Market segmentation to reflect the school's “green” context and increase the impact of environmental education

Collaboration between the fields of biodiversity conservation and social marketing is growing to promote environmental awareness and induce behavioral changes. In order to assess the significance of employing market segmentation, we conducted an analysis focused on identifying the “green” characteristics of the 386 high schools in the city of Puebla, Central Mexico. We designed a 15‐item survey to evaluate “green” features on school websites, including aspects like institutional identity, facilities, curricula, and extracurricular activities. Utilizing the gathered data, we employed multivariate statistics to categorize the schools into four groups: Green schools, Interested schools, Contemplators, and Do not act, indicating their potential exposure to environmental themes. We conclude that organizations can adopt a similar approach to develop tailored activities with enduring impacts, simultaneously reducing costs and enhancing effectiveness.

Biodiversity loss demands the involvement of society in conservation by generating activities that influence actions and promote changes in attitudes.However, it can be challenging to structure such projects as public perception is influenced by the instructional context, engagement methods, and available information (Jefferson et al., 2015;Wolsink, 2015).Consequently, using a one-size-fits-all set of practices to engage groups with different backgrounds is impossible.In the past, we used the same educational activities for every school we visited; however, in some of them, we noted a lack of interest or posterior impact.To increase engagement, we turned to social marketing, which aims to achieve a specific social goal focused on the public good (Green et al., 2019), however, its adoption has been slow as practitioners do not know the field or its potential application (Veríssimo et al., 2017).We incorporated "market segmentation" as it groups potential public or participants according to their needs or preferences (Dolničar, 2004;King et al., 2012;Molina et al., 2015).In consequence, it is possible to generate specific content according to the group characteristics to increase our impact on each audience.
Since school conditions directly impact perception, we selected four institutional aspects of school opportunities for environmental involvement: organizational culture (norms and values of each school such as sustainability in mission, vision, etc.), campus management (water or garbage management); curricula, (classes included in the program) and extracurricular activities (workshops, talks, etc.).Usually, the first contact we have with schools is either by recommendation or through their website; thus, we decided to look for information on each of the 366 schools in the city of Puebla, either on their web page or on their social media in 2017 despite their socio-economic level.The latter as it is often the only public information organizations have before implementing environmental education programs.We designed a 15-item checklist to measure school "green" characteristics according to institutional aspects and completed the checklist for each school with publicly available information.We coded the information in a binomial database (0,1) to use a cluster analysis and create groups according to the similarity of the objects (clusters).Afterward, we determined which characteristics have more impact on the grouping process by performing a principal component analysis (PCA), which transforms multiple variables into fewer ones to identify clusters of closely related data points.For all the analysis, we used the software PAST.
We do not present detailed statistical results but illustrate the data from which we developed the market segments and their potential use in environmental education (further information in Supporting Information).The resulting classification showed the existence of four groups according to the different characteristics of each school."Green schools" have more features of the evaluated factors, with multiple activities and opportunities for children to get involved in environmental themes.We labeled the second group as "Interested schools," which offer some opportunities to become involved but lack environmental themes in their organizational culture.A third group which we labeled as "Contemplators," has at least one environmental activity, but they need more opportunities and actions to be more involved.Finally, we labeled the last group as the "Do not act" schools, which lack environmental opportunities (Figure 1a).The principal components analysis helped to understand the importance of the different factors used during the classification process.The PCA showed how the different variables relate, creating three main categories: extracurricular activities, organizational structure, and campus management (Figure 1b).
Market segmentation has enabled us to improve our impact as it helped us to understand that not all schools have the same interest in environmental activities as they require time and money (Figure 2a).Consequently, educators must overcome these situations and either adjust their activities to the specific segment or invest enough resources to create opportunities to involve participants and advance them between involvement levels.To help educators, we suggest different activities according to the objective we want to achieve as well as available resources (i.e., time, income), which will depend on the type of school we are working with (Figure 2b).We have used the methodology in other areas of the region to develop content for different schools.As examples of resource use, we worked with a low-income "Do not act school" in the suburbs of a small community developing a 6-month program for a group of students from levels 7 to 9 with a 2-h impact per week.We planned different sessions involving basics on biodiversity and its threats, regional diversity, basics on-camera use and photography, and the use of i-Naturalist.After a follow-up evaluation, some students said they followed an environmental-related bachelor's due to our intervention.A public "Interested" school in a small city asked us to develop an activity to promote environmental education during a park festival for grade 9 students.We designed a rally in which groups had to complete a circuit and undertake activities in three different stations.The first one was to identify footprints of regional and domestic species, the second one was identifying different bird pictures along a transect, and the last station was to draw a detailed map of the circuit.
Results from our different experiences show the potential impacts of applying a market segmentation when planning environmental education programs as it increases the impact and long-term effect on participants.Furthermore, this technique can help to design content according to the school's characteristics, participants' involvement, and available resources (i.e., time, and money).In the case of our work, we noted various barriers that need to be considered: In concluding remarks, it is important to note that some organizations do not consider the use of market segmentation important as it requires a significant investment of time and money (Greenfield & Veríssimo, 2019).However, they need to change from using passive methodologies and focusing on large audiences thus, by incorporating this technique, organizations can generate customized activities with long-lasting impacts.

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I G U R E 1 (a) Segmentation results from school classification and (b) variable evaluation.

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Available data • Private vs. Public Education • Schools trying to cover what parents consider essential in education.