What is the new word-of-mouth?

My friend and chair of the Energy Improvement Corp, Mark Thielking, is fond of saying, “Our goal is to make energy efficiency for buildings the new social norm, just like wearing seat belts became the norm for driving a car a generation ago.”

The question on how to succeed is not about the benefits of energy efficiency. Those are clear: home energy upgrades pay for themselves.  If you finance them through one of the state benefit programs, the upgrades costs you NOTHING upfront.

The real challenge is creating the new social norm that Mark refers to above. How do we do that?

The answer is by ramping up what used to be called “word-of-mouth.”

These days, the marketing jargon can be thicker than pea soup in the frigde. Let’s start by agreeing on a basic definition: “marketing” is “explaining a product to an audience for whom the product is well suited.”

Melissa Everett, Executive Director of Sustainable Hudson Valley, explained “social marketing” this way in Warwick (Orange County) at a community outreach event this week, “Social marketing is the use of marketing methods to achieve social goals, like the Ad Council running all those anti-smoking commercials twenty years ago.”

Think of the “Keep America Beautiful” anti-litter ad of 1970s the proud Indian with a tear running down his cheek.  If you listen closely, the ad uses only one word of jargon, “pollution,” and it is spoken at the very end: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” Brilliant!

Can someone do that for adding cellulose to your home’s walls and spray-foaming your sill plate?

The creation of a new social norm for energy efficiency the Mark predicts does not have the kind of government mandates behind it that spurred the seat belt requirement or the cigarette package labeling that spurred those Ad Council style mass marketing campaigns.

True, the state has launched some cute “Irreconcilable Temperatures” ads. But they are really infomercials at 2+ minutes and don’t quite pack the crying Indian ad’s punch.

So, instead of relying on a single powerful advertisement to foment change, the Energize New York effort is leaning on community-based social marketing. 

As Melissa explained in Warwick, “Community-based social marketing is using personalized communication and marketing methods to achieve social goals and embed them into communities as new norms.”

Melissa gave us this fascinating account of the connection between cultural habit and energy use:

“The Japanese Ministry of Energy launched Cool Biz in 2005 to shave peak loads by cutting summer air conditioning use, setting office temperatures to 82F.  However, they immediately had to deal with cultural issues, because it was a deeply established norm for people to wear formal business suits at work.  So they actually had top government and business leaders model casual and light-weight business clothes and made it “the new normal.”  Cool Biz and a winter Warm Biz counterpart took off so completely that a Cool Biz line of lightweight business suits was launched and sold over 400,000 the first year, and Cool Biz mohawk haircuts were popular in some circles.  The campaign saved 210 gigawatt-hours in the summer of 2005 alone.  More recently, in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the campaign has scaled up as SuperCool Biz, with major government backing.”

The Energize New York Program is using word-of-mouth, oops, I mean community-based social marketing, by asking homeowners who have upgraded their homes for increased comfort and savings to talk to their neighbors and spread the word. 

The Energize staff is facilitating this hyper-local outreach by targeting existing networks in a community, for example, by approaching the leaders of a local community center, garden club, Lions Club, or baseball league.  

Does local word-of-mouth work? Yes! 600% better than no word-of-mouth. What is my proof?

We analyzed the participation rates in the state’s home energy efficiency program for the past decade. We found that state-wide the average participation rate was relatively flat and very low.  One tenth of one percent of all households completed energy upgrades throughout New York in 2011 and 2012. Meanwhile, in the first communities to launch Energize local word-of-mouth outreach in that same period (by zip code this included Bedford and Mt Kisco), participation rates climbed 600%.  Six-tenths of one percent of all households completed an energy upgrade. That is small number, but a 600% increase from 2009 when Bedford and Mt Kisco both had participation rates that exactly matched the state-wide average. The only difference is the local Energize outreach.