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COVID-19 is bringing hardship and tragedy. Health workers are having to take appalling risks; loved ones are being lost; lockdown is causing great distress. And, as always in testing times, the disadvantaged are being hit worst. As we emerge from the shadows, the call from the vested interests, from the systems current winners, will be for a rapid return to business as usual. We must resist this; business as usual got us into this mess.

COVID-19 is trying to tell us something; we health educators and social marketers must listen, think and, above all, take action.

This paper aims to explore the spiritual dimension of social marketing.

The paper adopts a conceptual approach.

The greatest problems humankind faces, from non-communicable diseases epidemics to global warming, are self-inflicted. Humans are voluntarily drinking sugar-sweetened beverages and driving SUVs which threaten our health and our planet. It need not be so. Historical experience and two millennia of thinking show we are capable of better. We all have within us the moral agency to make the right choice even when it is the difficult one; we just have to reconnect with it. Indeed, it is this capacity and desire “to follow after wisdom and virtue”, to rebel against injustice and malignancy, that make us human and cements our collective identity. In the past century, this realisation was focused by the terrible events of Second World War and resulted in the formation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This paper argues that these ideas of agency, morality and rights have fundamental implications for social marketing. We have to move beyond mere behaviour change and start thinking about people in the round – body, mind and spirit. Our job involves more than giving diets a healthy nudge or making the ecological option easy, fun and popular; we have to foster and encourage the innate human drive to think critically and act accordingly. We are not here to edit choice but to facilitate personal growth and social progress.

The debate surrounding tobacco control has become increasingly polarised as the health and tobacco lobbies seek to influence tobacco policy. In recent times the main focus for debate has been the impact of tobacco advertising on under‐age smoking. However, with the proposed ban on tobacco advertising, this paper argues that branding may prove pivotal to re‐orienting thinking about how tobacco marketing continues to influence smoking initiation. Marketing theory asserts that creating demand for a product is dependent upon building a strong brand identity that concurs with the needs, values and lifestyles of the consumer. It is hypothesised that branding can function by affecting not only the way people perceive specific tobacco products but also their perceptions of smoking behaviour itself. Using branding to extend the debate in this way provides some useful insights into the role tobacco marketing might play in encouraging young people to start smoking. It is concluded that explanations for smoking initiation can be found, not by attempting to isolate the abilities of tobacco marketing and health policy to persuade young people to adopt one behaviour in favour of the other, but by examining how exposure to competing forces such as these during adolescence may conspire to brand smoking in a way that encourages young people to experiment with cigarettes. It is suggested that more significant advances in reducing smoking rates are likely to depend upon a willingness to confront the fundamental contradictions that are created by such competing forces.

The purpose of the editorial is to accompany this special issue on “Social marketing: social change”.

The editorial presents three invited reflections by Philip Kotler, Michael Polonsky and Gerard Hastings. It also discusses the articles in this special issue.

Overall, the contributed papers demonstrate that there are many layers to social marketing.

The articles featured in this special issue help to advance social marketing theory as well as offer valuable implications and recommendations for managers, practitioners and policymakers.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on trends within social marketing after ten years of involvement with the field, including being co-founding editor of this journal.

The paper outlines personal interaction in the development of social marketing and then highlights five “millstones” that are identified as limiting factors.

Social marketing has to be more than just communications, has to be more than a definitional toy, has to break free from the straightjacket of the 4Ps and must reach beyond the well-trodden path of services marketing and be prepared to work with industry.

Observations on the evolution of social marketing through personal experience of engagement with the field.

In MIP, Vol. 25 No. 1, Mike Saren argued that academic marketers need to move beyond our “traditional managerial and business confines”. This paper aims to suggest that the discipline is already on the move in that direction, and that social marketing is in the vanguard.

Commissioned as a viewpoint, with permission to “think aloud”.

The paper starts by restating the simple premise that marketing's core business is behaviour change. Marketers are highly skilled at understanding people and persuading them to do things, mostly, but not only to buy and consume products and services. Furthermore, one increasingly influences behaviour at the strategic level, addressing stakeholders as well as customers, and recognising the benefits of turning transactions into long‐term relationships. Social marketers are demonstrating that these insights have obvious and invaluable applications far beyond the marketplace.

As researchers, teachers and practitioners, one should recognise the opportunities presented by social marketing, and act on them as appropriate.

A persuasive argument for an authoritative source.

The purpose of this paper is to question the role of corporate marketing in society and suggest ways of combating it.

The problems are urgent and the style is polemical.

Marketing is as old as human civilisation; it enables us to engage in the type of mutually beneficial exchange that makes cooperation possible. However, in the hands of the corporate sector, marketing is turning us into spoilt, consumption-obsessed children who are simultaneously wrecking our bodies, psyches and planet. The fiduciary duty of the corporation, which demands a single-minded focus on shareholder value, turns concepts such as consumer sovereignty, customer service and relationship marketing into corrosive myths that seduce us into quiescence, whilst furnishing big business with unprecedented power. Corporate social responsibility, meanwhile, is just a means of currying favour with our political leaders and further extending corporate power.

Critical analysis is vital: if we do not want to become the apologists for corporate capitalism we have to research, write and teach about its failings as well as social marketing's potential to do good. We should also present solutions. As individuals we have enormous internal strength; collectively we have, and can again, change the world. Indeed marketing itself is a function of humankind's capacity to cooperate to overcome difficulties and long predates its co-option by corporations. In the hands of social marketers this potential force for good is being codified and deployed. If these talents and strengths can be combined with serious moves to contain the corporate sector, it is possible to rethink our economic and social priorities.

The paper urges social marketers to take heed of and address marketing's failures if our discipline is to be taken seriously in debates about health, welfare and sustainability.

This paper aims to present the problem of obesity and associated ill health in the UK. It seeks to show how marketing by major companies contributes to this problem.

This paper uses the case study of “Terry” to illustrate the issues involved.

This paper finds that life expectancy is predicted to fall in the UK unless action is taken against the growth of obesity. The marketing of fast foods needs to be curtailed.

Ten pledges are made to “Terry” to improve his health, pledges that can be applied to the whole nation.

The financial crisis demands that we in the business academy raise our game: we either caused it by training the generation of “greed is good” MBAs who designed those financial instruments of mass destruction, or failed to prevent it by not equipping them with appropriate caution and ethical standards. In short, we are either complicit or irrelevant. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how Michael Thomas anticipated both the causes and the lessons of the financial crisis, and made a robust call for change long before this became a mainstream concern.

The paper discusses the work and ideas of Michael Thomas in the context of the current financial crisis.

The paper concludes that we can respond to Michael Thomas' vision with a combination of muscular game keeping and intelligent poaching.

Michael Thomas's thinking has profound implications not just for marketing but the whole business sector. The newly established Stirling Institute for Socio‐Management (SISM) is responding to his call to look critically at current business models and completely reengineer our processes and procedures. SISM also argues that lessons learnt about influencing consumer behaviour can be applied to other parts of life such as social and health behaviours.

The paper highlights Michael Thomas's notions of a new, “social capitalism” founded on trust and transparency.