"Fear and Facts" won’t drive anyone away from drink

Insight into the converging interests of implementation science and certain branches of marketing and advertising may emerge from work on binge drinking by the Queensland University of Technology.

Possibly significant for what it suggests about “tailoring” programs and interventions is the finding that excessive drinking is perceived very differently by Western and Eastern societies and by different groups within them.

Rebekah Russell-Bennett and Andrew Golledge from QUT's School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, argue that in Western cultures where excess has come embedded in the youth culture, campaigns that rely on peer pressure strategies do not work. Taking a whole-of-group approach, targeting "young people" as if they were a homogeneous slice of the general population will not get results either.

In dismissing the value of generic public health campaign approaches, the Queensland researchers promote the cause of social marketing in its efforts to refine messages and the methods of transmitting them for different segments of society.

Their study of 255 18-25 year-old university students found binge drinking behaviors of students from Australia, Canada, USA and the UK differed significantly from those those in China, Singapore and India.

"Within the university environment binge drinking is regarded as a rite of passage, a stress-releaser, a rite of initiation to certain social circles and as grounds for updating Facebook profiles," Russell-Bennett writes.

“But when you drill down, it soon becomes clear that what influences and motivates binge drinking in Western cultures is different from that of Eastern cultures.”

In the West the response was typically encouragement, laughter – or buying yet more drinks. In the East there was more likely to be avoidance, disapproval or a desire to remove people who were drunk.

"Social marketing strategies are more than just advertising campaigns telling people about the dangers of drinking. They include the development of new products and services and more convenient access to alternatives,” Russell-Bennett says.

"Current anti-binge drinking strategies seem to take either a 'tax and punish' approach or an educational approach and they are not working."

"If marketing campaigns were to look at adopting products like 'cool' reduced-alcohol drinks then the outcome might be more positive." she said.

Russell-Bennett reports successes in countries as far apart as Holland and Lebanon where non-alcoholic drinks that look and smell like beer or alcopops are being used to reduce alcohol consumption.

"It's time the government stopped treating everyone the same and focused on achieving real results," she said.

One definition of social marketing widely relied upon was framed in the mid 1990s by Alan Andreason at Georgetown University in the US. He described it as the “the adaptation of commercial marketing technologies to programs designed to influence the voluntary behavior of target audiences to improve their personal welfare and that of society of which they are a part.”

In the UK, social marketing’s cause was boosted in 2006 with the launch of a National Social Marketing Centre [1], where it is treated as "the systematic application of marketing concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioral goals relevant to a social good".

The results of the Queensland binge drinking study are being presented at the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference [2] being held in Melbourne next week.

Speakers include two UK specialists, Julie Fowlie and Matthew Wood from the University of Brighton Business School, who at the 2008 ANZMAC event [3] event presented a paper suggesting conceptual links between social marketing strategies and the objectives of social and emotional education.

In “Getting Emotional about Social Marketing: Why and How People Change Behaviour” they argued that “fear and facts” did not create change; ingrained habits were more likely to respond to an emotional connection with another human being or community.

They focused on the potential value of social networking websites and other new media as a means to develop the relationships and communities required to support behavioral change.

Fowlie and Wood return this year to argue that the critical elements of “developing relationships” and “understanding emotions” within the construct of social marketing can be used to influence local government communications and improve community cohesion.

They have been trialing new approaches to staff training in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and testing a theoretical behavioral change framework that draws on a combination of emotional intelligence and social marketing theories.