Editorial - Partnership the key ingredient for social marketing success
Jeremy Lambert
When the Biosecurity Strategy was launched in August 2003, the potential impacts of human behaviour on New Zealand’s biosecurity were explicitly recognised. For example, vigilant members of the public have alerted us to incursions by exotic pests, including the painted apple moth, southern saltmarsh mosquito, eastern banjo frog, termites, snakes, seaweed and fish.
However, people also represent a significant biosecurity risk pathway. Some of our most serious incursions may have originated from people bringing pests into the country, either knowingly or unwittingly.
For these reasons, achieving desirable behaviours from all New Zealanders is vital to our collective biosecurity success.
But how do we do this?
Influencing human behaviour is a complex business. We each have our own mix of behavioural motivators, drivers and barriers. For some, simply providing accurate information will be enough. For others, it takes an incentive or, dare we say, a threat before the importance of a desired behaviour begins to even register.
Over the past year, Biosecurity New Zealand has been investigating ways it can positively affect the behaviour of individuals and groups in New Zealand. The biosecurity benefits of this ‘voluntary compliance’ are substantial. It also allows targeting of valuable system resources to other priority areas.
Clear, targeted communication plays a vital role across the entire compliance spectrum. Communications programmes which seek to change behaviour often include ‘social marketing’.
What is social marketing and why is it so important?
It is not ‘social engineering’ by government. On the contrary, it reflects the biosecurity outcomes desired by society. New Zealanders have told us that they want our clean, green environment free from unwanted organisms. It is society that desires the protection of our economic, environmental, societal and cultural values through effective biosecurity. Government policy and funding decisions reflect this desire.
Social marketing is one tool used to achieve these aims. It is simply the application of commercial marketing strategies to achieve a positive social or health outcome. The techniques that persuade people to buy a brand of toothpaste or ice cream are also used to get people to take a positive step such as quitting smoking, getting active or driving more safely.
Like commercial marketing, social marketing focuses on the behaviours of specific target audience(s). It uses research, including psycho-behavioural analysis, to understand why an audience behaves the way it does, and what could motivate them to change.
In this edition of Biosecurity, we feature the new summer didymo campaign that encourages New Zealanders to Check, Clean, Dry all equipment between waterways. This campaign is based on research conducted by AC Nielsen (see Biosecurity 72: 6).
Unlike our previous campaigns, this one features a range of promotional materials (including 100,000 trigger spray bottles) designed for specific audience segments.
Some of the campaign’s images paint a provocative picture of the potential damage didymo could cause to our domestic and international tourist industries. Other imagery is far more subtle and is aimed at the many New Zealanders already checking, cleaning and drying their equipment between waterways.
These latter, more ‘aspirational’ messages, are intended to convey the feeling that everyone’s contribution, no matter how small, is vital to our collective success in stopping the spread of aquatic pests.
While there are many similarities between social and commercial marketing, there is one important difference: where commercial marketing is built upon the fundamental ‘four Ps’ (product, price, place, promotion), social marketing has a vital fifth P – partnerships.
You are our partners – other government agencies, biosecurity organisations, regional councils, non-governmental organisations, businesses, the New Zealand public. The better we work together, the greater our chances of success.
As part of our didymo campaign, we have introduced a new element: a small community fund that is accessed by regional councils for the development of local Check, Clean, Dry initiatives. Keep reading future editions of Biosecurity for reports on this initiative and future opportunities for you to be involved with us in protecting New Zealand together.
- Jeremy Lambert
Communications Manager
Biosecurity New Zealand
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Page last updated: 30 April 2008