Marketing ADR: Emphasize Avoiding Negatives or Aligning with Positives?

I imagine marketers everywhere regularly ponder what best changes a prospective client’s behavior from “not interested” to “buyer.” I’ve certainly attended enough ADR conferences to know that mediators are interested in a related question: What would make the public become more frequent consumers of ADR services?

Back when I was working on my dissertation, which examined behavior change in college students, there were a number of behavior-change models built primarily on the premise that people change behavior to avoid fear, pain and other negative consequences. There were also models built on the opposite premise that people change behavior to align themselves with positive consequences. So which approach to behavior change yields more effective outcomes?

A new piece of research out of the UK re-examines this very question. In You Can’t Scare People into Getting Fit or Going Green, the Economic and Social Research Council concluded that

“…positive, informative strategies which help people set specific health and environmental goals are far more effective when it comes to encouraging behaviour change than negatives strategies which employ messages of fear, guilt or regret.”

If you’re interested in changing the public’s attitude and behavior toward ADR, then this study offers some intriguing insights for you. You can find the specific strategies referenced above via the research report’s link.

Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.