Folks, you may need to register with the Washington Post to read this article (registration is free), but I think it's worth it: Social Networks' Sway May Be Underestimated It summarizes a study on how networks of people in a community shifted their norms on smoking. People who knew somebody who quit were more likely to quit themselves, and those who kept smoking became socially isolated over time. I think this article shows that social marketing theory, with its emphasis on establishing new norms, is on the right track. Traditional information-based campaigns, with their focus on enabling rational decisions, miss this important boat.
Enjoy! ***
Eric Eckl
Water Words That Work
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Fascinating Article on Peer Influence on Behavior
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Commercial marketers have become quite adept at identifying individuals who are predisposed to buy their product or service by determining associated behaviors -- and combing through various databases to locate those who engage in them. Here's a crude (and fictional) example: if I had a new yoga studio as a client, and I could determine that people who drive hybrid cars are disproportionately more likely to practice yoga than the general population, I might advise the client to purchase a list of hybrid car owners in their surrounding zip codes and start their marketing efforts with them (offering generous incentives to those who a bring a friend to the studio). In many areas of commerce, the connections between various behaviors and demographic traits have been extensively studied and there is an abundance of market research that ad agencies and others simply buy off-the-shelf as needed, depending on their client of the moment. Industry trade associations do these studies for their members, too. For folks who subscribe to this listserv, the pool of appropriate off-the-shelf studies is limited. Conservation organizations tend to hire political pollsters instead of market researchers. But there is some, check out: .. The Roper Green Gauge .. Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability The shortcomings of the above studies is that they are still fundamentally commercial in nature - oriented towards selling "green" products and services. They won't be much help at figuring out the various barriers to the sustainable behavior you are trying to foster. But if you're staring at a neighborhood map or a list of residents and wondering which 1% you'd like to reach out to first to get the ball rolling, this kind of market research (and the approach it represents) is very helpful.
*** Eric Eckl
From: Mel Tremper [mailto:[email protected]]
It is promising, but engineering change is still far from simple. How do you persuade the first few to quit? Do they rely on factual evidence it is harmful? Do they respond to nifty ad messages "selling" becoming smoke free? What is the mechanism that generates the first few recruits to the new behavior? Does it work the other way? That is do people who associate with smokers become more likely to start smoking? That seems to be the mechanism for kids, would it work for adults? Why does the normative pressure from smokers not overcome that from the newly quit non-smokers? Would this micro normative effect work as well as it does in a society where smoking itself was much more common and where there was no level of knowledge about harms of smoking? What if the first ones to quit are the "nerds" of the group? Wouldn't the cool people find even more reason to keep smoking?