Social marketing can help persuade and educate consumers on societal issues with the ultimate goal of helping to shape public policy. For example, social marketers, dealing with goals such as reducing cigarette smoking or encouraging condom use, have more difficult goals. They must make potentially difficult and long-term behavioral change in target populations by educating them. Social marketing applies a "customer oriented" approach and uses the concepts and tools used by commercial marketers in pursuit of social goals like anti-smoking campaigns or fundraising for NGOs.
Example of an Anti-Smoking campaign to educate consumers
An anti-smoking message painted on a pedestrian crossing in the Orchard Road area in Singapore.
Health promotion is broadly defined as the process of enabling people to increase control over and improve their health. It occurs through developing healthy public policy that addresses the prerequisites of health such as income, housing, food security, employment, and quality working conditions. There is a tendency among public health officials and governments—and this is especially the case in liberal nations such as Canada and the USA—to reduce health promotion to health education and social marketing focused on changing behavioral risk factors.