The UK National Social Marketing Centre defines social marketing as "the systematic application of marketing concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioral goals relevant to a social good". Their definition is based on one framed in the mid 1990s by Alan Andreason at Georgetown University in the US. He described it as the “the adaptation of commercial marketing technologies to programs designed to influence the voluntary behavior of target audiences to improve their personal welfare and that of society of which they are a part.”

Some of the pretensions of social marketing and the political and philosophical pitfalls associated are teased out in the work of the Vancouver-based media foundation Adbusters.