3 replies to this topic

[PatrickGer]

Does anyone have an idea...if health campaigns/deterrence campaigns....are ever actually successful in getting people to "modify" their behaviour?

Example: I remember in elementary we were shown pics of people who had totally bad teeth and major problems because of that.

Is anyone familiar with this? and if it usually works out / or not has any significant effect?

just curious..

[MauriceWalshe]

over time they do the drink driving and seat belt campaigns in the UK for example

I know that some of BT's advertising campaigns were designed to change calling behavior - interesting but slightly creepy.

They did reasearch on phone use by sex and found that males made shorter calls than women and developed an entire ad campaign to alter this behavior. The ones they did with Bob Hoskins BTW.

I saw a presentation where they showed the traffic graph for the UK correlated with the ad run times and you could see the traffic spikes.    
-- God only knows what the current smug BT couple are meant to represent

[krenerr]

I think they absolutely have value. The best example I can think of is the anti-smoking movement that began in my area in the 90's. Coupled with a strong advertising, I think it can be an effective deterrent for certain behaviours....however they can certainly be used for evil too! I think of the war films and propaganda media from the WW1, WW2 and all the others.

[PatrickGer]

thanks for the replies. I'm sure they can work - I can think of a campaign called "slip, slop, slap"(think it was logner originally) that became pretty popular in AUstralia and got the message across that people may want to care more about using sunscreen...supposedly it was very effective.

However, Im wondering if the majority of them work, or if many of them....do not really alter the behaviour of the people that are targeted. I know that a lot of stuff that "should" change my behaviour doesn't...and then I have to make a super effort to get myself to actually change my behaviour accordingly - for example I want to use my bicycle more rather than driving to the supermarket. havent done it in 3 months!lol....I also want to brush my teeth 3 times a day, have only brushed them once daily over the past 3 months....life is just too busy so I cant break out of the habits i want to (and improve stuff like that) when it comes to a few such things.

Thus, I was wondering if many health campaigns might be just the same for many people...sounding good, but not working...

Anyone else know something about this? I was hoping to hear about success rates in particular :-).

PS: I did come across another campaign....to prevent coet deaths...? if thats the right expression (admittedly i dont even know what exactly it is but supposedly it reduced the number of babies who died from 1,300 to 400 or so/year (I just made up the numbers, but they were in the same ballpark)