Building Yes: Community Asset Based Social Marketing in the Scottish Independence Referendum Campaign

This paper examines the Yes Scotland campaign in the 2014 referendum for Scottish Independence and examines how its grassroots, volunteer based strategy was practiced and implemented. Using a community asset based social... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the Yes Scotland campaign in the 2014 referendum for Scottish Independence and examines how its grassroots, volunteer based strategy was practiced and implemented. Using a community asset based social marketing framework, it attempts to understand how community assets (such as people, skills and possessions) came together to build campaign activity and to understand how Yes campaigning communities formed and were maintained. Data from an ethnography is presented and shows how a broad range of volunteers contributed their skills, psychological and physical assets, time and cultural, social and economic capital to the campaign. The paper highlights how the campaign was conducted during this referendum where instead of tight message control and voter targeting, local Yes groups were free to seek local solutions to persuading people to vote yes and to encourage volunteer participation. Campaigning events also aided community development as repeated use of certain locations and repetition of activities, led to the development of sacred sites, rituals, myths, shared sense of consciousness and moral responsibility. Conceptually, this paper extends understanding of community asset based social marketing, provides insight into political marketing within referenda, and how volunteers skills can be utilised within political campaigns.