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The Past, Present, and Future of Using Social Marketing to Conserve Biodiversity

Since the establishment of social marketing as a discipline, it was clear that environmental sustain- ability would be part of its scope (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971). Yet, whereas the academic scope of the field was broadly defined, the origins of social marketing practice, which were heavily linked to the promotion of family planning, meant that the development of this practice-led field has been histori- cally focused on public health. Since the beginning of the century, there have been important devel- opments at the intersection of social marketing and environmental sustainability, particularly considering issues such as waste management, energy efficiency, or water conservation. One area that has had very limited attention in the social marketing literature has been biodiversity conservation, defined as the management of diversity of life on Earth with the aim of protecting species, ecosystems, and their interactions from excessive rates of extinction (Hunter & Gibbs, 2007).

While this has often been constructed to be a topic that relates to wildlife as opposed to people, it is clear that all key threats to biodiversity are a result of human behavior and as such successful conservation strategies have to also be able to influence human decision-making (Schultz, 2011). It is thus unsurprising that conservationists are increasingly interested in social marketing (Ver ́ıssimo, 2013), and this issue of Social Marketing Quarterly aims to bring together these two fields to cross pollinate ideas and promote social marketing research in biodiversity conservation.

Chapter Nineteen – Social marketing and conservation

Halting biodiversity loss depends on changing people’s choices and actions. Increasingly, conservationists use approaches based on social marketing to influence people’s behaviour for the benefit of wider society through techniques developed in the business world. We give definitions of the terms and outline when it should be used instead of, or alongside, law-based, education-based and technical intervention-based approaches. We then illustrate the systematic, step-by-step process underpinning social marketing campaigns with an example from the Caribbean, where the number of people taking wild parrots as pets was successfully reduced. This is followed by examples of social marketing from three different conservation contexts: in community-based natural resource management to reduce the spread of aquatic invasive species, in demand reduction for rhino horn products, and in flagship species fundraising to broaden the benefits for biodiversity. We discuss the lessons that relate more broadly to conservation, including the need to acknowledge ethical issues and the difficulties involved in changing behaviour and the importance of identifying target audiences and evaluating campaigns.

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Competitive outreach in the 21st century: Why we need conservation marketing

Addressing impacts from human activities requires the change of current practices. However, reaching a target audience about conservation issues and influencing their behaviour is not easy in a world where people are continually bombarded with information, and distractions are permanently available. Although not typically considered to be part of the conservation science toolbox, marketing techniques were designed in the commercial sector to identify and influence human preferences and behaviour by placing target audiences at the core of the marketing process. It thus seems reasonable that the same marketing principles and tools could and should be used to address pressing conservation issues. In this manuscript, we provide an introduction to the main objectives of marketing and illustrate how these can be applied to conservation and animal welfare issues. To that end we offer two examples: Project Ocean, where a major UK retailer joined forces with the Zoological Society of London to influence consumer behaviour around seafood; and Blackfish, which coupled social media with an award-winning documentary to create a discussion around the welfare of large cetaceans in captivity. Without the ability to influence human behaviour, a conservationists’ role will likely be limited to that of describing the loss of biodiversity and the decline of the environment. We thus hope that conservation practitioners can embrace marketing as a fundamental component of the conservation toolbox.

Increased conservation marketing effort has major fundraising benefits for even the least popular species

Conservationists often complain that their study species are ignored by donors. However, marketing theory could help understand and increase the profile and fundraising potential of these neglected species. We used linear regression with multimodel inference to analyse data on online behaviour from the websites of the World Wildlife Fund-US (WWF-US) and the Zoological Society of London’s EDGE of Existence programme (EDGE), in order to understand how species traits and marketing campaign characteristics influenced flagship-based fundraising efforts. Our analysis accounted for species traits through variables such as appeal and familiarity, and marketing campaign characteristics through measuring the order in which the species were presented and the amount of information provided. We found that species traits were key for the WWF-US website, with appealing and threatened non-mammal species the most popular with donors. This was probably because WWF-US used well-known flagship species and so marketing had little impact. The EDGE website used a wider variety of species and in this case both species traits and the marketing campaign characteristics were important, so that appealing species and well-promoted species did best. We then predicted outcomes for a hypothetical EDGE fundraising campaign with varying degrees of marketing effort. We showed that additional marketing can have a large impact on donor behaviour, potentially increasing the interest of potential donors towards unappealing species by up to 26 times. This increase would more than equal the amount raised by campaigns using appealing species without additional promotion. Our results show marketing can have a large impact on donor behaviour and suggest there is scope for successful marketing campaigns based on a much wider range of species.

The Science of Changing Behavior for Environmental Outcomes

The Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) partnered with Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment to produce a comprehensive literature review of the science of changing behavior for environmental outcomes. While environmental challenges may seem disparate, almost all are unified by a central theme: to achieve positive environmental outcomes, people must act differently. In the past, those hoping to achieve environmental change applied a specific set of levers: rules and regulations, material incentives, and the provision of information. However, these levers are frequently insufficient. The past decades of research in the behavioral and social sciences have pointed towards new directions to meet those environmental ends: addressing barriers, motivations, and social context of the actors whose behavior would need to change as the primary focus for program design.

In this review, we identify and describe behavior change interventions that tackle components of five leading environmental challenges: biodiversity conservation, climate mitigation, water management and conservation, waste management, and land management. We review these interventions from three main perspectives: the strength of evidence, their integration of insights from behavioral science, and their integration of insights from social science. We conclude with a framework for understanding how program designers can more effectively integrate behavioral and social sciences into behavior change programming to improve environmental outcomes.

Why Behavior Change Matters and What to do About It

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) seeks to address the root causes and consequences of global environmental change by transforming markets and behaviors: unsustainable practices and behaviors are at the heart of the drivers of global environmental change, and responding to these can help to transform systems.