Nasrin Akter and Muhammad Ismail Hossain

Human behaviour is complex, dynamic, unpredictable and it has both positive and negative impact on individual, community and environment. In this pandemic, WHO prescribed certain individual behaviour change like washing hands, wearing mask, maintaining health etiquette and keeping social distance to prevent the spread of Covid-19 thereby positively impact the lives of individual, community and environment.

In response to these guidelines, different government wings, corporate houses, non-profit organisations and mass media of Bangladesh undertook different communication campaigns.

However, the campaigns seem to yield little satisfactory impact on changing the behaviour of the masses.

In the context of Bangladesh, adoption of the mentioned behaviours for mass is new and competing with their existing lifestyles. Simply telling people to change, or giving them information and expecting them to act on it, may not work here. Unless, there is a voluntary behaviour change by individual, positive outcome is difficult to achieve.

However, voluntary behaviour change is far more complex and challenging; requires a truly consumer-centred approach to understand why, how and in what context the behaviour is situated. In this backdrop, the knowledge of ‘Social Marketing’, a discipline that draws on psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology can facilitate the understanding of the underpinning reasons of people’s behaviours.

The governments of many countries have been successfully deploying social marketing techniques to achieve diverse strategic social objectives through behaviour change intervention programmes (e.g., smoking cessation, road safety, disease prevention and screening, physical activity and environmental issues).

Social marketing is a systematic process of influencing behaviour change of different target market segments by utilising a planning process that applies marketing principles and tactics to deliver positive societal benefits. Unlike commercial marketing, the primary objective is not to sell goods and services rather influence the desired behaviour of targeted markets.

Target market behaviour can be influenced in one of the four ways: accept a new behaviour (e.g., wear mask); reject an undesirable behaviour (e.g., expose to crowd); modify a current behaviour (e.g., wash hands frequently) and abandon an old undesirable behaviour (e.g., coughing here and there). It thus appears that, the demand of behaviour change in response to this pandemic is diverse and requires a careful, context specific all-inclusive behaviour change intervention programme.

A carefully designed social marketing/programme in this context should accommodate at least five broader aspects: first, a clear definition of the problem at hand; second, a thorough environmental scan to segment the entire market and analyse the target audiences characteristics to influence their behaviours through the right message circulated at the right media and location; third, an analysis of social norms, potential barriers and competitions toward the desired behaviours; fourth, an identification of the opportunities of upstream social marketing to modify the physical environments in which the behaviours are taking place; and fifth, establish the monitoring policies and criteria for evaluating the intervention programme.

Although numerous awareness programmes aiming to bring WHO directed behaviours are in the air from March 2020, little changes are visible in people’s behaviour and in many cases, resistance are also evident.

Exchange of people’s behaviour with the previous one is based on the concept of WIFM (What’s in it for me- tangible/intangible)?

In this case, the core benefit of adopting these new behaviours for mass people is ‘Safety’, however, different social classes of the society (e.g., upper, middle, working and lower) are not perceiving the benefits of such behavioural adoption equally.

The working and lower class that struggles to balance between life and livelihood may not consider ‘safety’ as their benefits because they have to sacrifice bigger benefits if they adopt these new behaviours.

As per different predictions, coronavirus outbreak is likely to go on for two years, which is evident if we take into account the second wave of this outbreak in countries that claimed to successfully manage the outbreak.

We are yet to know what is coming for Bangladesh therefore it is high time for the authorities to understand the underpinning attitudes and beliefs hold by the mass people regarding WHO prescribed desired behaviours.

Information on the current status of people’s new behavioural acceptance can provide insights on the reasons behind the compliance and non-compliance.

‘Coronavirus won’t affect the financially disadvantaged people’; ‘Youth are less likely to be affected by Covid-19’ and ‘Third world countries are immune to many dangerous viruses, including Covid-19’ are some of the examples of existing salient beliefs of people which may hold them back in their decision to change existing behaviours.

So, evidence-based knowledge on people’s salient beliefs, attitudes, social norms and decision-making autonomy can help the authorities to understand how the existing behaviour is situated within the lives of our masses.

Understanding of the behavioural problem also demanded a clear segmentation of our targeted community to whom we are communicating the message of behaviour change. Geographic (e.g., cities, neighbourhood), demographic (e.g., age, education, gender) and psychographic (e.g., attitude, beliefs, values, social norms, needs) elements are widely used variables for segmenting markets.

For example, psychographic variables can be used to segment the market into four: 1) Adopters (low information needs, highest commitment to behaviour change), 2) Status Quo (moderate information needs, high commitment to behaviour change), 3) Information seeker (high information needs, moderate commitment to behaviour change) and 4) Sceptics (moderate information needs, lowest commitment to behaviour change).

Segments due to its inherent peculiarities and uniqueness usually respond to campaign elements differently and different techniques are required to reach and motivate various segments.

photo:

Star/file