ABSTRACT
One consistent message from coaches and athletes is that, when there’s only so much time to spend in training, they’d rather use it to work on skill development than protecting against an injury that may or may not happen. Performance sells, but injury prevention isn’t glamorous. In the same way that cancer screening and exercising to exhaustion don’t provide attractive images, injury prevention suffers because its importance is difficult to market. So, what if we took a lesson from the best sales teams of our times? They can get people to buy a new pair of running shoes, identical to the ones they bought three months ago, because now they come in a new color! They brand lifestyles and shape the way people experience media content, creating a dedicated customer base ready to model themselves after the latest spokesperson. What if these companies sold injury prevention? What would that look like? This chapter explores the psychology of consumer marketing and discusses ways that its principles could be harnessed to promote injury prevention initiatives around the world (e.g., using nudging and guerilla marketing). Examples are drawn from sport-specific and general public safety literature to encourage readers to think more broadly about how these cross-disciplinary psychological concepts might be the way forward in injury prevention.
