Traffic safety is a global problem. Every day thousands of people are killed and injured on our roads. Innocent children riding to school, people driving to work, youngsters coming home from a party. Some of them will never return home. Also Belgium’s reputation with regard to traffic safety is not enviable. Fortunately, this situation is currently improving, partly due to the effort of the European Union to prioritize traffic safety in all its member states. In order to improve traffic safety several possible strategies are to be followed going from improved infrastructure and safer vehicles to strict enforcement of the law. But since most accidents are the results of human faults, traffic safety campaigns are often organised to try and change people’s behaviour in traffic. These traffic safety campaigns are usually based on social marketing. This is a discipline, based on commercial marketing, which is used to try and change the behaviour of people. In this case, we want to change the attitude and behaviour of people in such a way that traffic accidents can be avoided in the future. In Belgium there are several organisations involved in traffic safety that apply this strategy, like the BIVV for example. They regularly organise traffic safety campaigns that are based on social marketing. Also the Bob-campaign, the bestknown traffic safety campaign in Belgium, was based on this discipline. But traffic safety campaigns based on social marketing are not always successful as they involve a lot of difficulties. For a campaign to be successful, a strict plan has to be followed, which involves a lot of research and planning and which has to be combined with other interventions, such as enforcement of traffic laws and regulations. Even when a proper approach is used there are multiple reasons why a traffic safety campaign can be ineffective. Nevertheless, traffic safety campaigns have proven to have a positive impact on road safety, even though goals are not always reached. For this reason many countries are currently using this strategy to improve traffic safety. (Author/publisher)
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