Page 274 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

250 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

increased taxes on tobacco, restrictions on tobacco advertising). Of course,
if an educational campaign fails, the failure can be attributed to its execution
or its remedy-form. The judgment that it would be pointless to even try an
educational campaign reflects an expectation rather than experience. Hence,
the question of “Why coercion?” or “Why an upstream approach?” cannot be
answered by simply pointing to the futility of educational efforts.
A paradoxical reason is that over the decades, there has been a signifi-
cant increase in educational remedies. It is hard to imagine anyone under
the age of 50 who has not been exposed to information about the dangers
of tobacco, the importance of nutrition, or the need to “save the environ-
ment.” In addition, there have been numerous in-school educational pro-
grams and well-funded media campaigns designed to persuade (not simply
inform) individuals about such issues. Over time, regulations have been
altered so that marketers can (or must) communicate to consumers infor-
mation about the nutritional—and to a more limited extent, health—
properties of the foods they buy, the energy usage of objects they buy, and
so on. In other words, the argument that doing a better job informing and
persuading people is futile loses merit when one considers how often pol-
icy makers have attempted such actions.
A “green” reason is that remedies are increasingly sought for environ-
mental and national security problems, and these are almost always social
dilemmas or fences. Because a social dilemma can only be solved if almost
all members of the affected community “sacrifice,” it is not in the rational
self-interest of any single member to sacrifice alone; a person who sacri-
fices when others do not is a “sucker,” and one who does not sacrifice
when a sufficient number of others do can “free-ride” (Wiener & Doescher,
1991). Rothschild (1999) made the point that under such conditions, a
person (no matter how well-informed) will not be motivated to “sacrifice,”
and when motivation is lacking, education cannot bring about the “de-
sired behavior”; thus, an alternative remedy is required. In other words,
the trend toward public concern over the environment, be it the earlier
concerns over the use of resources (e.g., the initial Corporate Average Fuel
Economy [CAFE] requirements passed in 1975) or more recent concerns
over greenhouse gases (e.g., subsidizing alternative fuels and trying to ban
incandescent light bulbs) has led to a proliferation of objectives that many
scholars agree require coercive remedies.
A “rights” reason is that remedies are increasingly sought for problems
of inclusion and equity. Throughout the 20th century, there was a steady
increase in the extent to which people implicitly or explicitly accepted the
idea of “positive rights.” A positive right is something such as food, shelter,
or health to which people are entitled because they are human. Because it