In a marketing course, you’ll learn that attitudes are difficult to change, and therefore marketers should rather look to change a consumer’s beliefs, as they hold less emotional charge and are easier to sway.
My issue with this approach? What happens when you aren’t just looking for a way to effectively market a product (in which case you have a choice between changing beliefs or attitudes), but are rather looking to shift society’s attitudes and opinions regarding a given issue? In this case, you have no choice but to find an effective way to change attitudes, or else abandon ship and allow people to continue with their established attitudes.
[Please watch before reading on]
Don’t read on until you’ve watched the video.
Stop cheating and go watch it.
This Australian anti-homophobia campaign hits all the right notes. Instead of forcing an opinion down a viewer’s throat, it portrays an image of what most people in the given society would have a positive attitude towards. By keeping the partner out of view, the person watching the video has a reaction to the video that is rooted in their attitudes about love, rather than about homosexuality. Only at the end of the video does the focus shift – the viewer is caught off-guard and suddenly has to analyze whether the attitude they held while watching the video (that related to love) should change simply because the partner is the same sex. This is an effective strategy as it allows the viewer to transfer attitudes about one thing to another, before they can put up any barriers.
The video leaves this message on the table: Is it not strange to suddenly change all your attitudes about love, just because the people in love aren’t typical?
By getting the viewer to ask themselves the question, rather than forcing it on them directly, it holds much more weight. The ending note to “end marriage discrimination” simply solidifies what the viewer is already thinking about at this point.