Intervention.
When you're aiming to enhance customer engagement, improve employee performance, or drive public health initiatives.
SoMoCo’s intervention design service exists to help you achieve meaningful, lasting behavioural change.
The following case study is a great example of this.
Case Study :
Winter Bugs: Safeguarding Public Health with Behavioural Science.
Cheshire East Council.
Summary
Not every intervention comes with hard impact metrics, especially when execution is managed by the client’s internal communications team. This case study is included because it exemplifies SoMoCo’s high levels of creativity and insight-led approach.
Our client faced a potential public health crisis due to a resurgence of winter illnesses, a new COVID wave, and a population with weakened immunity.
They needed to increase infection prevention and control (IPC) behaviours among a population eager to move on. Without the required behaviour change, a predicted ‘worst case’ scenario posed a real risk of overwhelming health services.
SoMoCo’s behavioural analysis revealed that conventional fear-based or authoritative approaches would likely be ignored or could even provoke a negative response.
SoMoCo, drew deeply on their insight into the population’s attitudes and behaviours during COVID to create a striking and ambitious campaign that overcame all psychological friction.
Despite the absence of comprehensive metrics the campaign was highly praised, and the local leadership attributed the low infection rates to its effectiveness.
Context
In 2022, as the UK lifted COVID-19 restrictions, Cheshire East faced a triple threat: resurgent Winter respiratory illnesses, a new COVID wave, and a population with weakened immune systems resulting from prolonged social distancing. The potential for a public health crisis, capable of overwhelming an already stretched and depleted health service was significant.
Having previously profiled and segmented the local population according to social, cultural and behavioural characteristics. SoMoCo was tasked with developing a campaign targeted to the largest segment the 'Movable Middle,' this segment was assessed as most likely to adopt infection prevention behaviours.
Should a sufficient proportion of the moveable middle take precautionary measures, the benefits would be felt across the whole population.
Behavioural Analysis
Several challenges were identified that could prevent the re-adoption of COVID-related behaviours.
These included the underestimation of risk due to the availability heuristic (as media coverage waned, so did perceived risk), habituation to previous public health messages, and aversion to fear-based, authoritative messaging, which had become counterproductive.
Additionally, the intention-action gap posed a critical hurdle, where people intended to take protective actions but failed to follow through.
Strategy
The campaign focused on three principles: visual and emotional salience, tailoring, and ease of action.
SoMoCo employed striking CGI animations of bugs as metaphors for germs to capture attention and evoke a disgust response, encouraging viewers to adopt IPC behaviours. The use of humour helped overcome potential aversion, and the campaign's tailored messaging further enhanced memory and recall.
Simple, non-controversial behaviours such as handwashing and ventilation were promoted using rhyming phrases to increase recall and ease of implementation.
Implementation
The Winter Bugs campaign, meticulously tailored to resonate with the target audience, was deployed by our client across social and real-world channels for 10 weeks.
Impact :
The Cheshire East Communications team lead on campaign execution, therefore we do not have the same impact metrics as we hold for similar projects we have worked on.
We do know that Cheshire East experienced a significantly lower infection rate than predicted, easing pressure on local healthcare services.
By embedding behavioural insights capable of overcoming biases and habituation, SoMoCo delivered a campaign that not only met its objectives but received widespread praise for the campaign’s innovation and relevance.