Wheels, Skills and Thrills

Alan Tapp is Professor of Marketing at the Bristol Social Marketing Centre, University of the West of England. In his career Alan has worked within many behaviour change sectors including road safety, travel mode shift, encouraging sport and physical activity, and many health fields.

Young drivers are overrepresented in car crashes. The majority of those involved are young males, particularly those from areas of social deprivation. Such groups have previously proved resistant to attempts to modify their behaviour through fear appeals, punitive or educational measures. This project represents an attempt to apply social marketing techniques to see if an approach based on insight and engagement could succeed where traditional approaches had failed. The project focused on an area with relatively high levels of deprivation and involved young men with a history of driving and criminal convictions. Key features of the project were the use of in vehicle "black boxes" to record actual behaviour change and a bespoke training and assessment programme. Significant improvements in driving behaviour were observed and the techniques applied in this case indicate a potential future direction for interventions with such hard to reach groups.