Part I. Developing an Outreach Campaign Plan
Step 2: Identify & analyze the target audience

Why social marketing?

In today's highly targeted and distracting media and advertising world, it can be difficult to grab people's attention to get them to change behaviors that have a negative impact on the environment. This is compounded by the commonly held perception that those small personal changes offer few direct benefits, are too insignificant, or are not in synch with other people's behaviors. Enter social marketing to help motivate people, using tactics as persuasive as commercial marketing, to undertake the actions and behaviors that you are seeking.

One of the most compelling reasons to use marketing principles for promoting sustainable behavior is that marketing works. New products become successful largely because marketers are successful at convincing prospective consumers that they need to buy these products or switch from another product. The goal of social marketing is to create a demand for a product, action, or service that will lead to positive social change-in our case, to improve or protect water quality.

The problem with personal behavior change is that habit often wins over better information. So, even with information that tells us it is better to reduce sugar intake, exercise regularly and fasten seatbelts, our actions don't always follow our knowledge. Other excuses we have for not doing such reasonable things might include a lack of direct consequence or punishment, insufficient warning or prompts when we are about to do these behaviors, our ability to tune out messages selectively, and other reasons based on human psychology.

While information is key to changing attitudes and perceptions, the behavior change step can involve pitching a variety of motivations to evoke a response (like marketers pitch their products with sensory excitement and emotional associations), on-the-spot prompts and reminders, offering direct benefits, warnings of consequences, and so on.

The next section will describe some social marketing tools that will be touched on throughout the module in Steps 3, 4, and 5.