#Marketing tenet #479: Demonstrate the cost of doing nothing to create behavior change. Joan Donovan suggests in MIT Technology Review that this tactic, used to illustrate dangers of secondhand smoke, may help combat misinformation on sites like #Facebook : "a broad public campaign to address the dangers of secondhand smoke is what finally broke the industry's heavy reliance on the myth of smoking as a personal freedom. It wasn’t enough to suggest that smoking causes lung disease and cancer, because those were personal ailments—an individual’s choice. But secondhand smoke? That showed how those individual choices could harm other people... ...To achieve policy change, researchers and advocates had to demonstrate that the cost of doing nothing was quantifiable in lost productivity, sick time, educational programs, supplementary insurance, and even hard infrastructure expenses such as ventilation and alarm systems. If these externalities hadn’t been acknowledged, perhaps we’d still be coughing in smoke-filled workplaces, planes, and restaurants. And, like secondhand smoke, #misinformation damages the quality of public life." Link in comments- a must read. …see more