I had an interesting conversation with Gill and Tom yesterday following the lecture I gave on 'Behaviour change and Ipswich Town Football Club'.
Gill made the comment that the Save your Energy for the Blues campaign was essentially an example of community-based social marketing (CBSM) - a comment to which I would have to largely agree. But then I got thinking about the three strands of promoting sustainable consumption that the course has covered - Economics, Psychology and Sociology. Social marketing, when considered in that context, is deemed a 'psychological' approach - yet as I argued at some length yesterday, community-based approaches are, to my mind, inherently sociological in nature. So is CBSM a psychological or sociological approach to promoting sustainable consumption?
'Community', whether as an idea, locale, or symbolic construct, is a sociological construct. Traditional social marketing of the 'Act on CO2' and 'Are you doing your bit' kind adheres to the psychological approach, so if you combine the two what sort of hybrid have you created? Do we even need to classify it within such a framework? My own thoughts are that if its got 'community' in its title, it's sociological as you are creating a CBSM campaign with a clear target community in mind. Therefore, as community is a social construct, CBSM must at least in part be following the sociological pattern in that it is dealing with people not as individuals but as members of a group bound by certain lifestyle choices and routine practices - but I'd be interested to know the views of anyone else out there...
