social marketing

How do we get people to lower their green house gas emissions? How do we get people to act more sustainably?

We can enact regulations that forbid excessive GHG emissions, like an anti-idling bylaw. But regulations are only as good as public compliance, and public compliance depends on people's attitudes.

We can tell people about the threat of global warming but we need to be careful. Because if we just pump them with information about how bad a situation will be without showing them that their actions can make a difference, they are more likely to ignore the information in self-defence.



If we perceive that we have some control over how to improve the problem then we are more likely to act. If we perceive that in concert with others we can make an impact we are also more likely to act. Information by itself is impersonal. People are strongly influenced by personal contact with other people.

People don't necessarily need to know more about global warming. They need to know how lowering their greenhouse gas emissions is easy to do and convenient. Any appeal to change has to be in the form of a quid pro quo – if people are going to make a sacrifice they have to feel like they are getting something in return. That's where Social Marketing comes in.

Good marketing creates a set of benefits for the customer. Commercial marketers study the habits, perceptions and attitudes of consumers to see how they can produce a product that will satisfy consumer wants.

In social marketing, the goal is to reduce bads and increase public goods by influencing public behaviour. Composting can reduce the amount of landfill and add fertility to gardens – but only if people are willing to do it. Buses can replace a lot of cars on the street and thereby reduce traffic congestion and lower emissions, but only if people actually take the bus.

Why do some people adopt sustainable activities and others do not? Those who do not act sustainably may do this out of ignorance, or because they perceive barriers to the sustainable activities, or because the benefits are higher for competing behaviours.

The fact is, people will always find attractive – behaviours that have high benefits and few barriers. But a benefit to one person may be a barrier to another. Benefits and barriers vary both over persons and over time.


If we don't know what the barriers to a desired behaviour are, then we cannot successfully influence people to change their behaviour. In order to influence people we need to understand what are the actual and the perceived barriers to that activity.

What behaviours do we want to promote? Reducing carbon dioxide emissions can be done by increasing the fuel efficiency of cars, reducing the use of cars, by insulating houses, and by increasing energy efficiency. For an example, let's look at reducing car use.

The behaviours we want to promote are taking the bus, walking, and riding a bicycle. Let's narrow it a bit more. What are the barriers and benefits associated with riding a bicycle? The barriers might be: the weather, seasons, self-image, lack of physical fitness, fear of traffic, riding is uncomfortable, don't have appropriate clothing, etc, What are the benefits of riding a bicycle? Self-image, it feels good, seeing more of the landscape, enjoying the good weather, getting fresh air, exercise, saving money, etc.

Who are we targeting? This is a very important question. We do not target people who do not want to ride a bicycle. We want to know which people are most likely to want to ride a bicycle and which people are most likely to change their behaviour in this direction. Teenagers? Young adults? Working people? Parents? Here's where field work is required. Surveys need to be done in order to target the correct audience.

Once you target the correct audience you need to gather facts on the ground. It's time to observe what people actually do; to compare how people should ideally do behaviour to what they actually do. What are the target audience's perceptions of barriers? What motivates them? What do they see as benefits? Then you want to determine what barriers would be easiest to lower and what benefits would be easiest to add. This requires more research.

Now we are getting up close and personal because this kind of information requires focus groups to get at the right details. Note that, when dealing with focus groups we would want the participants to be uninformed about any campaign for encouraging cycling because if they were informed beforehand they would not be representative. Here are some questions we might ask at this stage:

1.What makes it difficult to ride a bicycle?
2. What makes it easy to ride a bicycle?
3. What positives are associated with riding a bicycle?
4. What negatives are associated with riding a bicycle?
5. Who wants you to use a bicycle and how much do you care about their opinion?
6. Who doesn't want you to ride a bicycle and how much do you care about their opinion?



Once the more detailed information about barriers and benefits is acquired from the focus groups, a plan is devised and a pilot project is attempted with a small selected group. The pilot project is evaluated and then the plan is modified until it will work for the community as a whole.




Behaviour Change Tools



The diversity of barriers to an activity like bicycling mean that information alone won't get people to switch activities. Personal contact is the key to influencing people which is why most of the tools of social marketing involve direct social contact.

Communication - present information that is vivid, concrete, and personalized. It will more likely be noticed and remembered and have a lasting impact. Know your audience – their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. To do this you need to gather evidence before you develop your message.
Have your message delivered by an individual or an organization that is seen as credible to your target audience.
Frame your message. Messages that emphasize losses which occur as a result of inactivity are consistantly more persuasive than messages that emphasize savings as a result of taking action.


Committment – Individuals who agree to a small initial request are far more likely to agree to a subsequent larger request. The act of committment subtly alters one's attitude. People have a strong internal pressure to behave consistantly. Example: During a blood drive, volunteers were told over the phone: “We'll count on seeing you then OK?” Just saying this made volunteers more likely to show up. Another example: Earth Hour – committing to turning off the lights for one hour.
Written committment is even more effective. Asking for permission to make the committment public leads to lasting change even if it isn't made public. Home visits, or when a service is provided, such as the delivery of a compost unit, are ideal opportunities to employ committment.
Existing volunteer groups like church groups and boy scouts can be effective in getting group committments or working door to door. We can ask people who commit to trying a new behaviour to ask others to commit. We can point out other sustainable behaviours that they are already involved in. The idea is that we are helping people to see themselves as environmentally concerned.
Committment must be voluntary. Do not ask a subject if they are not interested in the activity.

Prompts – are reminders to engage in action that we are already predisposed to do. We tend to forget to do things – we leave cloth shopping bags at home, we forget to shut off the car's engine when we are waiting, etc.. Prompts need to be noticable, self-explanatory, and in close proximity to targeted behaviour. Example: removable decals on dashboards to remind drivers to stop engines while waiting. Signs can be put in common waiting areas like school parking lots. Prompts should be used to encourage positive behaviours rather than to avoid negative behaviours.

Norms – People look to the behaviour of others around them to determine how they will behave. Start with people who want to do the target behaviour. Identify natural leaders. People are more likely to imitate or conform to a behaviour if they see someone they respect or look up to doing it.
Communicate to people the number of people in the community who are already doing the activity – eg., riding a bicycle to work.

Acting to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and acting sustainably are complex activities that transcend the kind of simple behaviour of switching brands of toothpaste, etc. that commercial advertising targets. That is why information campaigns, no matter how clever, are not usually effective. Social Marketing emphasizes techniques of observation and social contact that help form more long lasting and effective patterns of behaviour.



Bibliography


McKenzie-Mohr, Doug, and Smith, William, Fostering Sustainable Behaviour , New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island BC. c.1999

Bird, Tom, “Five Secrets of Social Marketing” Alternatives Journal, V 34, number 1, 2008.

Beyond the laws of leadership

I've been reading a book by leadership guru John Maxwell, called
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I'm impressed with Maxwell's
page-turning writing style and his simple pithy examples. "Leadership
ability is the lid that determines a person's level of effectiveness."
That's an eye-opening point he makes in his first chapter.

Another quote: "to add growth lead followers but to multiply
growth lead leaders." This one reminds me of what's behind the success of the Religious Right and the Christian mega-churches in the United States. Maxwell himself acknowledges his connection to Bill Hybels ,pastor of the hugely influential Willow Creek Community Church.

Outside Bill Hybels' office is a poster with the caption: "What is
our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?"

Every year Willow Creek Church hosts a leadership conference
which, in previous years, has featured Presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill
Clinton, and George W. Bush as speakers.

Like the corporate goal of maximizing profits, the goal of the
Willow Creek Mega-church is to maximize the conversion of unbelievers. It has 13,000 member churches and a 50 million dollar state-of-the-art worship center that features the largest auditorium in the United States.

Hybels, in his book: "The Courageous  Leader" says: "Leaders see the big picture and understand how to help others to find their place of
service within that picture." My problem with Bill Hybels is that he
is not thinking big enough. Just because you use words like "God" and
"Jesus" doesn't mean that your vision is big enough. It's simple – the
big picture is how are we going to survive, both as a civilization and
as a species. One of John Maxwell's quotes on leadership is apt here:
"Anyone can steer the ship but it takes a leader to chart the course."

Corporations, are required, by law, to be run solely   in order to
make money for their stockholders. And they have become enormously successful to the point where the size of many corporations rivals that of the nation-state. Exxon-Mobil Corporation has an economy that's bigger than 180 countries. Many of these huge corporations,including Exxon, are corrupting governments so that they will
implement policies that further the corporation's own profit-making
goals. The problem is that, even though corporations are now as
powerful as nation states the rules of the game are fixed so that
these corporations assume no responsibility for future generations.

The problem of focussing on growth of any kind, is that it is
too narrow a focus. While corporations have grown bigger than many
states the environmental and human cost has become too high. Think about the fate of the Titanic. It was so big for its time that people thought it was unsinkable. But its captain couldn't see the iceberg in time to change the big ship's course and the Titanic went down.

When you don't see the bigger picture you aren't navigating,
you're steering blindly. By concentrating on growth, corporate leaders
have forgotten to look ahead at the consequences of their actions.
Making more money is great but as the Indians say: "When the rivers
stop flowing, and nothing can grow in the soil you won't be able to
eat money."

Bill Hybels' favourite quote is "the local church is the hope of
the world." But where was the church when corporations were denying and delaying action on global warming? By prioritizing emotional issues like abortion and homosexuality the religious right has wasted its moral capital. And by mobilizing it's members to help elect the worst president in U.S. history for two terms of office it has essentially abdicated it's leadership and become a tool of the Republican party.

Mega-churches like Willow Creek may be exemplary at churning out leaders but if those leaders don't see what's coming then it's more a case of the blind leading the blind.

Is Environmentalism a Religion?

Some people accuse environmentalism of being a religion. There are lots of similarities: There is always a list of “Biblical” catastrophes that are predicted to rain down from on high because of our transgressions; People in general are castigated for having too much and not giving more to those who have not; Society as a whole is criticized for heading down the wrong path, etc., etc....

As an environmentalist, I've succumbed to those temptations many times. I admit to preaching fire and brimstone and loving every minute of it. Of course, that was a long time ago, when I was only 50. I'm a lot more mature now.

But at a certain point I realized that the world does not need another religion. We've got plenty of them already. Pushing religion, whatever the type, is divisive. Just look at our neighbours to the south and their Christian President. And look at the religious fault lines that opened up in Iraq after the American invasion.

The American Economist Robert Nelson, who often compares economics to religion draws a convincing parallel between some strands of environmentalism and Calvinism. Calvin was the 16th century Swiss Protestant theologian who inspired the Puritan movement which in turn inspired the first settlements of the New England colonies. Puritanism is the percursor to Christian Fundamentalism which has been so influencial in modern American politics.

According to Calvin, humankind is utterly depraved and corrupt. And even if we do change our ways, God plans to obliterate the vast majority of us anyways. How's that for a cheerful theological message?

It's interesting that, as Nelson points out, there are some environmentalists who sound just like this. Case in point: Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepard Society states: “We, the human species have become a viral epidemic to the Earth.” When three maritime sealers died while out sealing Watson said that their deaths didn't matter as much as the thousands of seals that were being slaughtered.

The idea of valuing life on earth more than human life gives me pause. I know it's good to be able to put ourselves in some other critters place but ultimately it's our future that we are interested in. This is my problem with Animal Rights activists. Because if we aren't more important to ourselves than the rest of life, then anything we can do to destroy ourselves faster would be a good thing. We should pollute and consume as much as possible and fight nuclear wars to hasten the end of our species so that life on Earth can get on without us. But, humanity matters. Our future matters. And nature matters because we ultimately depend on her to survive.


Scientifically we know much more about life on earth today than we did centuries ago in Calvin's time. We know that life is an interdependent web. Life supports life. Plants are food and animals are food. Certain elements essential to life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are recycled over vast spans of time so that life can continue on over eons. If these elements were just used up and not recycled, Earth would eventually become barren, like the planet Mars.

Ecosystems continually provide us with food, fresh air, fresh water, climate control, top soil for growing crops, erosion control, and flood control. We cannot put earth's ecosystems in jeopardy without putting ourselves into jeopardy – our ability to feed ourselves, our ability to provide shelter, our ability to breathe, and our ability to pass on our genes and our culture. We don't understand enough about how ecosystems work. To damage them is to risk damaging them beyond repair.

Religious preaching always assumes the presence of faith in listeners. So warnings about God's judgement on sinners and how they're going to hell if they don't do X, all presuppose belief in the Judeo-Christian God. But a warning can be just that – a warning. “Get off the road before you get hit by that car!” is a warning but it doesn't require belief in God. You can believe in God, you can be an Athiest. In any case, you'll still want to avoid getting hit by the car.

Who Was Ayn Rand?

In 2006, on the eve of the subprime mortgage crisis, Alan Greenspan left his job as chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, after twenty years of service. In a speech given a year earlier, Greenspan had praised the rise in the subprime mortgage industry as the right kind of market response for the financial services industry.

Alan Greenspan was a close friend of Ayn Rand, and a close follower of her philosophy. Vitriolic conservative talk show host, Rush Limbaugh is also a follower of Ayn Rand. So is arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Republican Presidential contender Ron Paul. Who was Ayn Rand?

She was perhaps the most influential American intellectual in the late twentieth century. Ayn Rand was a novelist and a philosopher. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, was considered the second most influential book after the Bible in the United States in the 1990's. This book, first published in 1957 is a perennial best seller. Part novel, part philosophical treatise, Atlas Shrugged is about a group of industrialists who set up a free market economy based on the gold standard, in a hiding place deep in the Rocky Mountains. The industrialists break away from the United States economy because excessive government regulation is stifling their creativity.

Ayn Rand was born in Russia and lived through the Russian Revolution as a teenager. She went to University in the Soviet Union and then moved to the United States in the mid 1920's. Rand hated communism and believed passionately in individual rights, private property, and laissez-faire capitalism. She was an militant atheist and also hated Christianity. She died in 1982, but her influence in American politics lives on.

Rand's philosophy, which she called “Objectivism”, is based on the idea that humans can gain objective knowledge from reality. Morality is objective if it can be based on those values that serve to preserve and enhance one's life. She argued that selfishness rather than altruism was correct morally because “man's own happiness is the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Altruism was wrong because it was “suicidal”, it encouraged people to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.

Ayn Rand believed that capitalism is the most ideal form of human society because it gives individuals the right to pursue their own interests through ownership of private property. She disagreed with any government interference with the economy, and argued that government should not be in the business of helping others. Only individuals should help others based on their own free choice. In 1964 she opposed the civil rights act because it violated individual rights to private property.


The fatal flaw in Ayn Rand's philosophy is her epistemology. Knowledge cannot be objective because objective reality is not attainable by humans. All human knowledge is fallible and thus open to improvement. Any model of reality will be fallible because we have to oversimplify reality in order to fit things into concepts. Declaring one's own ideas infallible leads to excluding competing systems of thought, some of which may be valid. This means that you close yourself off from any evidence that might weaken or disprove your position. Then the question is, how can you learn from experience?

The “free market” is an abstraction, a conceptual model that exists because of certain assumptions, such as perfect knowledge and perfect mobility. These assumptions are violated by the real world. Hence, basing moral philosophy on them leads to critical errors.

No matter what happened to the American economy: The Great Depression, the saving and loans fiasco, the subprime mortgage melt-down – all three of which followed the crucial relaxation of financial regulations – people like Alan Greenspan refuse to see the evidence that unregulated markets lead to financial disaster.

Followers of Ayn Rand's “Objectivism”, like Rush Limbaugh, waste a lot of time denying the existence of global warming and denying that there is a problem with anything but environmentalism itself. The evidence says otherwise. By closing their “objective” system from contrary evidence and ruling out most forms of government intervention they have helped to drastically reduce the tools available to build capitalist solutions to environmental and financial problems. The economist's toolbox will remain empty until and unless there is a real change in the American political system.

Accepting our Limits: It's the Adult Thing to Do

An adult understands limits better than a child. Sometimes a little boy will eat too much candy because he doesn't know that his body can only stand so much sweets at any one time. Or he will stay up so late that he cannot function the next day. Children aren't able to anticipate limits and control their own behaviour because they have undeveloped prefrontal lobes in their brains. Adults know better, which is why they commonly impose limits on their children's behaviour.

When it comes to global limits though, it seems that economists are a lot like little children. They believe that we can keep consuming the earth's resources for as long as we like, in contradiction to the fact that the earth is a finite planet.
There is a concept called “substitution” which economists use to demonstrate this possibility. When the price of one resource goes high enough then all we have to do is substitute another that's similar enough to do the job. If we run out of cheap oil, we use ethanol, or methane, or hydrogen. If we run out of wild salmon, we raise genetically modified salmon in saltwater “farms”.

Economists can use all the fancy mathematics they want to prove their sustitution theory. The fact is, when we lose the wild salmon we will have lost something irreplacable.

Isn't it interesting that life itself has to live within certain limits else it won't survive. If you take three of the most common elements: Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen – these three elements in various combinations, determine life's basic limitations.

Not enough carbon dioxide and the earth's temperature would be too low for life and water, which is part hydrogen and part oxygen, would always be frozen. Way too much carbon dioxide and the earth would be too hot for life, while all the oceans would boil away.

We know that plants require a certain minimum amount of carbon dioxide in order to grow, while all animals require a certain minimum amount of oxygen in order to breathe. If there was too much oxygen, then all the forests in the world would burn up in a matter of weeks.

Why is there just the right amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? We don't really know the answer to that question. We may well take breathing and livable temperatures for granted but the fact is, we cannot substitute anything else for them.

That's why I say economists are like little children. You tell them that if we keep on with business as usual it will have rather negative consequences and they will tell you, in free, unregulated markets demand will always equal supply, and the movement of prices will most efficiently change behaviour without denying people free choice.

The price may be right in terms of demand meeting supply, but if the costs of our activities to the earth's ecosystems are not taken into account in the price, then allowing free markets to do their thing will run us up to those limits too fast for comfort.
Because corporations with their huge economies and budgets have much to lose if certain government action is taken, they are interested in directly influencing the political process. Their powerful influence has caused the U.S. and Canadian governments to hinder and delay the essential assessment, planning, and action that needs to be done in order for our civilization to survive this crisis.

The idea that we can keep on growing, heedless to any limits is pure wish fullfillment and a sign of an overly childish trust in free markets. As adults we know we are responsible for more than just our own wants and desires. We are also responsible to our children and to future generations. If we continue to ignore earth's physical and biological limits we will end up running into these limits at full speed. We don't allow children to drive automobiles because of the destruction they could cause. If we want human society to sustain itself we have to grow up and take responsibility for where we're going and how we're going to get there.

Reaching Our Limits

It's not easy being green these days. It can be frustrating when there are just too many things to write about. Things that seem to be happening all at once.

Take the news last week. Food riots throughout the Southern Hemisphere. The global price of staples like rice doubled in a very short amount of time and doesn't appear to be coming down any time soon.

The higher price of food is probably due to a number of factors: Crop failure in Australia and other places due to drought probably caused by global warming; There are almost 1.4 billion Chinese and more of them are eating meat as China rapidly industrializes; Industrial farming of beef and hogs required more grain than the grain we grow for human consumption; All kinds of industrial farming have sharply increased costs due to the increase in the price of oil; And, misguided Bush Administration subsidies have encouraged American farmers to grow corn for ethanol instead of for food.

The process of industrialization has reached the point where we are screwing up the weather. That means that humans have reached their first global limit. We've so polluted the atmosphere that the huge climate system of the earth is responding to us. The earth is finite and the problem with limits is that once you reach one, the others are not far behind.

Industrialism , which has so far lasted about two hundred years, has always been fuelled by cheap supplies of coal and oil. Oil is getting too expensive because global demand is overtaking supply; Coal is costing too much in terms of air pollution and environmental destruction; Biofuels are crowding out food production.

There are no other cheap and easily available sources of energy that can replace fossil fuels. You cannot run an automobile or a tractor on solar or wind power. Nuclear plants take decades to build and require huge expenditures.

With the development of the Chinese and Indian economies industrialism has become a global reality and it is quickly exhausting the world of cheap resources. Sure, there is still plenty of oil, coal, iron, fresh water, etc., but the bigger the global population gets, the faster it needs to extract resources, and the more expensive it becomes to extract those needed resources. And the more expensive resources get the more expensive food gets.

What to do? If we make the world more equitable we can slow population growth, because, up to a point, people who have more income have fewer babies. And we can also slow the growth of chronic hunger the same way. To avoid collapse we could slow down and stop the growth in demand for the world's finite resources by stopping industrial growth. Then we could hook economic development onto using what we already have more intensively and efficiently.

If we recycle everything we can maintain society without the need to extract more resources from the ground. Japan was able to keep its economy in a steady state for three hundred years, during the Edo period. If we learn to conserve energy we can decrease our carbon dioxide emissions and slow down global warming before it runs away from us.

Everything is connected. The fact that we have already caused the global climate to heat up means that we will soon run out of slack with other systems of resources. Better by far, to anticipate reaching our limits before it happens, then allowing ourselves to overshoot and cause civilization to collapse permanently.

There are so many things to be aware of. Economic and environmental systems are highly complex. What I am saying here could be wrong. But when we press infinite demand on a finite world how can we not avoid coming up against limits eventually?

Meet Prince Rupert's Green Team

Last September Premier Gordon Campbell signed the BC Climate Action Charter together with the Union of BC Municipalities. The city of Prince Rupert was one of the cosigners of the Charter. The Charter recognizes that global warming is a real and growing threat to BC and as a consequence that each and every community in BC needs to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and become sustainable.

Premier Campbell and those who drew up the Charter realized that reducing GHG emissions and becoming sustainable are not things that should be done in isolation. They understand that it is vital that all levels of government work together to share best practices in this endeavor.

A year ago, the Prince Rupert municipal government convened a green advisory task force to assist in developing and implementing a GHG emission reduction plan. This task force or "Green Team" is made up of a cross-section of Rupertites, representing business, professionals, the environment, academia, and our municipal government.

One of the tasks that the green team took on was to bring the city's Official Community Plan (OCP) in line with our commitment to the BC Climate Action Charter. Changes to the OCP include: a commitment to reduce GHG emissions, making Prince Rupert more transit, pedestrian, and bicycle friendly, and the movement towards LEEDS efficiency standards for all publicly funded buildings.

The green team has advised the city in the hiring of a planning firm, Sheltair, which is currently drawing up the GHG reduction plan. The plan should be completed and presented to city council sometime in late May. But the green team's most important task, consultation with the public, has only just begun.

It is important that even before the plan is implemented we start the process of public consultation. At each stage of the planning process we need public input so that we can learn what will work and what won't. Ultimately it is public participation that will make or break the transition to a greener Prince Rupert.

BC is a beautiful place to live. In Prince Rupert we have everything that's good about BC and little of its downside. No congested freeways, no urban sprawl and no pollution. A magnificent harbour and one of the greenest container ports in the world thanks to efficient sea connections to Asia and railroad connections to eastern Canada and the continental USA.

Our region is uniquely poised to capture several forms of clean and renewable energy in the coming years - wind, hydro, and tidal power. If we the people, the city, and the province can work together to build a sustainable society we will have harnessed the far more important human energy of cooperation and mutual trust in the bargain.

The green team would like to invite the public to our first Community Engagement Workshop. This will be an informal get-together, with snacks and refreshments, where the public can meet members of the green team, take a look at the draft of the Sheltair Plan, get a brief glimpse of what other BC communities are doing, and get a chance to make verbal or written suggestions of their own. The workshop will be held on Saturday, April 19 from 11 AM to 1 PM at the Civic Center, in the Raven Room and on Tuesday, April 22 from 7PM to 9PM at the Civic Center, in the Judo room. Please come out and meet Prince Rupert's green team.