Social Marketing Innovation: New Thinking in Retailing

Retail marketing has been a well-established research stream in academic literature for several decades. As social marketing takes ideas from commercial marketing, this paper proposes to transfer the retail marketing concept of social supermarkets (SSMs), a real-world application, to social marketing. Social supermarkets can be seen as an innovative example of social entrepreneurship, as well as a best-practice benchmark of 'new thinking' in social marketing. Social supermarkets sell food and consumer goods that they receive free from retailers and manufacturers for a discount of up to 70% to people who are in or at risk of poverty. The contribution of this paper is in defining the concept of social supermarkets founded on social marketing and retail marketing literature and in describing the development and current status of the social supermarket sector in a European country.