Regardless their high potential, renewable energy resources are insufficiently exploited in Europe. This paper examines the potential of social marketing for renewable energy sources. It uses acceptability and willingness to pay results from existing surveys on renewable energy sources and generates a marketing mix for the state, organizations, businesses and consumers. These surveys typically claim to produce results that will be useful for policy making or marketing purposes. However, after they distinguish the parameters that affect acceptability or choice and willingness to pay, they do not go deeper to demonstrate the ways for the exploitation of the results. Therefore, this paper gauges the gap between the results from consumer stated preference studies and the insights generated for social marketing. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.