Journal of Socialomics

Authentication of Social Marketing in Reducing Water Consumption

Seehagen Luc^* Department of Social Marketing, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
^*Correspondence: Seehagen Luc, Department of Social Marketing, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium, Email:

Received: 02-Jan-2023, Manuscript No. JSC-23-19795; Editor assigned: 05-Jan-2023, Pre QC No. JSC-23-19795 (PQ); Reviewed: 19-Jan-2023, QC No. JSC-23-19795; Revised: 26-Jan-2023, Manuscript No. JSC-23-19795 (R); Published: 02-Feb-2023, DOI: 10.35248/2167-0358.23.12.165

Description

A major social and economic problem in many nations is the lack of access to water. One alternative is to increase the water supply although these actions are expensive. Price-based water demand management may be seen as politically divisive and socially unfair. Social marketing efforts with the aim of changing people's behaviour have the ability to promote sustainable use of a resource that is becoming more and more limited yet still vital. Society is under pressure to adopt more environmentally friendly habits, and household water use is one of these habits. The sustainable management of water resources is a crucial societal and political issue because access to drinkable water is frequently seen as a basic human right. The corporatization of water corporations was a factor since it served their financial interests to promote consumption and raise revenue. The challenges brought on by an increase in household size were made worse by the use of potable water for outdoor use, the low adoption of domestic water efficiency devices, waste from leaking taps, and inefficiencies in outdated water distribution infrastructure.

When the threat of shortages became real, water providers and governments worked to address both supply and demand challenges by building new storage facilities, opening up access to underground water sources, desalinating water, and recycling waste. However, supply side solutions are expensive and encounter resistance from a wide range of stakeholders concerned with resource conservation and environmental protection. The primary challenge of ensuring public health, equity, and community support while achieving sustainable water use requires governments and water providers to look beyond constraints on price and supply as well as restrictions on both. Resource demand management strategies might vary, but they typically combine economic and behavioural strategies. While behavioural approaches aim to alter behaviour by altering attitudes, economic approaches frequently rely on cost or regulatory limits. Some academics categorise these potential treatments into structural and voluntarism approaches. Instead of focusing on the attitude-behavior connection, structural approaches concentrate on mechanisms that directly affect behaviour. Examples of such mechanisms include water restrictions and subsidies for water-saving technology. Strategies to encourage ecological citizenship through more sustained attitude change are part of voluntarism approaches. According to the hierarchy of effects, attitudes shape behaviours in turn.

Although structural remedies can have an instant effect, they may also be viewed as shallow and short-term because they only persist as long as the structural remedy is in place. Additionally, they may not always result in a change in underlying attitudes or behaviour. Generally speaking, factors that influence water use include household size, tenure of housing, income, cost, and environmental beliefs. The impact of social marketing strategies is less evident, though. Although the voluntarism and social marketing approaches appear to be helpful tools for policymakers, there is still a dearth of empirical data to back up their durability. Despite demands in the literature to study social marketing applications in a number of new situations, none of the substantial and expanding social marketing literature examines voluntarism ways to demarketing water usage.

Water storages at the case study site had decreased to 11% of capacity by 2007 as a result of the ongoing drought in some areas of the State; they had decreased to less than 5% of capacity. Targeted programmes to enhance water conservation and decrease water use were conducted against this backdrop. An outdoor watering prohibition was initially implemented. Other initiatives to promote water conservation were also implemented. With daily consumption per person averaging around 250 litres, a target of 150 litres per person was set, and advancement toward that goal was tracked in the local media. Target 150 was a campaign that was run throughout the State and advertised in the media, on billboards, and on water bills. Its main goal was to provide a baseline for daily consumption that customers might use as a guide. The results of this study offer a conceptual framework and a thorough understanding of the major factors influencing behaviour related to water usage. The significance of elements like moral duty perceived and attitudes toward institutions associated to water in morally significant situations, as well as the intricate interplay between various policy instruments to promote behaviour change. A social marketing campaign has the potential to be a very effective strategy for altering household water use behaviours. However, in this instance, other policies, such as limitations and subsidies, favoured social marketing. In a large-scale campaign, behaviour change and attitude change support one another. According to established definitions from the literature, the campaign wasn't a strictly voluntarism strategy but rather a fairly extensive social marketing technique. In fact, one of our findings is that using some structuralize tools to support a campaign to alter attitudes increases its chances of success. Combining the existing literature on demand management and social marketing with the preliminary findings from this study raises a number of hypotheses that will be investigated in further studies.