A Brief Introduction to the Joys of Social Marketing

Social marketing is a citizen-centric framework of behavior change. It “creates, communicates, and delivers value in order to influence behaviors that benefit both the target and society”. In general, people make self-interested choices from existing alternatives, and practitioners have little power over these choices. For any health issue, people will fall along a continuum from those “who are prone to behave as we wish” to those “who are resistant”. Messages work well when people are prone; laws may be necessary when people are resistant. When people are at neither extreme, there may be a disconnect between positive awareness/attitude/motivation and a lack of behavior. Social marketing can serve by changing the environment, so that the benefits of the desired behavior are increased and/or the barriers inhibiting behavior are decreased.

Road Crew has given over 65,000 rides to potentially drunk drivers in rural Wisconsin. A year of in-depth research led to the development of a paid service that takes people from their homes to bars, between bars, and home again in limousines. Each community's service becomes a self-sufficient non-profit operation that has reduced drunk driving without increased drinking. With Road Crew , it costs less than 1/3 as much to avoid, rather than clean up after, an alcohol-impaired driver crash. The service accommodates self-interest, provides more benefits than the competitive choice of self-driving, provides an opportunity for people who are aware and motivated to behave as desired, and reduces the barriers keeping people from behaving appropriately.