The 4Ps of Demarketing Tobacco Use

Demarketing as a strategy for social marketers is a popular, but unknown or poorly understood part of social marketing practice. Those are my initial conclusions from the feedback and hits from the recent post, Demarketing Sugar Consumption in Drinks. Popular in that many people are obviously interested in the topic; unknown or misunderstood either because people tell me they have never heard the term before, or thought 'it had something to do with counter-advertising.'

I have talked about how such strategies were employed to frame tobacco control in the NCI ASSIST study [Social Marketing and Tobacco Control Policy], and I noted in the Demarketing Sugar post that demarketing tobacco was studied recently by Edward Shiu and his colleagues. Because of the curiosity in demarketing approaches, here is a synopsis from their article to broaden your perspective on this social marketing strategy and how it intersects with many public policy approaches to the topic.

In a social marketing context, they define demarketing as having the objective to decrease  demand by discouraging consumption or use of products such as alcohol and cigarettes that pose health risks. They note that while governments use various demarketing strategies and instruments independently to curb smoking (increasing taxes, clean indoor regulations, banning advertising), little research is available on how the 4Ps work in conjunction with each toward reducing tobacco use and how they influence consumer behavior over time.

This chart by the authors shows how traditional marketing and demarketing approaches to tobacco can be thought about. Working through the 4Ps, product is framed as product replacement and displacement – most often by offering free or low-cost replacement products (e.g., nicotine replacement therapies) as well as support services (e.g., telephone quit-line and other information services). Increasing taxes and therefore the sales price primarily realigns the price variable. They view place interventions as restricting tobacco consumption opportunities through such instruments as  bans on smoking on public transportation and clean-air policies in public places. Promotion interventions are most familiar to readers who lean towards communication approaches to the issue: implementing counter-advertising campaigns, mandatory package warning labels and restrictions on tobacco advertising.

To summarize their overall approach, the authors write:

Conceptualizing the 4Ps from a consumer perspective and linking them to consumer intention via attitudinal mediators is novel and contributes to the literature. Modeling governmental demarketing from a consumer perspective allows one to determine the impact of this government approach not only on consumers' intention to cease consumption, but also on consumer attitudes both toward consuming the product and toward companies that promote and sell these products.

They then go on to develop and test a model of demarketing using data from the International Tobacco Control Four Country Survey (http://www.itcproject.org) – a nationally representative, longitudinal panel survey of adult smokers that was designed to evaluate whether and how a number of key government policy initiatives led to reductions in tobacco consumption. The authors used structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized relationships among policy initiatives aimed at each of the 4Ps, attitudes towards smoking, attitudes towards the tobacco industry, and intentions to quit smoking at two points in time.

The results show that the two attitudinal variables only partially mediated the effects of each of the 4Ps on intention to quit. In each case, the direct effect of each demarketing element on intention is significant over and above the effects of the mediators in the hierarchical regression. The only exceptions to a number of hypotheses about the effects of demarketing strategies on attitudes and intentions were:

1. The demarketing element of product does not affect their attitude toward smoking nor their intention to quit (they suggest that many smokers are already familiar with many of these quit smoking products and services and have already been unsuccessful in using them to quit themselves).

2. Price does negatively affect their attitude toward the tobacco industry (respondents attribute price increases to the industry, not government taxation policies, is their assumption to explain this).

3. The demarketing element place does not affect their attitude toward smoking.

Their results demonstrated that governmental demarketing activities during 2002 and 2003 in the U.S. have resulted in significant beneficial changes in smokers' attitude toward smoking and their intention to quit. They conclude:

This study demonstrates the differential effect of the 4Ps of demarketing and the central significance of promotion and price, which are the only demarketing mix elements that influence all three outcome variables, attitude toward the tobacco industry, attitude toward smoking, and intention to quit smoking. At the same time, the empirical evidence from this study shows that the demarketing mix element product, in terms of product replacement and displacement through the promotion of NRT [nicotine replacement therapies] and behavioral support programs, is less effective in terms of changing smokers' attitude toward smoking and intention to quit smoking. Lastly, smoking restrictions at work and in public places do not influence attitude but have a small direct effect on intention to quit.

Two lessons the researchers draw for social marketers are:

1. Social marketers and consumer-policy makers cannot assume individual demarketing measures will be effective in changing the attitudes and behavior of the priority audience. Rather, a comprehensive demarketing mix aimed at decreasing the attractiveness of tobacco and impeding the availability and consumability of cigarettes is needed to result in measurable changes.

2. Ad hoc and one-off demarketing measures are unlikely to have the desired effect. The results show an effect over time of the 4Ps of demarketing, suggesting that governments should equip anti-smoking campaigns with sufficient and sustained demarketing resources.

SO when you consider 'upstream social marketing,' think demarketing and all 4Ps.

Reference: Shiu E, Hassan LM & Walsh G. (2009)  Demarketing tobacco through governmental policies – The 4Ps revisited. Journal of Business Research; 62:269–278

Comments

[marleneb]

It is really time to pull the plug on tobacco control. This fascist assault on freedom spends obscene amounts of money on behavior control and should be criminalized!