Marketing has always been focused on increasing market share, pushing sales, numbers and surviving cut-throat competition. In this process, many a time, social interests are compromised. It is time marketers paid their due to the society.

Accelerated economic growth paved the way for prosperity in the developed world but brought in its wake a lot of problems like environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, increased income disparities, exploitation of labor. Companies, in their bid to make substantial economic gains focused only on the strategies to capture maximum marketshare and in the process ignored society's interests. This situation calls for a strategy that looks beyond consumer wants and firm's goals and takes into account the long-run social welfare. This strategy can be called as societal marketing.

The societal marketing concept is similar to the marketing concept, except that it also takes into account society's well-being. The focus of societal marketing is not just on the business and its customers but also on other stakeholders. The concept was developed at a time when the society began to question if the marketing concept was adequate in the face of worldwide environmental problems, resource shortages, and other social problems. Therefore, the concept holds that the organization should concentrate on finding out the needs and wants of their target customers, and then fulfill these needs more effectively and efficiently than competitors in a way that maintains or improves the consumer's and the society's well-being. It is important to bear in mind that practicing the societal marketing concept does not mean that the company sacrifices profit for the sake of saving society. It does not imply sacrificing commercial goals for societal causes nor does it imply sacrificing societal benefits for commercial gains. Companies are in business to make money. Societal marketing managers believe that consumers will respond more favorably to companies that are also socially responsible (eg. The Body Shop with no animal testing, McDonalds for using more environmentally-friendly wrapping), and react unfavorably to companies which they feel are not socially responsible (eg. Exxon for denying all involvement and responsibility in an oil spill). This gives socially-responsible companies a competitive edge over their competitors.

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