Hard Sell

Graphic design is often most challenging when it is employed to change established behaviour. Asking people not to smoke, or not to illegally download films and music is difficult when you have to counter the incentives for doing so. I have been frustrated when I have asked friends and family to give up smoking. They express a lack of will-power, and position themselves as ‘light smokers’ against theoretical worse candidates who would be more worthy of (my) positive peer pressure. Because it is so difficult to overcome this stubbornness, many attempts will misfire by adopting the wrong strategy. In recent years, British anti-smoking campaigns have largely fallen into two camps. The first places emphasis on shock images to hammer home the negative health impact of smoking: pictures of charred lungs, tumours and rotten mouths placed on cigarette packets. How successful is this form of campaigning? I suspect that after some initial shock value, some smokers can tune these images out. If long-term smokers are comfortable with ignoring the risks to their health then they will find it easy to ignore the same repeated warnings in the same place on their cigarette packets. Supermarkets make this easier by displaying their cigarette packets with large price labels to cover the health warning.

The second anti-smoking strategy is the emotional campaign. These campaigns often focus on the negative impact of a family member’s smoking on young children. Where they have a greater chance of success is by challenging the idea that smokers are responsible only to themselves for their health. Whether the fear is that you are setting a bad example for your child, or that they will suffer by passive smoking (cue CGI smoke wafting out from the mouth of a smiling baby), or by risking your own life you risk depriving you and your child of something hugely important, the sense of responsibility to someone other than yourself is an important step in reaching out to people about the dangers of smoking because it diminishes the capacity for self-delusion.

These emotional campaigns are therefore perhaps the more effective strategy to adopt. This is not the 16th Century, we do not smoke tobacco believing it to have medicinal qualities; the health effects are well-known in most societies and many people continue to smoke in spite of this. That being the case, I believe that emotional and shock campaigns work best together; it is important that health campaigning does not relent in targeting smokers but seeks to communicate the dangers in meaningful ways that are hard to ignore. In 2004 the British Heart Foundation ran a gruesome advert Give Up Before You Clog Up. The advertisement featured a scientist in white gloves squeezing the thick fatty deposits from a smoker’s artery. A survey by Hall and Partners research agency indicated that of 500 smokers interviewed that there was a 94% recognition level, and 83% had considered giving up smoking.