Accentuate the Positive: How Social Marketing Makes a Difference

There’s an easier way to save water Social marketing is a promotion strategy that we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the coming years. This marketing technique combines commercial marketing practices with social change and communication the-ories to alter particular behaviors. The ultimate goal of a social marketing project is to benefit the selected target audience, not the marketer. Presently, most environmen-tal education programs rely on education and communica-tion, but most have had limited success. “We tell them that water conservation is important. We send brochures out with the water bills. We make every effort to educate people, so why don’t they stop wasting water?” “Knowledge alone doesn’t harm or help the environment. Human attitudes don’t harm or help the environment. Human behaviors, on the other hand, have greatly harmed yet hold a great deal of hope for helping, the environment, ” says GreenCOM, the environmental education and commu-nication project of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Therefore, it’s in addressing behavior that environmental education programs will be successful. And that’s what social marketing does