The events described in this section took place in the summer of 2020. As the lockdown measures were relaxed, we saw rates of infection start to increase in Plymouth and across the country. As expected there were different rates of increase among different groups of people, depending on their relative risk of exposure to transmission. Rates climbed highest among young adults (16-30) across the country and in Plymouth in late July and early August 2020. Our challenge was to work to reverse this increase by applying principles of social marketing to create active, purposeful and engaging messages.
We know that messages rooted in a rich understanding of their audience tend to chime and engage them better. We also, through previous insight work, knew that Plymouthians tend to love their city. We set out to build on this and started by talking to young people about their perceptions of COVID-19 and, in particular, to explore their views surrounding compliance with the key COVID 19-secure behaviours. We were looking for insights into what young people think and feel about COVID-19 to inform our messaging.
Through our conversations, the young people we spoke to told us that their central concern s of them infecting other people they know.
They also told us that people know what the key COVID-19 behaviours are but:
- find official advice, confusing and some do not trust it.
- also want life to return to normal – for their wellbeing and the economy yet,
- they believe non-compliance is widespread among all ages.
We knew if we responded to these insights our communications would be more engaging and therefore have more impact.
This set us a creative challenge; to find a phrase that responded and reflected young people’s central strong feelings of altruism. A phrase emerged from our team: “A good Janner looks out for their nanna”
We went on to use this phrase in our messaging and found that it did chime with people and helped to positively reframe a developing narrative about young people and COVID-19. The phrase was picked up both by local press and nationally as an example of effective communications.