Last week I attended the first ever European Social Marketing Conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. Social marketing can be broadly defined as “the systematic application of marketing concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioural goals for a social good”.
The meeting gathered more than 100 delegates from around 25 countries to discuss the application of social marketing in the European context. Although largely dominated by the health sector I did my best to represent the environmental sector through my presentation “Branding Biodiversity: What environmental conservation can learn from social marketing”. This meeting also saw the launch of theEuropean Social Marketing Association (ESMA), which began shaping itself about a year ago and of which I am a proud founding member. All in all the conference was a great opportunity to learn about what is being done in Europe in terms of social marketing and build networks with some leading academics and practitioners. Plus the food was great.