Stay at Home
25 Mar 2020
By its very nature - Stay At Home - is draconian - it’s harsh and the average free wielding Aussie doesn’t like to be told what to do. Being told to Stay At Home is, in a way, relinquishing our basic freedom of choice. Ask any teenager! We’ve spent decades fighting for freedom on every level - fair work, fair choice, inclusion, equality, democracy. Guess what folks - the leaver’s shifted and we can’t press reset overnight. People are resisting the Stay At Home instruction, they’re making a choice, because they’ve always had one!
So while the public health authorities are creating clear messaging and blanketing the media, imploring people to - Stay At Home, to Stop the Spread, and not to socialise - at the end of the day changing the behaviour and attitude of a nation is going to be more difficult and take longer than a couple weeks.
Marketing is at its core about changing behaviour. So how can we ramp up and compel a nation to do what we want them to do in a time of crisis when it goes against natural behaviour and the social norm.
Social media has never been more powerful with people scrolling kilometres each day on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram with an insatiable appetite to find out more. If it’s done right, we can change behaviors, families, communities and societies and quickly. Never have we needed it more than we do at the moment.
Here’s my checklist
Show the consequences of risky behaviour.
Show the consequences of risky behaviours on others.
Using celebrities (AKA influencers)
Empower people to take personal responsibility
Appeal to an intervener (Grandparents would be great for this) you can motivate behaviour change by getting the attention of the individual with the most influence
Use guerrilla marketing tactics
Engage people in the conversation
Of all the communication campaigns “StopTheSpread” is great, it's clear and implies all the elements that we need to get the message through. After decades of empowering the people it’ll take a while for the simple “Stay At Home” message to change the behaviour of our entire nation.
As for Lock it Down as a marketing campaign - can we not go there - let’s avoid it all together.
As always, my opinion only, love to hear yours.
