As a medical writer, I frequently participate in launches of pharmaceutical products. Behind closed doors, I join doctors and pharma executives to craft messages that will support a launch. While the messages must hew to the science, there’s no law against highlighting a product’s best features. As all marketers know, the right words can cast a product in a new light. It’s like dressing up a child in a lacy dress or tuxedo: the child hasn’t changed, but the fancy duds have the grownups clucking in admiration.
Messaging matters. It matters a lot. It can make or break a pharmaceutical product. It can impact people’s willingness to take a medication as prescribed or to push through side effects to get its full benefits. To follow the rules, as it were.
Which brings us to COVID-19. For a full year now, the public has faced a wall of absolutist messaging that has left people either terrified, enraged at their neighbours’ lack of discipline, guilty for falling out of line or resolutely defiant. “It sometimes seems like the messages have been crafted expressly to demonize and demoralize people,” says Vinay Prasad, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. “These states of mind are neither healthy nor sustainable.”
Pre-COVID, public health guidelines emphasized the need for flexibility and community buy-in. From a 2019 World Health Organization report on the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce the risk of pandemic influenza: “It is important to take into account people’s capacity to act on the advice being given. The recommended behaviour must be doable and be adapted to people’s lifestyle; otherwise, it will not be widely adopted.”
Communications about COVID-19 have stood this advice on its head. Both policymakers and Twitter warriors insisted that everyone jump over the same high bar of restrictions, wielding the pointy stick of shaming to keep people in line. One might argue that this was necessary, but after a year the law of diminishing returns has set in.
It’s time to retire those sticks and bring out a few carrots. To the government spokespeople, public health experts and tweeters of the world, I offer these carrot-shaped messages for consideration:
- Drop “stay home, save lives” and similar slogans. A year in, the words have lost much of their power. It doesn’t mean people no longer care about their loved ones. It’s simply the phenomenon of habituation we learn about in Psychology 101: response to a stimulus lessens with repeated exposure. If you want to maintain a robust response, create a new slogan – perhaps something that heralds a brighter future, like “stay alert, save tomorrow.”
- Forget “we’re all in this together” or even “we must all work together.” It’s dismissive of people who have lost livelihoods, businesses, career opportunities and social connections. Acknowledging the real losses incurred by the restrictions makes people feel respected and heard. For example: “COVID is affecting everyone differently. As we ramp up the vaccination program, we encourage you to do what you can to keep the curve manageable.”
- Give shaming and guilting a rest. TV ads that feature an indoor gathering followed by a person gasping in the ICU will not, at this juncture, persuade the rule breakers. As Zeynep Tufekci notes in a February Atlantic article about pandemic missteps, shaming “entrenches polarization and discourages disclosure, making it harder to fight the virus.” Instead, create ads showing people having a picnic in a park or playing beach volleyball, with the message: “Every day will bring more things we can do safely. Let’s stay the course so we can get there faster.”
- Replace absolutism with harm reduction. The harm reduction philosophy, which gained prominence during the AIDS crisis, emphasizes reducing risk rather than eliminating it. It recognizes that humans have competing drives and needs. For people seeking relationships during the pandemic, for example, one might advise: “COVID is a good time to experiment with slow dating: getting to know someone while not rushing physical contact.”
- Stop pouring cold water on the vaccines. Continually emphasizing the need to stay masked and distanced after the jab reduces the incentive to get it. It leaves people frustrated and hopeless. Here’s a fix: “The vaccine is our passport to normal. It may take a few months, but we’ll get there.”
- Put vaccine risks in context. Countless doctors have told me, using more or less these words, that “the public has a terrible understanding of risk, probably because we experts do a terrible job of communicating it.” A weak grasp of the risk/benefit profile of COVID-19 vaccines leaves people vulnerable to scare stories and resultant vaccine refusal. Indeed, rates of vaccine hesitancy have been disappointingly high throughout the world. The solution? Show, don’t tell. Visually impactful tools such as stick-figure diagrams get the message across more effectively than a wall of words. Put two of those diagrams side-by side – one with the risks of serious harm from COVID-19, another with the much lower risks of vaccination – and people will get it.
- When announcing reopening plans, don’t focus exclusively on COVID-19 metrics. Assure us that you’re aware of the need to balance various facets of public health. Perhaps something like this: “We understand that reopening decisions rest on numerous factors. We are reviewing the situation every day, with inputs from experts in various disciplines, with consideration not only of the pandemic curve but of mental health and opportunity to thrive.”
- Point the way to normality. One of the key functions of public health communication is to maintain public morale and the public needs hope right now. Stop with the doom-laden messages about a forever-changed future in which socializing, cultural activity and travel will never return to their pre-COVID innocence. Instead, consider the time-honoured advice, laid out in the United Kingdom’s 2011 Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, to promote “a return to normality and the restoration of disrupted services at the earliest opportunity.” Rather than the new normal, promote the “true normal” – a normal that includes hugs and dancing at music festivals. Tell people the true normal is on its way.
See? It’s not that hard.
The comments section is closed.
Disease severity is not dependent on presence or absence of vaccines, if health is truly desired there are other variables that if addressed will result in a healthier society. The presence of these variables alone should exclude the mandating of vaccines. Vaccines should only be used as a tool not a rule. There are certain people who benefit from vaccines and certain people who do not. At the very least, universal vaccination policy harms society by taking the focus away from the culprit of disease severity and places it on an action with limited returns. Universal vaccinations do not address the real cause of disease severity. Additionally, any invasive medical procedure should always be individualized. This concept is standard and recognized as a pillar when attempting to provide care to anyone. Why is it being ignored with the application of vaccines? The universalization of any vaccine puts society at risk for crises similar to the opioid epidemic and drug resistant micro-organisms. Science is very clear about what the human body needs to function appropriately. Science is very clear about how the immune system functions and what it needs to function. Disparity caused by numerous social injustices as well personal health decisions is the real cause of pandemic and disease severity. This fact was recognized by WHO researchers commenting on the Ebola Outbreaks of 2013-2016. Normal is just what science has been telling us it is: the body needs proper care to function well, the bodies’ immune system needs regular exposure to micro-organisms to build and maintain immunity, a properly maintained body can handle exposure well. This is the science that public health should be pushing. Attaining this solely as public health measure would bring about a much more just society. If real revolution in healthcare is what the goal is then this is the way. Anything else is just a delay.
I am both a specialist in public service innovation and had a corporate communications background. This seems so obvious: Ontario and all provinces should have harnessed the best advertising and marketing people to shape a once-in-a-lifetime marketing campaign. Had we done so, perhaps we would have come up with ideas like NZ did. Imagine…if we hired Schitts Creek to create short fun videos on 20 Covid themes over 3 monrhs. Imagine the social media potential. Or…imagine if created a Covid Creativity project to have kids and pros create homemade videos on being kind and staying safe in lockdown. Well NZ did that too. 6oo people created a video (pop of 5M). Right now, AU spends $20 million on a Vaccine communication plan to manage expectations. Us? I wrote about NZ communication last year. Keep in mind we failed to market the use of our Covid App.
(17% of our population vs 61% in NZ) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/covid19-wicked-problem-solving-did-your-country-change-ed-bernacki/
I work in marketing and communications, and I agree with this assessment 100%. The principles of marketing don’t just apply to selling the latest iPhone, but also to promoting healthy living habits – you have to show people the benefit of doing what you want them to do, and you lose people instantly when you start wagging your finger or calling people names for not doing everything perfectly. I live in British Columbia, where our chief medical officer of health Dr. Bonnie Henry has emphasized harm reduction a lot more than law & order throughout the pandemic. We do have restrictions, and it has been difficult for me and many others, but I would much rather have the messaging and approach Dr. Henry has than some of the authoritarian, demoralizing messaging I’ve seen out of Ontario and Quebec and some European countries. Has BC been perfect? No, but we do have one of the lowest death rates from this virus in North America – lower than every single US state and lower than most of the rest of Canada outside the Atlantic Bubble and the North.
I could not agree more. The messaging has been atrocious. And demoralizing to the vast majority of people who have followed the rules at great personal expense. While we’re at it, perhaps we can be more thoughtful about using language like ‘heroes’, ‘essential’ and ‘priority populations’. Health care workers, grocery workers and disadvantaged groups all deserve recognition, but it suggests that everyone else doesn’t matter. And I’m pretty sure that all the people who have willingly done what has been asked of them and paid the price of not being with their loved ones when they die or having to drop vulnerable family members at ERs all alone, are pretty heroic in their own right. And we wouldn’t have achieved the success we have had without them. I can’t think of anything more essential than that.