Is social norms marketing effective? A case study in domestic electricity consumption

Ever since the foundational work of social psychologists Asch (1987) and Milgram (1974) there has been a great deal of interest in the influence on behaviour of perceptions of ‘normal’. In social marketing, this has led to the development of the social norms approach (Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004), a marketing technique that attempts to influence behaviour by changing perceptions of what is normal (Lewis and Neighbors, 2006; Neighbors et al., 2010; Burchell et al forthcoming). According to the literature, this approach has proven successful in influencing bullying (Perkins et al., 2009), substance abuse amongst students (Perkins, 2003; Bosari and Carey, 2003; Berkowitz, 2005; McAlaney and McMahon, 2007; Neighbors et al., 2008; Moreira et al., 2009), household recycling (Shultz, 1999; Nomura et al., 2011), hotel towel re-use (Goldstein et al., 2008), the payment of tax debts (Cabinet Office, 2012) and domestic electricity consumption (Allcott, 2011; Ayres et al., 2009). Funded by the Research Council UK Digital Economy Programme, and part of the suite of research projects known collectively as CHARM, this study set out to question the validity of these case studies and to assess the value of the social norms approach as a tool in the armoury of the social marketing practitioner. The field of domestic electricity was selected because the impact of social norms information is contested in this area and because the reduction of domestic consumption is an important social policy goal. The research aimed to ascertain whether social norms add significantly to the persuasive power of social marketing messages and to consider whether previous research on electricity consumption confounded the effects of the approach with those of feedback that only includes information on a household’s own consumption. The reduction of electricity consumption for the mitigation of climate change has a central place in policy discourse (Defra, 2006; DECC, 2010; HM Government, 2009) and has become a key social marketing objective (Hargreaves, 2011; Collier et al., 2010; Whitmarsh et al., 2011). The 2008 Climate Act committed the UK to reduce its 2050 carbon emissions to 80% of 1990 levels. Domestic consumption constitutes 31% of the UK’s electricity demand (DECC, 2011). However, driven in part by the growth in consumer electronics and domestic appliances, it increased by 0.1% in 2010 (Firth et al., 2008) and is not currently expected to fall sufficiently for the UK to achieve this target (Chitnis and Hunt, 2012). The use of the social norms approach on this issue is currently endorsed by the UK Government (Cabinet Office, 2011) and has already been adopted by the UK electricity provider First Utility (Solon, 2011).