What have we achieved so far?
Across Europe the social marketing community is steadily growing, with over 1,000 people actually practicing, and many times that many interested in this approach to achieving better social, health and environmental outcomes. ESMA will be developing a set of services for its members to share information about good practice and research and to develop their skills and understanding about effective social marketing. ESMA will also seek to advocate for the application of social marketing in policy development and delivery across Europe.
Following our first meeting in London, November 2011, we worked together towards laying the foundations of the Association and preparing for the official launch of ESMA, which took place at the first European Social Marketing Conference in Lisbon, 27-28 November 2012. We also launched our logo and website there, to make it easier for people to join ESMA.
Since then there has been a lot of work happening in the background to develop a new website, which was launched in Spring 2014. We have achieved a legal status for ESMA, and we organised four European Social Marketing Conferences in Portugal (Lisbon, 2012), the Netherlands (Rotterdam, 2014), Finland (Espoo, 2016) and Belgium (Antwerp, 2018). The conferences bring together academics, practitioners and policy makers from many different countries across Europe and also further afield. ESMA is also a supporter and partner of the World Social Marketing Conferences.
In November 2014 and December 2017 ESMA held elections for the Board of Directors. The ESMA Board Directors are:
Rita Brophy, Research Director, SMS Research, UK
Jeff French, CEO of Strategic Social Marketing, UK
Julie Huibregtsen, Owner of Huibregtsen Sociale marketing, Netherlands
Nadina Luca, Lecturer, the York Management School, University of York, UK
David McElroy, Senior Policy Officer, Marine Stewardship Council, UK
L. Suzanne Suggs, Associate Professor of Social Marketing and Head of BeCHANGE Research Group, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland.
Diogo Verissimo, Oxford Martin Fellow, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, UK
ESMA is growing and looking forward to working with its members and supporters to further develop and promote social marketing in Europe. We are looking for locations for the next ESMC conference in 2020. We are looking for individuals to put together an expression of interest with information on their country/cities as potential hosts for the conference. These bids will be used to help pick a location for the 2020 conference, and also create a shortlist for the 2022 conference. Do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in bringing the European social marketing conference to your city/country.
Christiane Lellig launches ESMA at the European Social Marketing Conference in Lisbon on 27th November 2012.