I work for a utility company we would like to drive social and behavioural change with respect to energy consumption. The general concept is that mass media corporate advertising plants the seeds of social change and supports a portfolio of targeted programs. My question is: what is an appropriate level of advertising (in terms of marketing presence and dollars) to drive social change. Is there any research on this topic? Any benchmarks or expert opinions?
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You don't provide enough information to answer your question. Advertising dollars are like paint. Until you know how big an area you want to paint, you don't know how many buckets you need. A marketer would prefer to approach this challenging by focusing first on the behavior and the type of person most likely to engage in it. Advertising channels and budgets flow from those decisions.
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I learned this lesson from Japanese manufacturers: Advertising spend depends on the quality of your product. The higher the quality of your product, the less advertising you have to do.
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The question you raise leads to a fasinating area of study called social marketing. The most effective way to change behaviour often has more to do with understanding public or group barriers to adopting a certain action (recycling, energy or water conservation etc) than the amount of $ spent on advertising. A very good book and author about this field of study is "Fostering Sustainable Behviour" by Doug McKenzie-Mohr. He is an environmental psychologist, professor and an excellent speaker.
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Arien,
reference your request, it wasn't clear to me who you wanted to communicate with, the Utility company employees, your clients and /or the general public at large. There would be several staged approaches based on how you wanted to tackle these audiences. But changing behaviour takes a sustained initiative and I would point you to www.cbsm.com which has some useful guidance regarding fostering sustainable behaviour.
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I think there is a vast range of answers to this question depending on the importance of the issue, the how much public awareness already exists, whether the behavior is controversial, etc. My sense is that there are two general approaches to this, one is truly mass media attempting to saturate the audience with information on TV, radio, print, etc. The other main approach is to target very carefully the people you most want to reach, either because they are opinion leaders or are predisposed to adopt the change, or because they are the ones most at risk from not adopting the change. Political campaigns are by definition trying to change or shape a specific behavior - who one votes for, they typically employ both approaches, going door to door in highly targeted areas, and launching an a"air campaign" to saturate the airwaves with their message.
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