Funnels

It is possible to look at public relations purely in terms of attitudes, opinions and relationships, and to expect the hardest metrics come from ad value equivalency calculations. Lots of PR seems to be couched in these terms, including some of the core academic texts on the subject. Borrowing from psychology, Grunig and Hunt talk about cognitive, affective and conative objectives, which all live "inside the head", and which equate roughly with the stirring of rational, emotional and behavioural impulses.


Prompted in part by Mr Sean Kidney's interesting talk in this weeks seminar, and in part by my campaign planning assignments, I've been thinking about what psychological objectives actually mean for the PR practitioner. Certainly, unless you're prepared to conduct expensive research, theres very few ways to find out what people are thinking. Indeed the notion that Mr Kidney spent a while developing was that even if people say they've changed their minds, what does this actually mean for the campaigner? Sure, its probably a rhetorical win for the communicator, but if it doesn't translate to action (eating more healthily, going to see Watchmen, setting up a direct debit to Oxfam), what have you actually acheived?

Mr Kidney's ideas made me lapse into a weird solipsist trance for a while. Sure, we want to see results, and, come to think of it objectives should be measurable, so why not skip all the psycho-babble and go straight for the brutalist jugular? And on that basis, why not look to the ideas of people like Thaler and Cass, who claim that structural change, and physical change where appropriate, are really what make people behave differently. According to Thaler and Cass, we behave in a predictably lazy way, which suits us well to being funnelled around. Using the nomenclature of the writers, the best way to make people change the way they behave is to 'nudge' them, by making the right choices 'easy'.


So for a few hours I wondered how I could funnel people around, thinking over crazy ways in which I could adapt the physical nature of the environment to ensure that people could live happier lives. In my head, I began to construct a custom moulded neotopia, where people lived in harmony with their environment, whether at work or at play. I imagined crisp blocks, intuitive walkways, fragrant open fields just minutes from the centre and lots of cows...concrete cows. Wait a second. In an excited flurry of social engineering, I had somehow managed to build a mental version Milton Keynes, a mere 50 miles to the north west of my brain.

And this is the thing with making big physical changes in the world - you can get so wrapped up in your grand plans that what you think is the future is not quite what the future had in mind. People build urban funnels that in future years function only as halfpipes for skateboarders and hideouts for petty thieves. This holds of things like laws and other structural changes. Laws have been created for one purpose and then used in defence of all sorts of awful things. I like the idea of making grand changes for the best, but are we ever equipped to know what future generations will make of it?

Perhaps something like the Countryside Code should be introduced for social marketers, encouraging them to pursue their aims without bringing too much of a violence upon their surroundings. Communicative methods remain one such way to change ideas and behaviour. I'd maintain that what goes on inside heads is actually pretty important in terms of prompting and informing behaviours, and that to leave communication behind is to relinquish an important tool for change.