Social Marketing to Extinguish Fire-Setting Behaviour

This paper presents a case study of a social marketing intervention, developed as an action research project, which applied marketing principles and practices to the public policy challenge of reducing the incidence of deliberate countryside fire-setting in certain communities. This represented an interesting and challenging application of social marketing because it involves an illegal anti-social behaviour, the target ‘customers' for the campaign are largely unknown and difficult to reach, the direct benefits of the behaviour change will accrue to the community rather than the target ‘customer', and the behaviour in question had become an ingrained multi-generational ‘tradition' and social norm within the communities involved. This paper tracks the scoping, development, implementation and evaluation of the social marketing intervention. The campaign's success could have implications for tackling other forms of anti-social youth behaviour and for protecting communities at risk of wild-fires worldw ide.