The art and science of social marketing.
From conjuring campaigns that spark movements and reshape communities, to encouraging healthier habits and fostering equity-focused brands, we believe in the power of marketing to sell good, not just goods. At Argus, we shift behaviors in order to change lives and communities. This is known as “behavior change marketing” or “social marketing.”
Our Principles
Our approach to social marketing is grounded in six cross-cutting principles that we apply across every stage of our projects.
We use tried and true behavior change models to guide the development of our projects and continuously assess progress.
We partner with our audiences as co-creators from research all the way through development and execution.
We recognize the lived realities of our audiences and approach our work with humility, a willingness to learn and recognition of our own biases.
We learn about audiences’ values, experiences, perspectives, and cultures to best understand and eventually meet their needs.
We know that to be effective, our creative must stand up against the competing messages and ads in the market.
People always have a good reason to behave the way they do which makes behavior change difficult. But thoughtful research, the right strategy, and strong creative can transform the landscape of society’s most pressing problems.
Principles at work
Social marketing takes on seatbelts
Seatbelts save lives. Right? Yes. But only if you wear them. Society solved this issue long ago, right? Yes. Except for a very specific part of our population. Tough guys. You know them. Men who are too tough to die. Too cool to buckle up. Too, well, manly.
Traditional marketing dictates we would talk at this audience. Tell them that if they don’t wear their seatbelt, bad things will happen. Our solution, however, was much more nuanced. And it started with a simple question?
Who is the one person who can get a tough guy to buckle up? His mom.
So we built our messaging, not around finger wagging, but a simple reminder: mom wants you to come home alive.
Then, instead of spending our media dollars on traditional, one way marketing, we put the message in non-traditional places: on the tough guys’ trucks.
We went to the place where we knew we’d find our tough guy: Home Depot. We paid tough guys to plaster Mom’s message on their trucks. And did they ever.
Our tough guys drove mom’s message a total of 200,000 miles, driving (pun intended) an 8% rise in seatbelt use among members of this hard to reach and harder to convince audience.
Who do we have to thank for getting tough guys to buckle up? Social marketing principles. And of course, Mom.