www.ijsc-online.org | IJSC 3 (2008): 108-118

FOSTERING SUSTAINABLE BEHAVIOR: BEYOND BROCHURES

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Doug McKenzie-Mohr

Abstract: The transition to a sustainable future will require sweeping changes in behavior. To date, most campaigns to foster these behavioral changes have been informa-tion intensive and have had little impact. Community-based social marketing is presented as an attractive alternative to conventional information intensive cam-paigns. This approach blends together knowledge from the field of social market-ing with behavior change tools that have been investigated in psychology. Com-munity-based social marketing is based on five steps: careful selection of the be-havior(s) to be promoted; identification of the barriers and benefits to the behav-ior, development of a strategy that addresses these barriers and benefits; pilot testing the strategy; and finally; broad scale implementation.

Keywords: social marketing, behavior change, climate change, sustainability, community, population