Analyzing Toyota City’s Eco-policy Through Strategic Marketing Tools

Toyota City has long been making efforts to promote its eco-policy based on five eco-themes: transportation, the urban center, industry, forests, and the public welfare and livelihood. A previous study that examined changes in citizens’ awareness regarding the city’s eco-policy between 2012 and 2015 illustrated that while the city has been successful overall to communicate its eco-policy to citizens, it has failed to do so in some eco-themes such as industry or forests. That is, despite some improvement, promoting the city’s eco-policy still remains an issue. This paper analyzes Toyota City’s eco-policy by using strategic marketing tools to help elaborate on effective eco-policy promotion in the framework of social marketing. Given that the ultimate goal of eco-policy is to promote citizens’ pro-environmental behaviors, the concept of social marketing is relevant here, as it includes the promotion of public policies, including eco-policies. Social marketing also may help understand why some cities succeed to promote their eco-policies while others fail to do so and elaborate on an effective policy-making and promotion. In this article, I will first describe a brief overview of Toyota City’s eco-policy. I will next employ different kinds of marketing approaches that may be relevant to promoting eco-policy. I will then employ several strategic tools (i.e., marketing mix, strategic purposes, PEST, strategic groups, and SWOT) to help analyze Toyota City’s eco-policy. This article ends with some discussions about how to promote the city’s eco-policy.