Customer Insight
A New Age for Road Safety
Dan Campsall, an experienced marketing and communications professional, explores how MAST can add value in tough times for public service delivery.
Road Safety is facing a crucial time of transition. The traditional focus on new engineering schemes to improve the road network is yielding fewer and fewer viable casualty reduction solutions. In future, the real gains will be made by changing road user behaviour. In other policy areas such as public health, huge progress has been made through investment in social marketing – but road safety has lagged some way behind in developing this approach.
The Government’s recent consultation on Road Safety strategy set out the clear intention to make much better customer insight data available to road safety practitioners. MAST fulfils that pledge by giving local, regional and national programmes the same kind of high quality data which the commercial sector relies upon to communicate effectively with its target audience.
The financial pressure
As services increasingly come under pressure to perform better while managing greater budgetary constraints, this new approach can really help ensure that valuable resources are targeted effectively and efficiently. This is achieved by reducing waste on exciting but ill-conceived programmes.
For instance, one advertising proposal intended to reduce mobile phone use while driving looked really promising at first sight. However, analysis using the MAST approach revealed in just a few minutes that although it was the right message, it was targeted on the wrong people and in the wrong place!
The language of ‘customers’
Knowing how road users can stay safe is only part of the battle – the road safety profession already has a very detailed understanding of what are the best and safest behaviours. The area where progress must be made is in translating that knowledge for our ‘customers’. There are groups of road users who are more at risk of being involved in an injury crash – those who exhibit riskier attitudes and those who drive in dangerous ways. These are the customers with whom we need to engage, and whose lives we must come to understand, so we can hopefully help them towards less dangerous lifestyles. MAST is a major step toward giving the world of road safety the means to converse in this way.
