Introduction
Rising petrol costs alone would get anybody to abandon personal vehicles and jump immediately aboard a bus or a train. But this has not been the case in recent years in Malaysia as the amount of people owning their own vehicles has been steadily rising. Most households have at least two cars; some have even more vehicles than people living in them! This is wasteful in too many ways to count - from said petrol to valuable money that can be put to other uses like education. The main reasons are this: prestige, and convenience. In the Klang Valley especially, public transportation is scarce, badly managed, rarely on time, and do not properly serve a lot of the outlying areas of the city.
This presents a catch-22 of sorts: if there is no proper service, people will not use it but if there are no people using the service, how will those in charge know what to improve on? This does not just happen in Malaysia but in a lot of other developing countries. But traffic congestion, pollution, and rapid depletion of fossil fuels are getting increasingly worse and must be dealt with by everybody, and not just by the authorities. One way they can do that is by an advertising campaign that serves to encourage people to switch from private cars to mass transit.
By taking an example of a nameless large city, this report serves to discover how, by using several psychological theories, the authorities will be able to effectively launch said advertising campaign to encourage the switch.
Changing the basic motivational function
An effective way of changing consumer attitudes towards a particular object is to make obvious particular needs of the consumer, particulartly using something called the 'functional approach'. Within this approach, there are four ways that attitudes can be classified as: the utilitarian function, the ego-defensive function, the value-expressive function, and the knowledge function.
The utilitarian function
There are...