Small Steps of Engagement

Yesterday, I was speaking at a conference of (mainly) European professionals in traffic safety awareness communication campaigns - yes, I know, quite a specific target group. I was there to talk about the “Pitstop” campaign on driving fatigue we had done for the Belgian Institute for Road Safety, but above all, about the process we went through to develop the campaign: the methodology, the insights, the feedback loops, etc.

After a presentation by somebody from Leo Burnett UK, who was presenting a “Think”-campaign (the guys who brought us commercials like this or this), I got into a very interesting discussion with a Dutch professional on the effectiveness of “scare appeals” like “Think” likes to use.

These scare appeals try to get people to think or feel a certain way, and hopefully therefore to do certain things - or not, of course. The Dutch - and the Belgian Institute as well, I might add - take a radically different approach, where they don’t tell people the kind of behaviour they are supposed to act, but rather helping them to do it.

Instead of telling people not to drink and drive, for instance, or showing them the consequences of drinking and driving (”scare”), the will install a ritual, in this case BOB, the designated driver. This ritual will help people do the right thing, i.e. not drink and drive. The underlying assumption is that 90% of all people actually know what to do, and they also have the right attitude (”it’s not responsible and morally incorrect to drink and drive”). If they do end up drinking an driving, it’s probably due to circumstances - and telling them or scaring them won’t change that. The real question is; what do you do to help them a) avoid those circumstances, or b) when they are in those circumstances, how to get out of them.

I found this very interesting, since it follows closely my own ideas on what communication in this time and age should do. If we want to influence behaviour, it will rarely be effective to work on cognition and emotion (alone). What we have to do is to outline the chain of small steps and small decisions between a feeling towards a certain brand or behaviour, and the actual behaviour (of buying the brand, for instance). And then, communication can provide these small steps of engagement.

I talked here before (in Dutch only, sorry) about the famous fly-in-the-urinoir. Now, traditional awareness campaigns would have used cognition (”do you know how many hours we spend a day cleaning up the toilets?”) or emotions like shame (”can’t you even piss right?”) to get men to use the urinoirs in a clean way. Modern communication draws a fly on the urinoir on the exact spot men have to aim at as to not mess up. Result: cleanner toilets, no annoying communication and a lot of men who walk out of toilets grinning like a little boy. Win - win - win, thank you very much.

Our pitstop-campaign did just that. We didn’t lecture, we didn’t moralize. We gently gave people the opportunity to take a nap. We took away barriers to do that. People liked us and the campaign for it. Our “excuses”-campaign did that just as well - we gave people the oneliners to talk to their friends or husbands. And they massively did.

There’s a very valuable lesson here for all of us wondering what communication will look like in the coming years: we have to be designers of human reactions. What do people need - in terms of tools, words, rituals, mechanisms, arguments, whatever - to take a step in the right direction? And then the next step, and the next.

Thinking and feeling are crucial. But not enough. In the end, it’s about doing.