Hopedance

by David Laulainen


It’s Hard to Keep Things Simple

I have a friend who once wrote me a long, explanatory email about what was going on in his life, his family and business. At the bottom of the email he apologized: “I’m sorry this letter is so long… if I’d had more time it would have been shorter.”

Social marketing is much like my friend’s apology – it takes time and effort to create a concise message that will effect behavioral change. And, right now, “sustainability” is a very long letter.

On the surface, sustainability is simple: consume less, use energy wisely and minimize waste. Dig deeper and soon the reality of sustainability in everyday life becomes a complex challenge. Does one sustainable choice create another situation with its own set of problems? How many personal decisions are interconnected with those of other people?

In the early ‘90s, many organizations began spreading the word about a sustainable lifestyle. Brochures, flyers, and presentations with stark facts about our consumption and our wasteful habits admonished us to “recycle,” “replace incandescent bulbs” or “drive less.”

And thus, today, people are more knowledgeable about concepts of sustainability, but this familiarity has yet to spur real action – that is, significant change in daily routine. For example, we are more aware than ever that CO2 emissions from our cars contribute to global climate change, and yet many of us still find ourselves stuck in traffic every morning. It seems that knowing about sustainability doesn’t necessarily lead to being more sustainable in our daily lives. Research has recently shown that although 70 percent of people rate “greenness” as a very important factor in household product choice, sales figures show that very few consumers actually choose these “green” products when they shop.

This stubborn “knowing-doing gap” occurs because some of the most important aspects in our day-to-day decision-making are the barriers. For instance, if we are to drive less, we need to walk (“I’m too far away”), use a bike (“what if it’s raining?”), or ride the bus (“they’re crowded and make me late for work”).

Tools for Overcoming Barriers

When communicating or marketing sustainable practices, we must address the barriers to behavioral change in a real-world context. In order to identify them, we use a traditional business tool to get a better understanding of a situation, then apply an extra “trick” that allows us to explore the nature of the barriers themselves. This technique is called a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis.

This methodology clarifies aspects of any goal in a unified format, which is particularly useful in planning effective social marketing campaigns. Once an objective has been established, we gather and conduct as much research as possible about the audience. We use a simple grid to list information about the audience and the barriers, which allows us to see all the issues in one view.

A traditional marketing approach is to take this information and build a campaign based on Strengths and Opportunities with the idea of optimizing results. However, we find this approach can often be short-sighted or too organizationally-focused, meaning that the all-too-human decision-making barriers get lost in the shuffle.

Now for our “trick”: we take the SWOT analysis and invert it (TOWS). By “inverting the relationship” and overlapping the information, we seek to turn Threats into Strengths, and Weaknesses into Opportunities. The benefit to this approach is that it helps to address directly the barriers that keep people from making the decisions they already know they want to make.

For example, take the City of Vancouver’s Idle Free campaign. The initial approach was to dispel myths about idling and provide factual information intended to educate people on problems associated with unnecessary vehicle idling – in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

After using the SWOT-TOWS we determined that the general driving demographic needed a two-stage campaign. First, an easy-to-remember fact (“10 seconds of idling uses more gas than restarting your engine”) and second, a clear directive to change behavior (Turn off your engine when not in traffic). Over two years, the campaign message shifted slightly from targeted groups of people to a larger regional audience in the Vancouver area. The key message “Be Idle Free” remained constant throughout the campaign.

Another good example is a Vancouver-based local food campaign. The Get Local project was launched this fall to educate consumers and media about the benefits and importance of eating foods grown closer to home. Given the number of articles in the news, the popularity of the 100 Mile Diet concept, and the glut of “green” editions in popular media, our research found that awareness is not the barrier to buying local food.

Using our methodology, we found that consumers are looking for ways to make sustainable decisions and are open to guidance. We developed the social marketing brand Get Local as a way to stimulate public support to buy locally-produced sustainable foods and products – and to support the businesses that offer them.

The key task for all print materials was to point people to the website for a directory of member businesses – enabling them to choose a store close to them, or simply to look for the brand mark in a shop window. Once people visited the website, there were additional opportunities to raise awareness about “food miles” and the environmental and economic benefits of buying locally- produced foods and products. To increase campaign impact, we initiated Facebook and MySpace groups, and encouraged membership in local sustainability directories, such as Happy Frog.

Social Marketing is about People

Social marketing must offer both tools and perspectives that enable people to encourage each other to make positive change. This is a key point: people helping their peers to make better decisions is exponentially more powerful than any top-down marketing pitch.

Giving communities tools to evaluate, prompt and monitor commitments toward sustainability leads to plain language outreach that is rooted and effective in the community.


David Laulainen is the president of Catalyst Creative, a marketing communications agency based in Vancouver, Canada. Every aspect of our business reflects our commitment to making meaningful connections between people. We specialize in socially responsible marketing campaigns and natural products branding.
www.catalystcreative.ca