Social Marketing

Social marketing campaigns typically focus on changing public behavior to advance health, environmental, or social goals. Cadmus’s solid reputation for excellence in social marketing is built on the foundational role we have played in designing and implementing social marketing campaigns for the U.S. EPA’s ENERGY STAR®, Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools, Asthma, Radon, Smoke-free Homes, and Partnership for Clean Indoor Air programs, among others. The involvement of the health care, buildings, manufacturing, retail, residential and public sectors in these voluntary programs has increased every year since we began supporting EPA’s efforts. For example, thanks in part to our effective social marketing, awareness of the ENERGY STAR brand grew from 40 percent of consumers in 2000 to over 60 percent in 2004. Our next step is to help consumers better understand ENERGY STAR and make the connection between energy consumption and its environmental impacts. Key social marketing efforts for EPA include:

• The ENERGY STAR Buildings Challenge: Commercial and Industrial partners who join the challenge commit to cutting the energy use in their buildings by 10 percent.
• The Communities in Action for Asthma-Friendly Environments Campaign: Communities commit to accelerating the delivery of high-quality asthma care by using EPA’s Change Package of Effective Strategies as a model and joining a national network of 1,000 communities in action.
• The Smoke-free Homes and Cars Campaign: Parents and caregivers pledge to protect children from secondhand smoke exposure everywhere children spend time and manufacturers and retailers of child safety products agree to promote the Pledge in their products and at points of sale.
• The ENERGY STAR Change a Light, Change the World Pledge: Participants promised to replace one incandescent light bulb in their homes with one energy-saving compact fluorescent light.
• The ENERGY STAR Change a Light, Change the World Day (October 2005): More than 30 state governors participated by changing a regular light bulb to an ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent light bulb.