Marketing Health

[I posted this over at GE Adventure, but I was originally going to post it here and figured a cross-post was in order.]

As part of the GE Adventure project and my new interest in healthcare, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how I believe health is essentially a marketing problem: An attempt to change consumer behavior through communication. With that in mind I was intrigued by this New Scientist editorial that suggests climate change has a positioning problem. Specifically the editorial suggests that science’s hard line that it’s not about belief, but rather fact, misses the point of how culture actually works:

People’s attitudes towards climate change, even Pope’s, are belief systems constructed through social interactions within peer groups. People then select the storylines that accord best with their personal world view. In Pope’s case and in my own this is a world view that respects scientists and empirical evidence.

Supporting the argument are a few examples (certainly not scientific) of people involved with reform around climate change ignoring the dangers of their own behaviors (something that seems common with doctors as well).

July 23, 2009