Social marketing and the 'selling' of sustainability.
How do we make sustainability ‘mainstream’?’
I have seen this question posed many times over. Part of me thinks, ‘why do we need to ‘sell’ living responsibly when the planet is in crisis?’. At the same time, I understand why it is important to think in these terms. After all, tactics are being used every day to sell unsustainable behaviors. Embracing the strategies involved in the marketing industry could be the answer to fostering more sustainable choices.
‘Social marketing’ does just this. Social marketing is the marketing of a social cause, and the climate crisis is our single most pressing issue facing our existence. It takes a page from the advertising/marketing playbook and applies these strategies to ‘selling’ sustainability. Environmental organizations and those in the sustainability industry should start employing social marketing tactics. We need to make sustainability desirable, inspirational, emotional, relevant, convenient, and personal. After all, campaigns that just fire off information often lead nowhere. The way a message is communicated is often just as or more important than the message itself. These tactics can be applied to both community-based programs (see Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s Community-based Social Marketing), and campaigns looking to reach wider audiences. Check out Robert Cialdini’s ‘Influence: The psychology of persuasion’. He provides six principles for how to design a social marketing campaign. We need to include POC and those of all socioeconomic situations when thinking through how to ‘market’ sustainability.
