Abstract

Social marketing is a growing research field. It has been proved that social marketing has some effectiveness in health programs and can help in shaping people’s behaviour. This paper examines the role of social marketing in public communication campaigns and, more specifically, it explores the issue of healthy food habits promotion. An overview of theoretical issues surrounding definitions of basic principles and contents of social marketing is presented. Consequently social marketing is analysed within the context of healthy food promotion. The paper also provides a review of past food campaigns with relative pros and cons and, finally, some recommendations are drawn and some “best practices” recalled.

Key words: Social marketing, food education, behavioural change.