Cognitive dissonance and individuals' response strategies as a basis for audience segmentation in social marketing to reduce factory farmed meat consumption

This paper describes an audience segmentation study that highlights several areas where current social marketing strategies in relation to reducing factory farmed meat consumption could be more effectively applied. The need to address factory farming (intensive animal agriculture) and meat consumption is supported by a large body of evidence that points to their deleterious impacts worldwide, including their impact on the health of communities, on social and environmental justice (e.g. Nierenberg and Garcés 2004), on animal welfare (e.g. Donham et al., 2007), on water, air and biodiversity and their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions (Steinfeld et al., 2006).