The lack of clear-cut personal benefits, especially in the short term, is one of the greatest challenges facing social marketers who work on environmental issues. The other is that it is often hard for individuals to see how they can make a difference with their own actions in the world of environmental stewardship and conservation.
That’s how Jay Kassirer started off in his talk, Confessions of an Environmental Social Marketer, that ranged from the beginnings of social marketing in environmental management to case studies of its application. Jay presented the evolution of the adoption of social marketing in environmental programs in four stages:
- The first was the ‘end of the pipe’ approaches that are command and control in nature; primarily using regulatory and legal instruments to manage individual and corporate behaviors.
- Then came efforts to educate people and teach and promote activism skills, efforts that while successful in some cases, were seen as not being able to comprehensively address the problem.
- The information campaigns that followed, often imaginative, creative and evocative were likewise found to not be the single answer to encouraging broad adoption of environmentally responsible, or sustainable, behaviors.
- Now is the recognition that a continuum of approaches are needed, ranging from information/education (show me), through social marketing approaches (help me) to regulations and legal interventions (make me).
Some of the points I took away from his presentation were:
Being careful with fear, guilt and shame approaches (often favored in this community of practitioners) because they can often backfire or simply lead people to turn off to the messages.
Thinking about how to use social marketing to influence an audience’s perceived reality of the threat, their personal susceptibility to the outcomes, beliefs of self efficacy (feelings of and being in control), and response efficacy, or answering their question: will what I do make a difference?
I was really intrigued by the idea that people often have the choice between fear control OR danger control when faced with threats and risk communication. That is, you can choose to manage the emotion of fear by ignoring, justifying, rationalizing the threat of simply shutting down OR you can decide to actively engage in behaviors that lead to a reduction in the threat, your susceptibility to it or in the likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes. Factoring this dichotomy of behavioral responses (you choose one way OR the other) into how we think about many types of protective behaviors we focus on in public health (HIV, immunizations, injury prevention, bioterrorism preparedness) could lead to insights into how to allow people to cross the bridge from totally emotional responses to threats to actively coping with them.
Jay finished up with several case studies on a divergent collection of conservation behaviors and audiences including getting automobile recyclers to pull out light switches from cars before crushing them and releasing the mercury they contain into the ground (and eventually seeping into ground water supplies), encouraging citizens in the greater Toronto area to reduce home energy use and vehicle pollution, and continually expanding efforts for a more water efficient Durham. These and many other cases in environmental social marketing are available at Tools of Change.
And in a timely Op-Ed piece on Sunday, Thomas Friedman writes (Times Select viewing only):
...we’re in a green bubble - a festival of hot air by the news media, corporate America and presidential candidates about green this and green that, but, when it comes to actually doing something hard to bring about a green revolution at scale - and if you don’t have scale on this you have nothing - we wimp out. Climate change is not a hoax. The hoax is that we are really doing something about it.
I look forward to hearing more from social marketers working on these issues at future Social Marketing and Public Health conferences.
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