Healthy persuasion: a values-based messaging approach to leisure air travel decision-making

“Healthy persuasion” is a public health social marketing strategy that aims to counter corporate efforts to drive the desire to consume products that cause negative individual (personal) and/or collective (social and/or environmental) health outcomes. In this paper, we argue that healthy persuasion might be usefully borrowed from public health and applied to leisure air travel (over) consumption to facilitate behaviour changes that past facts-based messaging has failed to evoke. We implemented mixed methods to generate quantitative and qualitative insights into the air travel decision making of Norwegian leisure travellers. Our analysis identifies and explores the values held by three groups relating to reduced leisure air travel – supporters, persuadables and opponents. We draw insights into values-based message framings that are likely to be effective in appealing to supporters and persuadables to reshape their air travel consumer decisions and conclude with important avenues of future research.