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Get your messaging on the right track

I was sitting on a train last night and there was a poster opposite me. It asked passengers not to put their feet on the seats because other passengers found it a particular annoyance. Then it quoted some of those unnamed passengers’ opinions:  “Dirty... unacceptable...  selfish.”

I began to think about the intended audience of that poster.  Certainly, there might be a very small percentage of people who are tempted to put their feet up and be dissuaded by that poster – but they’d be an extreme minority. In fact, the kind of person who persistently puts their feet on seats is the kind of person who doesn’t give a toss about what other passengers think. Or, rather, if the practice is dirty, unacceptable and selfish, that’s all the better – because this person thrives on such negative attention.

The rail company had made two key mistakes in its poster. The first was assuming that the opinions of some its passengers represented all passengers ; the second was failing to do some research and discover that the target audience were the least likely to pay attention to the message.

This same company recently produced another poster campaign that showed a great deal of creativity. Designed to eradicate assaults on staff, it made a sentence out of words that had been mixed up. Only the first and last letters of each word remained the same, but  by concentrating for a moment on the poster it was possible to eventually discern the meaning.  The technique made the observer concentrate on the message and reflect on the cleverness of how it worked.

But do people who drunkenly attack rail staff appreciate clever word games? And if they did, would the poster stop them from assaulting people anyway? Very unlikely.  The success of the message – any message – is in discerning its intended audience and targeting it at them.  That might mean using their language.  It certainly means using their psychology. What motivates them?  What matters to them? This is the first stage of successful communication.

Matt