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Habit Forming Advocacy

It is important to recognize that companies can be advocates too. An article in today’s Sunday New York Times Business section described how advocates’ P&G, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever worked with anthropologist Val Curtis. Curtis was interested in getting people in underdeveloped countries to regularly wash their hands with soap. Many diseases and disorders are caused by dirty hands (a child dies every 15 seconds from diarrhea) and many deaths could be prevented if people only washed their hands consistently. But it had to be turned into a learned habit. Dr. Curtis, now in charge of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, approached the three multinationals because she realized that they have been successful at ingraining habits among consumers to use their products. She figured that with their knowledge of consumer behavior they could help her make hand-washing  part of people’s daily routine– just as we brush our teeth, chew gum after meals, etc. The companies’ knowledge from product development and selling helped Dr. Curtis understand how to create messages and design ads for Ghanaians to increase hand washing with soap. And the figures are showing that hand washing is up dramatically. These companies became advocates by helping solve a social issue that had been unobtainable till now. As Dr. Curtis says in response to criticism about using marketing tactics to change behavior, “But those tactics also allow us to save lives. If we want to really help the world, we need every tool we can get.” It’s worth reading the whole story. But the lesson to be learned is that companies can use their intellectual capital to change behavior and save lives.