Fostering Sustainable Clothing via Social Marketing Tools

Current clothing consumption behavior, with regard to what clothes to acquire, where to acquire it, how to use it, and how to discard it, is often unsustainable. While concerns about environmental impacts induced by clothing production and consumption are becoming increasingly important for consumers, and while an increasing number of consumers would like to consume clothing in a more sustainable way, such good intentions are still rarely translated into different real behavior change.
In this report, we discuss social marketing as one potential way offering support to consumers for changing their behavior. We describe community based social marketing (CBSM) as a specific and systematic social marketing approach. Each step necessary for developing a CBSM strategy is introduced, and a specific component of CBSM strategies, the selection of appropriate tools for behavior change, is elaborated in detail. We link the theoretical knowledge to the five consumer challenges (promoting environmentally friendly clothing products, supporting consumers´ use of alternative business models, prolonging use, optimizing use-phase handling of clothes, increasing recycling rates) and offer examples for which and how tools can be applied for fostering each.