An examination of social marketing and campaign management from the perspective of environmental non-governmental organizations: A mixed approach

With a starting point "Why can't you sell brotherhood like you sell soap?", social marketing has become more crucial with the increase in social problems. Environmental social marketing practices strive to stimulate social environmetalism and to minimise environmental problems. The beginning of environmental movements coincides with the emergence of social marketing. One of the most important components of environmentalism movement is environmental non-govermental organizations (NGOs). Environmental behavior refers to converting all kinds of behavior that have significant effect on individual and social arena to environment conscious manner. Behavior change comprises giving up a harmful behavior, adopting the beneficial behavior and making a habit out of this behavior etc. Social marketing campaigns of environmental NGOs should be appropriate to the targeted environmental behavior. These campaigns are one of the communicational steps of social marketing process and as naturally they reflect all the components of the process. In this study, the focus point is the environmental NGOs operating in Turkey. In order to understand these NGOs' social marketing campaigns, both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to complement each other. In the first place, the campaigns belonging to the last 5 years were examined via the content analysis method to evaluate the existing situation.. Then, to get the views and advices of authorities, semi structured interviews were conducted with social marketing academicians and field experts from environmental NGOs. In addition to the content analysis and these interviews, a survey was conducted in order to determine customers' perspective. As a result, some inferences were drawn on the 3 distinct dimensions (behavioral dimension, NGO dimension and social marketing dimension) and related interpretations were made. People are inclined to inactive environmental behaviors and NGOs should be more proactive in calling attention to the social campaigns which have continuity and which depends on feedback. It is suggested that diversification of environmental behavior types that campaigns focus on can be helpful. Based on the evalutaions regarding the environmental NGOs investigated in this study, inadequecy is observed on topics such as institutionalisation, reaching local regions, campaign objectives, partnerships among each other, and etc. Problems with regards to the usage of campaigns to generate funds are expressed. As a result of the evaluations about social marketing, it is suggested that campaigns could have ambigious objectives and goals due to doing mass marketing and not determining a specific audience group. Therefore, determining target audience is highly important. The elements of campaign communication will vary according to different aspects of target audiences. Monitoring behavior change after a campaign is over is another point that is overemphasized. Also, differences between people that exhibit environmental behavior and others are identified. These differences should be taken into account while planning social marketing efforts. The importance of social media is also emphasized. Besides, increasing the reliability of social media channels is needed as well.