I was sitting in my car, minding my own business, waiting for the traffic light to go green when I saw that smiling gentleman flying from car to car distributing plastic bags and saying somethings to the drivers. My turn came and I received the below shown plastic bag and the gentleman said something like ‘Throw it right or you will be fined SAR 150,’ in other words, he was threatening me!!!
This is all a part of the anti-littering campaign that is currently carried out by the city municipality. The campaign started few days ago and the posters are all over the place advertising the fine that the city is imposing on Jeddawies throwing trash wherever they want! To see a photo of the street ads, check out this post by Deadul, and notice how she described them as ugly and creativity lacking, so now I am sure that I am not the only one who thinks this campaign is … read on …
So the campaign is built around the fines the city is imposing on people throwing trash around, in other words, the campaign is more advertising the fine rather than the cause itself. And in my opinion, this approach won’t work and won’t give the desired results!
Let me tell you why, usually the targeted audience of such campaigns are the youth sector between 20 and 35 or 40. And using the authoritative and/or threatening approach with such young audience won’t usually resonate with them, let alone the probability of leading them to the total opposite behavior.
If you remember, this same approach was also used by Saher, the traffic monitoring and ticketing system. Now, you cannot help but wonder why our government bodies are so convinced that Saudis won’t commit to such social causes unless threatened to subjected to punishments. I would bet my largest amount of money on the marketing agencies developing those poor campaigns.
Moreover, it is important to notice that even if we decided to let go the authoritative and threatening approach and adopted the softer one of appealing to people and nicely asking them to throw trash into cans and so forth, the campaign message won’t work as well!
So what should we do? many studies under the topic of social causes marketing suggest that for a campaign to be successful, it is better to be emotionalized. It should relate to the audience feelings, to trigger their shared responsibility, and to make them aware of the impacts and consequences of their decisions whether to adhere to the campaign message or not! Many techniques can be used to achieve this target, humanizing the face of the message is one, calling for the sense of the group/community or national pride is another, officials engagement to promote the message, or eliciting peer pressure (e.g. honoring those adhering to the message) are all possible ways of delivering an emotional social message.
To get things clearer, please allow me to close with an example that some would consider as the best anti-littering campaign ever made; it is the campaign branded as ‘Don’t mess with Texas.’ Back in the 80’s, the state of texas started to realize that it has a real problem of littering, especially on its highways, that was costing the city a lot of money to clean and look after to. The city went through the usual, they nicely asked the people to use trash cans, it did not work. They moved to threatening, it did not work neither. Then, they realized that they need to engage audience. They humanized the message and used many celebrities in their campaigns. Within few months, it has been reported that littering has been reduced in Texas by about 72% …
Now … that’s what I call a successful campaign.
