This briefs aim was to explore the area of design for advocacy and behavioural influence while discussing the ethics of designing for said cause. With the challenge of promoting a social message taking the side of keeping/against abolishing palm oil usage in the UK and provide this social message to an audience group called the ‘undecided’, pushing them to vote in favour of the campaign.
Me and Samantha collaboratively worked to home in on the concept: ‘What would happen if palm oil disappeared over night?’. From this, we formed two key sub-audiences to target our campaign at: young professionals (shop with and monitor their own expenses) and parents (those who do the shopping for their family). These groups are those who are not just of age to vote but are actually in contact with purchasing palm oil-based products more than others. The campaign is called ‘NO US WITHOUT PALM’. This directly references consumer identities and how we associate ourselves with our favourite’s brands or type of products. We played on this saying that without the products that make us, where is no ‘us’ as we know it. We felt it would immediately highlight to the audience that a palm oil ban would impact their daily routines and purchasing habits. Alongside showing the audience the consequences of a ban to convince them, we also brought in element of informative and sympathetic routes too. Touchpoints like traditional advertising posters hold longer forms of communication, in which we included faces and other people’s names as to give the audience a sense of actions have consequences, and by them not voting for our cause they directly impact others’ lives too, i.e. how will Sarah, a little girl, give cookies to Santa if you ban palm oil. While touchpoints like smaller, location-specific posters hold shorter forms of communication, in which we exclusively used the use of ‘you’ to speak to the audience and the types of products used in that situation, i.e. how will you smell nice without wearing deodorant on London Underground during rush hour in summer. The same principle is applied to the campaign social media touchpoints, using user marketing analytics to directly target the user viewing the posts. We believed this focus on showing our audiences unknown dependence would help convince them to vote for the campaigns message. To expand on this, we also created a guerrilla marketing aspect to the campaign and created an animatic to showcase how it would work. The concept is to take over a supermarket overnight, board up all the products with palm oil by displaying more campaign graphics, and then use this online as another touchpoint for our audience to engage. Indeed, all touchpoints have a QR code or digital link to the campaigns website where they can learn more about palm oil, experience the campaign video and engage with a personal supermarket shopping list, that allows the user to upload their shopping list before being shown what they would lose in a palm oil ban. All aspects are designed to give different users, different campaign journeys based on location-appropriateness but still receive a similar message in order to cause discussion and convince people to vote for the campaign.
