Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
marketing campaign can be used to change such behaviour. To explore these ideas we have
presented a case study based on a recent research project working jointly with two social
marketing companies. The purpose of the case study is to highlight the key processes of a
social marketing campaign.
We do this to move beyond many of the more general ideas of social marketing that are
presented and also to show the nature of the stages involved in this context and as a form of
action research in the social marketing of holiday travel behaviour.
Approaches to social marketing and sustainable travel behaviour:
a case study
The case study formed part of a project entitled 'Social marketing for sustainability: developing
a community of practice for co-creating behavioural change campaigns' (ESRC 2012). This
project aimed to explore the potential of establishing a collaborative 'community of practice'
between academics and practitioners to in turn develop a series of applications using existing
technology platforms (for promoting responsible environmental behaviour). The focus was on
reducing travel and tourism's impact on climate change. This in itself has been a rich source of
potential for social marketing within tourism but few projects have actually tackled in detail the
idea and more importantly the steps towards enacting behaviour change using social marketing
strategies. The project had a number of research objectives but the two of most relevance to this
case study are:
1 To co-create with practitioners an approach towards developing social marketing strategies
relating to sustainable holiday travel.
2 To co-create a platform of products using social marketing for promoting responsible travel
amongst key market segments.
The starting point for any social marketing strategy is indentifying the key behavioural goal. This
is something that has to be achievable and again it is important that targets are not set too
ambitiously. In our case our goal was 'to reduce so-called “aspiring green travellers” who fl y short
haul in the UK and Europe by 5 per cent by 2015'. However, our key focus was to switch
travellers from plane to train on selected European routes.
Flying was chosen as it is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions and it
accounts for 7 per cent of UK carbon emissions. In addition it is often at odds with the political
agenda so there is no government policy to counteract the increasing demand for air travel. Finally,
it appeared possible to reduce fl ying in certain circumstances as a potential behaviour change.
The main stages of research associated with the process of social marketing are shown in
Table 5.4
.
As can be seen most effort was devoted to considering who were the key market
segments and also what were the key challenges in attempting to change attitudes and
hence behaviour. These are both critical starting points in the development of any social
marketing strategy.
In terms of fl ying habits the highest number of users is in the socio-economic groups ABC1
and certainly in the fi rst two of these. Using a desk based study, data from Mosaic identifi ed three
very general groups (Mosaic UK 2009), namely: 'Liberal opinions' (young professionals);
'Suburban mindsets' (mainly married middle aged people); and 'Professional Rewards' (managerial
classes, 40+ years old with considerable spending power). Working in partnership with a social
marketing company 'Uscreates' along with two other such organizations as stakeholders (Jeff
French and Hyder Consultancy), more market segmentation analysis was undertaken and
