Page 253 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Empirical Generalizations for Social Marketing 229

but findings for U.S. firms do indicate that “it pays to be green” (Dixon-
Fowler, Slater, Johnson, Ellstrand, & Romi, 2013).

Discussion

As a brief summary of multiple empirical generalizations for social market-
ing, this review indicates that on average:

• Interventions of various types concerning multiple topics have small positive
effects on behaviors (Table 8.1).
• Attitudes and intentions have strong relationships with behaviors (Table 8.2).
• Some persuasive techniques have stronger positive effects than others
(Table 8.3).
• Advertising elasticities are relatively small but positive, indicating that increases
in advertising increase consumption (Table 8.4).
• Price elasticities are higher for individual brands than for general product cat-
egories, but even more habit-forming categories such as alcohol and tobacco
show meaningful responses to price changes (Table 8.5).
• Corporate misconduct hurts organizations financially, whereas positive corpo-
rate social and environmental performances improve financial performance
(Table 8.6).

As Snyder and colleagues (2004) noted in their review of the effects
of mediated health communication campaigns, such findings can be
useful in setting realistic goals and establishing benchmarks for social
marketing programs. If the mean effect sizes found in the literature
are similar to the median effects, then about 50 percent of social market-
ing programs will perform below the mean. Because small differences
between intervention and control groups of d = .20 or r = .10 would
actually be above average for many behaviors, planners should answer
questions such as: (1) Would the benefits of a program justify the costs
to achieve an average result? (2) Do available resources make average per-
formance likely? and (3) What steps, if any, will plausibly lead to superior
performance?
Addressing such questions could be part of the formative evaluation
stage of social marketing programs (Balch & Sutton, 1997), which in-
cludes setting baselines as well as performing exploratory and strategic
research with target segments. In addition to research on individuals, plan-
ners could also examine the original studies summarized in the empirical
generalizations to gain insights for their own programs. That is, they could
examine the literature to find precedents that might apply specifically to
their particular situations and to discover practices to follow or avoid.