Our thinking

SKY high success

23 September, 2022

A filmmaker, a psychologist, a political economist, and a sustainability consultant walk into a bar in Brighton… they are likely to have joined us at the recent World Social Marketing Conference.  

Social marketing is often confused with social media marketing, rather, social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to encourage positive behaviour change in others. 

From Australia to Argentina, the Conference gathered professionals from many different sectors and disciplines, to share experiences and tools to tackle some of the largest challenges we face in society. This covered a whole host of topics; climate change, conservation, vaccination uptake, sexual harassment, healthy eating, drug use, binge drinking, to military strategy. Social marketing has a crucial role to play in improving so much of daily life.  

Good Business attended to present our experiences from running SKY Girls; our pan-African teen girl empowerment programme funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  

Since launching SKY in 2013, we’ve become experts at changing the behaviour of teen girls across social and health issues, including tobacco prevention. Instead of switching girls off by preaching about the harms of smoking, SKY’s approach is to create cool, relatable girl-led content – and then incorporate smoking messages within it. 

And we were honoured that amongst hundreds of entries, we received a highly commended award at the Conference for our work on SKY Girls.  

So, if you want to try and instigate behaviour change amongst consumers or colleagues, whether it be for on social or environmental issues, drop us a line.   

By Alice Railton