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Are shock tactics back?

Tough question to answer. However, it all comes back to behavioural change - which is what marketing is really about, underneath all of the other stuff. Will these hard hitting ads change people's behaviours? What behavioural pathways are being presented for consumers to follow to carry out the required change? The use of fear can be effective in certain situations (I blogged this back in 2010: http://interacter.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/the-use-of-fear/ ), however there is a tendency for this type of appeal to become overblown as self-defeating as the viewers push back against it. What's interesting is that Government campaigns, such as the stop smoking work, tend to default to the shocking. They rarely explore marketing methods which will be more cognitively consonant with the audience. In fact, I can't think of one that says "This is what you CAN do" [if you stop smoking] - it's all based in the shock and there's no reference to helping the consumer achieve their intrinsic goals. Similarly, they rarely use the behavioural levers that are rooted in our in-built community relationships. There's plenty of scope to utilise cognitive dissonance to one's advantage in these campaigns, but it's never really carried through. Imagine also if the anti-smoking campaigners directly spoke to the audience and empowered them through social campaigning, giving them the chance to share their victories as they go along. I've never seen this done either, and think that, in our hyperconnected, social world, this could be a real gamer changer if deployed correctly.

Wed, 23 Jan 2013

3:56 pm