Social marketing as a behaviour change strategy to increase tourists' pro-environmental behaviour

This chapter explores the value that social marketing can bring to subject areas such as sustainable tourism. Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviour that benefits individuals and communities for the greater social good. Social marketing practice is guided by ethical principles. It seeks to integrate research, best practice, theory, audience and partnership insight, to inform the delivery of competition- sensitive and segmented social change programmes that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable. This chapter will also explore key principles of social marketing and how these principles can help to overcome the overtourism issue faced by the tourism sector. Social marketing has already been utilised as a useful tool to positively influence tourists’ pro-environmental behaviours (ex. Borden, Coles and Shaw, 2017; Tkaczynski et al., 2020). Social marketing has the potential to address these issues with behavioural change interventions that are more effective than awareness-raising (Dolincar et al., 2019).

More specifically, the social marketing theoretical approach is demonstrated through application to address the challenges faced by the Peak District National Park in Derbyshire, a protected area negatively affected by the issue of overtourism because of COVID-19 pandemic. A social marketing behavioural change intervention will be proposed in order to address overtourism challenges currently faced by the Peak District National Park. Such an approach can also be broadly applied to promoting a sustainable tourism approach in other protected areas across the UK.