Social marketing and the built environment: What matters for travel behaviour change?

Abstract

Social marketing and the built environment are two important 'tools' to manage travel demand which have had significant attention in the literature separately. Most previous studies evaluating the effects of social marketing programs have relied on preand post-surveys, using self-reported measures without any objective measures of travel behaviour change. Further, there is a lack of evidence on whether the effects of the built environment are synergistic when combined with other intervention programs, such as social marketing programs. This study contributes by quantitatively evaluating the relative and combined effects of the TravelSmart and the built environment on travel behaviour using objective GPS measurements. Between 2012 and 2014, daily travel data were collected using GPS equipment in suburbs of inner northern Adelaide, South Australia. Individuals in the households aged over 14 carried a portable GPS device everywhere for a period of 15 days during March-May in each year from 2012 to 2014, providing a total of three waves of panel data. The empirical analysis suggests that the TravelSmart program as a 'treatment' significantly reduced the car trips soon after implementation with longer term effects on reducing car trips in high-walkable neighbourhoods. For walking and bus trips, the TravelSmart program increased these 1 year after the 'treatment' with stronger effects on travel behaviour change for the participants living in high-walkable neighbourhoods than for those living in low-walkable neighbourhoods.

Environmental management and social marketing: a bibliometric analysis

“…In some studies, scientists consider that social marketing is one of the approaches to the study of market performance in various industries [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60]. For example, Ma L., Mulley C., Liu W. [61] state that the social marketing and construction industry are essential starting points for the formation of population preferences in travel. Kennedy A.-M. [62] introduces the concept of macro-social marketing as an integrated approach that has a positive impact on the macro-environment of the country and considers its essence on the example of antismoking campaigns.…”

April to June 2021

“…It is evident in the studies that social marketing programs make use of various theories from different fields when designing social marketing campaigns. The following theories were highlighted-theory of planned behavior (Adascalitei et al, 2013;Carrete & Arroyo, 2014;Lee & Kotler;Ma et al, 2017;Manikam & Russell-Bennett, 2016), concepts from public health (Wymer, 2011), theory of reasoned action (Carrete & Arroyo, 2014;Manikam & Russell-Bennett, 2016;Wymer, 2011), social cognitive theory (Carrete & Arroyo, 2014;Lee & Kotler;Wymer, 2011), health belief model (Adascalitei et al, 2013;Carrete & Arroyo, 2014;Lee & Kotler;Wymer, 2011), hierarchy of effects theory (Fry et al, 2017), stages of change model ( Lee & Kotler), social norms theory ( Lee &Kotler) exchange theory ( Lee & Kotler) , expected utility theory (Carrete & Arroyo, 2014), protection motivation theory (Carrete & Arroyo, 2014), personal communication network (Manikam & Russell-Bennett, 2016), ecological systems theory (Farrell & Gordon, 2012). Social Marketing Design Criteria: Several concepts highlighted by the studies reviewed pertained to the design of social marketing programs.…”

“…The term downstream marketing is used in some of the studies to refer to campaigns that target final consumers. The following concepts focusing on final consumers can be highlighted: use of music (Lynes et al, 2014) (Whitelaw et al, 2011),tailor-made campaigns (Ma et al, 2017;Twenewboah-Koduah & Owusu-Frimpon, 2015).…”

Effects of a Travel Behaviour Change Program on Sustainable Travel

“…Recent examples of the utilization of before-and-after panel surveys to evaluate TBCP interventions are Hsieh et al [50], Sunio et al [51] and Meloni et al [8]. On the other hand, there are some studies that included panels consisting on one survey before and two or more survey waves after the implementation of the TBCP, which facilitates the identification of medium-long term effects [52,53].…”

“…Only two studies found in the literature used predictive models to evaluate the effect of TBCP on travel mode use, finding significant effects, using control groups and data collected before and after the implementation of the program [52,55]. But none of them focused on analysing different effects, considering the sociodemographic characteristics of the individuals.…”