Communication+Strategy

=Communication Strategy:=

Objective:
The "Butt Out" campaign's objective is to educate existing smokers on the environmental harm caused by their habit, hence, we are attempting to force this target audience to act differently. We need smokers to consider the harm of cigarette butt pollution and persuade them to take proper responsibility in disposing cigarette butts in a proper manner. Furthermore, the communication goals surrounding this endeavor include motivating, educating and informing the target audience as well as stakeholders in order build support.

Goal:
Our goal as an organization is to minimize the amount of cigarette litter by increasing awareness of this growing environmental issue using our environmental friendly ashtrays to promote a greener environment. Also we thrive that by creating a social movement to decrease cigarette litter, we hope to gain to support of the government to regulate the production of decomposable cigarettes.

Target Market:
The target market for this particular campaign would be existing smokers, as we are focusing on dealing with the effects that cigarette litter has on our environment. We must also keep in mind the stakeholders our issue concerns which include the general public, the tobacco industries and the government.

Strategies:
There are three main strategies that our campaign plans to implement in order to fulfill our objectives.

The first strategy is the distribution of environmental friendly ashtrays all across Toronto to promote awareness of this growing issue. They will be designed to incorporate our campaigns logo, various environmental facts and warnings, along with vibrant and very visible ashtrays for smokers to properly dispose of their cigarettes. Unlike Canada’s own Butt Stop, which many people tend to ignore or are unaware of, these newly designed ash urns attempts to stand out to smokers to help bring awareness of this issue and draw more attention to the cause.

The second strategy that our campaign will implement to support and draw further attention to the ash urns, involves an intense advertising campaign in various urban centers around Canada. Such advertisements will include posters in various locations featuring heavy traffic, TV and radio advertisements as well as a viral campaign featuring street posters, pin ups, stickers and online image and video advertisements. Such an ad campaign should reach out to significant amount more of people compared to just having the ash urns themselves as a form of promotion. It is always important to raise awareness to the target audience, stakeholders and even those outside of the target audience.

Our final strategy is to put pressure on tobacco companies to start implementing faster decomposing starch cigarette filters as opposed to the currently used cellulose acetate filters which take a staggering three to five years to decompose. A combination of more ash trays and ash urns spread across Canada as well as the use starch cigarette filters would definitely bring about a considerable change in the pollution that current cigarette butts contribute to.

Tactics:
For the first Strategy; the distribution of environmental friendly ashtrays all across the Greater Toronto Area, tactics begin with seeking out permission for the placement of such ash urns. After permission is granted from the authorities in question, placement of the said urns will begin in various urban centers of the Greater Toronto Area to slowly spread to a number of suburban communities. The ash urns as well as the many forms of advertisements of the ad campaign will feature various facts, slogans and key messages concerning the environmental damage caused by cigarette pollution, it is important that the ash urns are engaging and interactive which helps communicate our key messages.

Similarly for the second strategy, after constructing an ad campaign featuring posters, banners, billboards, newspaper ads, magazine ads and televisions, different representatives from the different mediums will be contacted for ad placement. With the viral ad campaign, interactive sites such as youtube, facebook, twitter and a number of wikis as well as other online communities must be utilized and engaged to further promote our cause. Poster, pin up, sticker and any other design templates can be posted online and encouraged to be printed and put up anywhere.

Facts posted on the ash urns and advertisement posters should follow the lines of: “//Each year, 52 billion cigarettes smoked by five million Canadian smokers contribute to almost 5,000 tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere… making cigarette butts the most littered item world wide// (Smoke Free Canada)//.”// Some of the brainstorming slogans have resulted in: //“Smoking already hurts the people around you, don’t let it hurt the world you live in.//” Other key messages need to mix fact as well as an appeal to emotion.

For the third strategy, research by Biotec, a joint owned subsidiary of Stanelco and SP Metal have done research showing that cigarette filters can be made out of the more environmentally friendly starch as opposed to current and damaging cellulose acetate. Hence, our tactic would be to use this research and approach various tobacco industries with our proposal for the use of environmentally friendly starch filters. If this tactic does not work to implement the starch filters, our ad campaign and viral ad campaign can be modified to put more pressure on the tobacco industry.



Measurement:
In order to measure out objectives in order to see whether or not out campaign has been effective must view the degree of involvement of our community and the awareness of this global issue. Other ways in which the success of our campaign can be measured it through the degree of usage of the ash trays that we have set out, and whether or not smokers have actually consistently properly disposed their cigarettes.