Many social changes hinge on good marketing. But what are social marketers to do when their target audience couldn’t care less about—or even despises—the change they want to make? That’s the situation we encountered in 2003, when we joined the Utah Wind Working Group, a cross-sector volunteer forum organized to inform stakeholder groups about wind energy opportunities for the state of Utah. The Utah Energy Office sponsored our group, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Powering America program. This program supports working groups in states that face roadblocks in developing their wind resources, and it had targeted Utah as a priority. Our job as marketing professors was to lead an outreach campaign that would promote wind power to the people of Utah, as well as to state legislators who were considering a bill that would provide tax incentives for renewable energy. But most Utahns did not want wind power. At that time, the state relied almost entirely on inexpensive local coal for its electricity, and the state’s conservative politicians were not inclined to alter the status quo. Citizens perceived wind power to be an expensive, ineffective experiment that had failed in the 1970s. And state legislators did…