Social Marketing Tools

Community-based social marketing draws heavily on research in social psychology which indicates that initiatives to promote behavior change are often most effective when they are carried out at the community level and involve direct contact with people. The emergence of community-based social marketing over the last several years can be traced to a growing understanding that programs which rely exclusively on media advertising can be effective in creating public awareness, but are limited in their ability to foster change, especially in the long term. Social marketing can impact driver behaviors that have been difficult to change through design and enforcement and can also supplement design and enforcement efforts.

Community-based social marketing involves four steps:

1. Identifying the barriers and benefits of an activity
2. Developing a strategy that utilizes "tools" that have been shown to be effective in changing behavior
3. Piloting the strategy, and 4) Evaluating the strategy once it has been implemented across a community.

Some "tools" of social marketing include:

• Commitment: (See Drive With Care pledge)
• Prompts: Prompts are visual or auditory aids that remind us to do something we might otherwise forget, like sticking strictly to the speed limit.
• Norms: Seeing others in our community behave a certain way, (coming to a full stop at every stop sign), creates a norm and makes others in the community more prone to behave in a similar way.

The tools are most effective when used in combination with one another.

The Placing of Prompts:

At gas stations and drive-thrus. Prompts about specific activities are most effective when presented as close in time and space as possible to the targeted behavior. Hence, safe driving prompts in locations where people stop in their cars mid-trip.

Variable Message Boards (example pictured top right) are another way to target people while they drive.

Yard signs:

Serve as both prompts and means of establishing norms.

Presence at Community Festivals and Events:

Norms are best reinforced through peer-to-peer personal contact. These are also wonderful opportunities to recruit residents to make commitments and encourage them to ask their friends and family to do the same.