Lessons from Wiebe

Alright, I may have gotten a little carried away before talking about soap. Let's try that again.

So G.D. Wiebe wanted to evaluate the success of attempts to "sell brotherhood like..." something. This was before Social Marketing was a thing - so he was primarily interested in advertising. "The success of mass persuasion, in terms of motivating behavior," he argued, "is a function of the audience member's experience with regard to five factors." His five factors were as follows:

1. Force. There may be a light side and a dark side, but this is a measure of how motivated a person feels to take a specific action. The force is decided both by how motivated a person was before seeing an ad and the motivation provided by the ad. So if two people are asked to take an action to - let's say - end genocide in Darfur, and one of them is a total racist, they experience different forces.
   
2. Direction. Once someone is motivated, they should be given directions telling them what to do and how to act on their motivation. I like to call this the "action step." On a side note, I am obsessed with action steps. It's amazing how often people are like, "Save the World!" and forget to say, "...by signing this petition," or what have you.
   
3. Mechanism. This is the "implementing social mechanism." You can't call your representative if you live in a dictatorship, or if you don't have a phone.
   
4. Adequacy and Compatibility. You also can't call your representative if he is moving offices and his phone is off the hook. Yeah you heard me. You know who you are.
5. Distance. The distance is critical. Wiebe rephrases this as the person's "subjective estimate of the intervening energy expenditure required." So maybe you have a representative and maybe you have a phone. But do you really want to look up her number and find time to call when you are at work? And what if the person who answers is mean and you feel like an idiot? So yeah, even making a phone call be a far distance.
   

Looking at this 50 years later, it seems pretty straightforward. These are all important things to do, certainly, but it reads more like a logistical checklist rather than a brilliant formula for motivating social action.

Wiebe's concept of "distance" is really the most fascinating. Because as illustrated above, even something as simple as a phone call can be seen as "far away." The challenge to communicators is to:

1. Understand what your audience will find a daunting to undertake, and
2. Find ways to make it seem less daunting