Same Tactics, Different Results: A Social Marketing Case Study of Marine Wildlife Viewing in Hawaiʻi

Background and Situation Analysis Tourist interactions with federally protected Hawaiian spinner dolphins, green sea turtles, monk seals, and humpback whales place ongoing pressure on wildlife populations in Hawaiʻi. Federal viewing distances exist for all four species, including a 50-yard minimum for spinner dolphins implemented in October 2021. Building on a prior successful single-species campaign, a U.S. university research group received federal funding to develop and evaluate a multi-species social marketing intervention on the Island of Hawaiʻi. External challenges included entrenched cultural norms around human-dolphin contact, a competitive tourism market, and social media glamorizing intimate wildlife encounters. Priority Audiences The primary audience was Hawaiʻi tourists, segmented into uninformed but receptive visitors and experience-seeking visitors with preformed expectations for close contact. Tour operators were a key secondary audience and implementation partner. Formative research consisted of in-depth interviews with eight marine wildlife tour owner-operators serving as expert proxies for their transient clientele. Behavioral Objectives The campaign sought to increase observed compliance with viewing distances of 10 feet from green sea turtles and 50 yards from spinner dolphins by an average of 15%. Strategy/Intervention Planning and Development The campaign, branded “Amazing from Afar,” was organized around the COM-B model. Capability was built through species-specific distance estimation tools and photogenic replacement behaviors. Opportunity was addressed through signage, partnerships with 12 tour operators, and injunctive norm messaging developed with Hawaiian collaborators, who introduced the cultural significance of protected species as ʻamakua (ancestral guardians). Motivation was cultivated through identity-based and responsibility-oriented framing, natural place attachment priming, an optimism appeal, a guilt appeal, and a public pledge. Evaluation Methods and Results A pre/post nonequivalent group design assessed behavioral outcomes using trained observer counts, drone video and telephoto content analysis, and direct compliance recording. Sea turtle results were strong, with campaign compliance nearly double that of control and regulatory sign conditions. Dolphin results showed no significant campaign effect, with location and time of day as the only significant predictors. Recommendations for Social Marketing Practice Wildlife tourism behavior change is not a monolithic problem, and campaigns designed as though it were will inevitably underserve some of the species they aim to protect. Early campaign success can obscure the degree to which that success was context-dependent; tactics that worked for sea turtles did not translate to spinner dolphins, where decades of cultural normalization produced a far more resistant behavioral environment. Meeting that resistance requires norm change through industry engagement, cultural framing, and narrative storytelling, not simply more of the same tactics. Additional lessons include accessing visitors directly in formative research rather than relying on tour operator proxies, elevating Indigenous cultural knowledge partnerships as central campaign framing, and building evaluation designs to detect incremental norm shift over time.