Social Marketing Strategy for Low SES Communities: Position Paper

Education is transformative. Education delivers benefits to individuals, their families and communities. It is this far-reaching impact that compels research into understanding why people from low-socio economic status (SES) backgrounds are under-represented in tertiary education, and finding new ways to address this situation. This position paper reviews what is currently known about interventions for widening participation in tertiary education, with the intention of mapping those findings to a social marketing strategy aimed at people who have not traditionally considered tertiary education as a career pathway. A practical approach is taken, to give an overview of the current discussions and debates in the literature to review which approaches work best for the cohorts under consideration, and consider the reasons for that success. This project is novel as it synthesises two similar yet different domains; social marketing and widening participation. The social marketing-widening participation nexus that underpins this project not only provides a more robust platform which will generate new insights, it also represents a different lens through which to view the issue of underparticipation in tertiary education by people from low socio-economic backgrounds