To: HPA Consulting
From: Fred Holbrook, Regional director, EPA
Re: Radon Marketing Effort
I am enclosing the EPA Radon guide with this memo. Frankly, I view our past efforts to get people to react to radon as a failure and I do not know why. Radon is clearly a very serious environmental problem. I thought once we put the facts out we would see homeowners test their houses, make sure they did not purchase homes with high radon, and mitigate any radon problems if they had any. What has actually happened is almost nothing.
I want your group to rethink our strategy. Maybe just getting the facts out is not enough. Write up a 3 to 4 page memo on how you would frame this issue (i.e. what is our real audience?; what will get their attention?; why don’t they test their homes?; etc.) Describe and justify a market frame that will get this program going.
Note to Learners:
Obviously, this is a case study in which you are going to have to fill in a lot of missing information with some intuition about how people feel about a dangerous, but colorless, odorless gas in their homes that really has no discernible immediate effects. Your report should cover the framing questions presented earlier and discussed on page 497 of the Novick text.
456 Memo last updated April 20, 2004 (epowell)