The UK government just changed its COVID-19 slogan, from ‘stay home, PROTECT THE NHS, save lives’ to ‘stay alert, CONTROL THE VIRUS, save lives’. It has been controversial, to say the least.
The change also reveals a common ‘blind spot’. Like any blind spot, it is easy to see from another angle - a case of spotting the blindingly obvious.
Public information communications are meant to work on a particular ‘target audience'. But this audience is obviously made up of individuals who receive and interpret the information as a sole recipient. (I did say that this was blindingly obvious).
Sometimes the audience and any one member of it can be combined to achieve the desired outcome. As in the ‘Keep Off The Grass’ sign in the park, or as in the famous wartime slogans ‘Dig For Victory’ and ‘Your Country Needs YOU.
More often, however, the sender considers the audience in general and hopes that enough of the message is obvious or clear enough to any one individual. For example, the London Underground platform announcement to “please use all available doors when entering the train” has the desired (audience) outcome of preventing overcrowding at certain doors, not to encourage any individual to run in and out of all the doors.
I once heard a radio traffic reporter announce roadworks likely to cause huge motorway queues the following day, suggesting that motorists (the audience) should “stagger their journeys into work”. The desired outcome (audience travelling at different times) in this case could not be translated into behaviour of any one individual listening at home.
In the original COVID-19 slogan, “Stay home” operates in the same way as “Keep off the grass”, a clear and specific message to the individual and the group at the same time. It ‘anchors’ the communication by connecting the individual action with the greater (collective) desired outcomes of protecting the NHS and saving lives.
A new slogan was always going to be trickier, in attempting to evolve to a more nuanced message, even for an agency as good as MullenLowe London. But it falls into the trap of conflating individual with audience. It is now all about desired (audience) outcomes. We should all ‘stay alert’ and thereby (somehow) ‘control the virus’ to ‘save lives’.
Following an outburst of largely unfavourable reactions, the government has ‘clarified’ the slogan by saying that staying alert means, amongst other things, staying home. PR professionals have not been shy in coming up with alternative suggestions – such as ‘stay apart’ instead of ‘stay alert’.
It is always easier to criticise than to create. But some good may come still from the whole farrago, if it means that the current trend* for vacuous three-part slogans, such as TfL’s ‘see it, say it, sorted’, becomes a thing of the past.
(* Post-script: not happening, not yet, at least)
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