Monday, December 22, 2014

Pilot Round III: Marketing

If you read our last two blog posts, you’ll already know that the Babson Eco Reps have been hard at work on a pilot study to improve the rate of recycling in our dorms on campus. The pilot is a multi-pronged approach that consists of educating our peers, redesigning bin layouts, and marketing the awesome system we have in place. We’re fortunate to have single stream recycling on campus as it reduces the guesswork people often confront when trying to recycle: everything that can be recycled goes into the same bin! But anyone who has discovered or introduced a method or tool to make people’s lives easier will know that getting people to actually use that something can be wildly difficult! When technology improves our lives so efficiently it almost seems to good to believe, people often become suspicious and hesitant to change the way they do things.

 

That’s where marketing comes in.

 

Marketing on college campuses is a really interesting phenomenon- it resembles the marketing seen in the world outside of higher education, but heightened because there’s absolutely so much clutter on a school campus! There’s really one of two strategies when it comes to marketing a message: either bombard your audience by repeating your message through sheer numbers, or creating a more quality, memorable message. Either tends to work, but as Eco Reps at a Business Management school, we’re all for conserving our resources and increasing efficiency.

 

With this in mind, we crafted our pilot’s marketing campaign around the idea of our school’s mascot, Biz E Beaver, tackling students who acted unsustainably. While incredibly entertaining a concept, this was a little risqué- not to mention, potentially dangerous! We had no intention of actually harming anyone! So to pull off our concept, we shot a series of videos using well-recognized students on our campus to star as actors in safe and controlled situations. These videos were hosted on YouTube, shared via social media channels, and paired with a poster hung in one of the dorms involved in the pilot. These videos were kept short and educational to maximize their value and shareability. What do you think of them? Check them out and give us your thoughts!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpA4kl-uSa4

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