World Economic Forum proposes psychological plan to overcome ‘vaccine hesitancy’ By Michael Haynes for Life Site News
The scholars want to use psychology to promote vaccines, noting how customers make decisions in a process of thinking, feeling, and taking action.
“Overcoming COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, procrastination, and rejection” is “the greatest marketing communication challenge of our lifetime,” declared an article on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) website recently.
The piece was authored by three professionals in marketing: Rohit Deshpandé, the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at Harvard’s Business School; Ofer Mintz from Sydney’s University of Technology; and Imram Currim, Professor of Marketing at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine.
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The group had conducted research into how to combat what they described as a “demand problem” for COVID injections, with supply outweighing demand. This led them to suggest “creating and implementing such solutions to inform, persuade, and convince customer segments to act, and we believe this kind of approach could also boost COVID-19 vaccine communication efforts.”
The scholars want to use psychology to promote vaccines, noting how customers make decisions in a process of thinking, feeling, and taking action. The entire process is replicated when an individual has to decide to get a COVID-19 injection, declared the authors.
While emphasis has been on promoting the third part of this process — the “doing” or actual vaccination event itself — the group lamented the fact that much work was still needed in order to actually convince those described as “the vaccine procrastinator, hesitant, and rejector populations.”
In order to convince this sector of the population, “we need to focus on the ‘think’ and ‘feel’ stages of decision making,” declared the marketing experts.
As such, Deshpandé, Mintz, and Currim have drawn up three recommendations “to eradicate vaccine hesitancy.”
Knowledge and misinformation
The three authors called for a campaign against vaccine “misinformation,” explaining how to address how people think about the vaccine. Noting that many who were hesitant about the injection believed it was “rushed, with underreported side-effects,” the group suggested a policy of directly confronting such people.
