The Concept of Social Marketing : From Local Development Initiatives to Global Integration - The Example of Health Care in Rural India

This paper aims at the delimitation of the concept of social marketing, with a special emphasis on priority products for the weakest sections of society in rural India. It also aims to show that there is a wide and unexplored scope for potential synergies between private and public institutions, small-scale enterprises and multinational corporations, business and non-governmental organisations and between the formal and the informal sectors. Given the slogan of the World Health Organisation "Health is Wealth", we subscribe to this axiom and we conduct a PEST analysis based on a field experience in the rural areas of Tamil Nadu (South India) in order to show that there is further scope for the social marketing of health care in rural India through the design of renewed partnerships between public and private institutions that can be viewed as a subtle dialectic between local development initiatives and global integration