Selling Your Ideas: Part 2

Last time I wrote about some social change insights from a book called Diffusion of Innovations. Innovations tend to succeed or fail based on six factors: (1) Relative advantage, (2) Compatibility, (3) Observability, (4) Trialability, (5) Complexity, (6) support by influential change agents. Last time I made some remarks on how those characteristics can be applied to selling social innovations. This time I want to offer a concrete example.

The subject.of the day is sustainable development (economic development built on principles of ecological protection and social justice). That short definition covers lots of territory! Sustainable development has to include public policy, buying habits, marketing, construction, energy production, waste disposal, mining, manufacturing, transportation, and urban planning.

For the sake of illustration lets just focus our attention on "green" buildings. A "green" building could literally be green, but it would be more useful to create a building that uses as little energy as possible and that generates as little waste as possible.  It would also be desirable to use recycled and salvaged materials where possible. There's much more to green building than I can cover here, and this web site does a wonderful job of explaining things anyway. So, we want to sell people (what people?) on the application of green building principles. How do we do it?

Well, first make a couple of decisions that narrow our scope of activities. "Selling" the implementation of green building principles isn't really something anyone can do. They have to sell particular ideas to particular audiences that can reasonably be expected to act on the ideas in question. You may also need to narrow your focus to a certain geographic area. No, cyberspace is not a geographic area!

(some boring details omitted)

Let's go right to work selling people in the Washington, DC area on buying and building "green" condos. Condos are hot in the DC area, as are condo conversions of old buildings. Let us further focus our attention on condo builders. What can we do to sell them on the idea of going green? Well, it may help to have a specific set of building principles that we want them to follow.

You can learn more about green building standards in this Wikipedia entry. The exact set of standards we use here isn't really important so I'll jump right into making some recommendations, organized according to the six factors I listed in my opening paragraph:

1. Relative Advantage - Gather statistics on the selling prices of "green" condos to show that they command a premium above any additional construction costs. The greener condos may not always sell for more, but being able to offer up numbers showing that extra profits are possible will help.

2. Compatibility - Condo owners love to save money, one thinks. Provide energy-savings estimates based on the type of energy to be used (probably electric power, plus gas for hot water) and estimates of water savings. This will help builders to sell units: "Cut your energy bills by 40% by moving to Green Dream I, the Districts Hippest and Greenest Condo Development." (If the condo fee includes utilities, lower water and energy costs can be converted into lower condo fees too!")

3. Observability - Provide several case studies of companies that have built "green" condo buildings and made extra money, so builders in the area know it can really be done with a variety of property types (gedern, mid-rise, high-rise, whatever)

4. Trialability - Offer suggestions for integrating some inexpensive "green" features and an incremental plan for doing more.

5. Complexity - Simpler plans are better! Offer something that is easy to integrate into current building and landscaping methods.

6. Change agents - Network and find one or two builders/developers/designers who are interested and have connections. Help them help others' see how those green building principles are good for business. Incidentally, you could also talk up the "soft" side of being a green builder, specfically the real contribution it makes to environmental protection.

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Selling Social Change

I was reading about research on how innovations spread through societies. Most work seems to be on technological innovations. But, I think the lessons from diffusion of innovations research could apply just as well to social innovations. Policies, laws, regulations, lifestyle changes, new attitudes, and "green" technologies all need to be sold. Knowing what helps an innovation to succeed can only help us out. So, I've got three points to make here.

First, take deep breath and ask a few questions about your idea: Why should your idea be implemented? Why is your answer going to be persuasive to to anyone? Why will your idea helpo solve the problem or exploit the opportunity? Why do you belief *this* answer is a good one? After a period of questioning your idea, alone or with others, you may need to refine your idea.

Six factor shape the chances for an innovation to succeed. Here they are:

1. Relative advanteage - it has to be obvious that the idea is better than what people are currently doing. The bigger the change, the bigger the advantage as judged by your audience, will need to be before your idea has any hope of selling.

2. Compatibility -The idea has to be seen to fit existing beliefs, norms, work patterns, organizations, and relationships. This feature of an innovation is probably even more important than relative advantage.

3. Observability - People need to see people realizing benefits from using the idea.

4. Trialability - People need to try out an idea and have a way to go back to the old way of doing things.

5. Complexity - Keep your idea simple to understand and to implement. People are lazy, very busy, poorly educated, or overstressed by their current lifestyles. They won't knowck themselves out to try and understand a complicated and esoteric concept.

6. Change agent - Successful innovation pretty much demands the presence of people who have the respect of people who you want to adopt your idea. These change agents give the idea credibility.

With those features in mind, one can easily come up with many ways to modify an idea or its marketing. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Structure the idea so that people will have an easier time obtaining benefits.

2. Modify the idea so it can be adopted in stages. I think this is what some vegans and vegetarians do to sell their ideas about diet: Go vegan one or two days a week. Identify vegan dishes you like. Eat more vegan dishes. Swear off meat entirely. Then give up other animal products.

3. Simplify it!

4. Deliberately shape your idea to fit the culture as it actually exists, not as you think it should be.

5. Design a trial, demonstration project or experiment that people can do, so they become more comfortable with the idea.

6. Related to #5, write about the idea. Specifically, invite readers to participate in a thought experiment wherein they imagine the consequences of implementing your idea in their personal lives.

7. Make sure you know what your audience will really see as an advantage, rather than what seems like an obvious advantage to you.

I'll offer some concrete examples of these suggestions in action next time.

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Some Social Change Principles

Designing new public ediucation strategies, social policies, and so forth needs to proceed based on some fundamental principles that can guide us to create things that are likely to work. I'm not sure what new or revised principles we really need in this area. I do have a few thoughts to offer. So, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Decision making is emotional and not purely rational - If you base your idea on the assumption that people are making rational and carefully considered decisions about what to do, then your idea is likely to fail.

2. Altering perceptions of a situation is more powerful than trying to alter emotions or to present facts. Thanks to Edward DeBono who mentions this principle in Seious Creativity

3. People will often work harder to avoid a loss than to realize a gain - It might be useful to present an idea in terms of what it can help people to not lose rather than in terms of what they might or might not gain.

4. Opportunities are just as important as problems - Sure, solving social problems is important. Maybe there is more social good to be realized by trying to improve something that is already working reasonably well.

5. Use enlightened self-interest to your advantage.

6. Know that all changes in society will have unplanned consequences, some good and some bad - Try to anticipate the negative consequences and plan for them. Maybe there is a way to modify the idea. Maybe you can predict a beneficial side-effect that can be a selling point of your idea.

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