Unintended consequences in demarketing anti-social behaviour: project Bernie

Unintended consequences are recognised as a potential risk for well-intentioned social marketing interventions and as a comparatively under-researched topic in the field. This case study uses an intervention tackling deliberate grassfires to explore the application of social marketing in a novel context, its potential effectiveness in demarketing antisocial behaviours and the potential of such interventions to generate positive and negative unintended consequences. The intervention’s evaluation confirms social marketing’s potential value in tackling ingrained antisocial behaviours within communities. It also revealed unexpected benefits accruing from changes within the target community, within the sponsoring fire service and in the relationship between the two. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of potential unexpected and unplanned consequences for intervention planning, conduct and evaluation

Social marketing: a fresh approach to promoting sustainable lifestyles?

The discipline of social marketing involves the application of the philosophy, perspective and toolkit of the commercial marketer to key social policy issues. It is a relatively young, but rapidly growing, discipline. Many of its early successes have been in areas relating to personal health, where it has been used to influence individuals' behaviour to quit smoking, drink less, or exercise more. Social marketing initiatives have been less prevalent in environmental issues, although it has been applied to the promotion of behaviours such as energy saving and recycling. This paper looks at the potential for social marketing to promote more sustainable lifestyles, and to encourage new partnerships between commercial organisations and policy makers. Recently there have been calls from the United Nations for approaches to promoting sustainability which rely less on generating fear and guilt amongst consumers, and which are better at understanding consumers and engaging with them. Social marketing offers a ready-made approach that is ideally suited to answer this call. It also has the potential to encourage constructive public-private partnerships because it frames key sustainability challenges in a language and logic that businesses can relate to. However, the promotion of sustainability represents an issue of a size, scope and complexity beyond anything that has yet been tackled using social marketing. It therefore represents a major challenge to those who practice and promote social marketing, and to the policy makers for whom it represents a novel way of approaching the promotion of sustainable lifestyles. This paper combines insights from the evolution of social marketing, writings on sustainable lifestyles, and experience from the field of environmental marketing to explore some of the theoretical, cultural and practical challenges that the social marketing of sustainability will entail

Novel Structural Components of the Ventral Disc and Lateral Crest in Giardia intestinalis

Giardia intestinalis is a ubiquitous parasitic protist that is the causative agent of giardiasis, one of the most common protozoan diarrheal diseases in the world. Giardia trophozoites attach to the intestinal epithelium using a specialized and elaborate microtubule structure, the ventral disc. Surrounding the ventral disc is a less characterized putatively contractile structure, the lateral crest, which forms a continuous perimeter seal with the substrate. A better understanding of ventral disc and lateral crest structure, conformational dynamics, and biogenesis is critical for understanding the mechanism of giardial attachment to the host. To determine the components comprising the ventral disc and lateral crest, we used shotgun proteomics to identify proteins in a preparation of isolated ventral discs. Candidate disc-associated proteins, or DAPs, were GFP-tagged using a ligation-independent high-throughput cloning method. Based on disc localization, we identified eighteen novel DAPs, which more than doubles the number of known disc-associated proteins. Ten of the novel DAPs are associated with the lateral crest or outer edge of the disc, and are the first confirmed components of this structure. Using Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP) with representative novel DAP::GFP strains we found that the newly identified DAPs tested did not recover after photobleaching and are therefore structural components of the ventral disc or lateral crest. Functional analyses of the novel DAPs will be central toward understanding the mechanism of ventral disc-mediated attachment and the mechanism of disc biogenesis during cell division. Since attachment of Giardia to the intestine via the ventral disc is essential for pathogenesis, it is possible that some proteins comprising the disc could be potential drug targets if their loss or disruption interfered with disc biogenesis or function, preventing attachment

Applying sales promotion competitions to nonprofit contexts

This paper discusses the applicability of sales promotions within not-for-profit (NFP) marketing, and argues that some of the widely held prejudices about sales promotions have acted to obscure their potential contribution to a range of NFP markets. Understanding this potential requires a clearer understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of specific sales promotion techniques. The paper presents frameworks for classifying both sales promotions and marketing contexts, which can help an understanding of which sales promotions might work in particular NFP contexts. The paper then focuses on a specific type of sales promotion, which represents a potentially valuable and versatile tool for NFP marketers, the sales promotion competition. It details the benefits that sales promotion competitions can offer NFP marketers, and also contributes some guidelines to aid in running them effectively