What is commercial social marketing? And is it a force for good or bad?

The aim of this paper is to introduce the concept of commercial social marketing (CSM) and discuss some major ethical aspects of CSM. In the first section, we introduce 6 social marketing benchmark criteria. Against this background, we demonstrate Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ to be an instance of CSM. Inrelation to the benchmark criteria, the second section focuses on 3 key ethical challenges in CSM. a) We describe the problem of paternalism and suggest that CSM can deal with it by anchoring social campaigns in the target groups’ world-view. b) We address the problem of power imbalances and argue why it is more severe in nonprofit social marketing. c) We argue that CSM could create a new and unethical kind of social competition due to its inherent motivation to gain ownership of the social cause it addresses