Page 288 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

264 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

a state who agreed that smoking should not be allowed in specific public
areas and the likelihood a state legislature had banned smoking in specific
areas. Public support will advance upstream remedy policy change.

Marketing’s Unique Contribution

Downstream social marketing campaigns commonly use marketing con-
cepts such as targeting, promotions, and so on. However, it is important to
note that marketing can contribute to the conceptual thinking about up-
stream remedies and the standard public will model with regard to a criti-
cal aspect—exchange and its associated costs. The essence of marketing is
exchange, and in the policy context, this means that any proposed policy
will do more than produce benefits; it will impose costs. The perception of
the extent of those costs and the framing of who bears those costs can be
critical for upstream policy change. Another concern associated with up-
stream remedies is that once a policy change process is initiated, there is
an increased likelihood that a parallel process of policy opposition (or the
advocacy of policies contrary to the agent’s goals) will be triggered. For
instance, the wave of both pro- and antigun legislation that followed the
2012 school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, is a prime example of
how action evokes reaction. From a marketing perspective, it is imperative
to understand how the opposition might frame costs in the ongoing de-
bate of policy change.
As noted above, public health and social marketing change agents have
embraced upstream-legal remedies that advocate industry and product us-
age restrictions to alter destructive consumer behaviors. Whether market-
ing agrees with the philosophy or not, social policy has embraced
upstream-legal remedies. And in both research and practice, public health
leads while marketing trails. This is particularly true when the behavior is
a classic individual trap engaged in by a particular market segment rather
than a social trap engaged in by almost all. To help marketers better under-
stand destructive behaviors and how their costs can be framed for policy
change, this chapter proposes a simple framework and then discusses it in
terms of framing the costs to enact upstream remedies.
In this framework, two dimensions are considered: (1) who is being
harmed by the current situation and will benefit from the upstream rem-
edy; and (2) who will have to sacrifice, or pay the costs, to improve the
situation. Figure 9.2 illustrates this basic framework.
Many of the situations addressed by individually-based social market-
ing efforts are individual fences or traps. Individuals are engaged in actions
that bring harm to themselves but threaten little physical harm to others