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“Mr. Condom” may not have been the nickname Mechai Viravaidya aspired to have, but it’s the one he got — and he’s honored. 

In 1974, Thailand tackled poverty with an unconventional approach: promoting the use of condoms. That same year, the average Thai family had seven children. Women didn’t have many opportunities outside the home, and supporting a large family was next to impossible on small wages during a recession. 

Rather than control the population by limiting the amount of children people could have by law, Mechai Viravaidya wondered if condom marketing and distribution alone could reduce the size of families over time. Viravaidya, a former minister who was frustrated by the Thai government’s inability to set a national family planning policy, founded the Population and Community Development Association (PDA) to take on the task. 

With government investment, Viravaidya and PDA began distributing condoms everywhere low-income communities gathered. Buddhist monks blessed condoms so that people felt safe using them. Shopkeepers received condoms to hand out with every purchase. Teachers were trained to show students the proper use of condoms through fun events like condom blowing contests. 

For people who could afford to spend a little more money on meals, PDA established a chain restaurant, Cabbages and Condoms, so they could hand out free condoms with every bill. Now with locations in England and Japan, Cabbages and Condoms supports the PDA with its profits.

Cabbages and Condoms restaurant, Bangkok.

By the year 2000, after 26 years of aggressive condom distribution and promotion, the average family had just 1.5 children. Population growth slowed from 3.3% in 1974 to 0.5%. On top of that, new HIV/AIDS infections fell by 90% between 1991–2003. PDA estimates that 7.7 million lives were saved as a result of condom education in the country. 
To achieve his outstanding goals, Viravaidya used social marketing, which adapts conventional marketing strategies to reach social goals for low-income communities and other vulnerable groups. Social marketing for condoms has been used all over the world to help slow the spread of HIV and give women more autonomy. 
Keep reading to find out more about social marketing tactics and how they’ve been used to promote condoms, saving lives all over the world.
What is social marketing and why does it matter for condom use?
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) defines the ultimate goal of social marketing as instigating “healthy and sustainable behavior change.” Social marketing comes with a mandate to reach low income and vulnerable populations, with the goal to shift perceptions of the status quo so that population health outcomes improve over time. Experts apply social marketing principles to movements across a wide spectrum, including the climate crisis, the opioid crisis, and smoking cessation — but social marketing started with condom campaigns during the HIV crisis. 
In the 1980s, as queer men and trans women started dying of AIDS at an alarming rate, condoms were promoted as a way to slow the spread of the disease within a population that hadn’t yet grown accustomed to using them. As HIV/AIDS spread within developing countries, social marketing promoted condoms to populations who weren’t using them for religious and cultural reasons.  
It’s hard to change behavior. Social marketing campaigns need a lot of time to be effective, and the most successful ones get government investment so they can run long enough to see any impact. But even on top of government buy-in, successful social marketing campaigns also need:

• Unconventional distribution networks to reach low income people
• Respected community leaders who know people within the target population    
• Low cost or free products
• Mass marketing campaigns that reduce behavioral stigma

When you’re trying to change stigmatized behavior, the normal rules of marketing and product distribution don’t work. For example, in the 1980s, free condoms were available at reproductive health clinics — accessible for people with vaginas, not so accessible for queer men and trans women who never visited reproductive health clinics. You could, however, find them at bars, truck terminals, and bathhouses — so that’s where the condoms needed to be, too.  
Social condom marketing is high stakes because it’s public health — the success or failure of a campaign means more lives lost or saved from HIV/AIDS. That’s why NGOs and other organizations running successful campaigns learned quickly to lean into the norms of a community and use them to promote condoms in novel ways. Here’s a selection from some of the most successful campaigns throughout the world: