This conceptual paper highlights the importance of adopting gender-responsive approaches in social marketing programs. The paper addresses the lack of understanding of gender and what it entails by describing gender as a social construction and using practical examples from the health and international development areas. Drawing into intersectionality perspectives, the article underlines the need to understand the varied and particular experiences of individuals and groups within a specific context given their intersecting social-identity factors.  

The article also presents several approaches to integrate gender, that are commonly used by academics and global governance institutions: gender-unequal, gender-blind, gender-sensitive, gender-specific, and gender-transformative. The last two are considered gender responsive and are recommended to be adopted by social marketing programs. Lastly, the article also proposes pathways to integrate gender in the different phases of a social marketing program (research, social issue identification and participant selection, development and implementation, monitoring, evaluation and learning, reporting and dissemination) to make strategies and actions more gender-responsive.