Competition – Crazy Safety Campaigns
If you are a follower of this blog you will know that we have often discussed the way safety and marketing go for crazy promotions to get people into safety. In the past we have discussed: Dumb Ways to Die, Hazardman, Sexy Sophie, Mum’s For Safety, Pickled, Heroes and Meerkats campaigns as examples of how Safety is attracted to Nutjob Central and the Wacko Wagon to identify with safety. It seems when it comes to marketing safety anything except undertaking the basics is the focus. How strange that the safety basics such as conversation, helping, care, listening and advising don’t even feature in the AIHS BoK or WHS Curriculum. Such is the penchant for Safety to look to crazy campaigns to brand safety. No wonder the brand is so often ‘on the nose’. When your ideology is zero, your trajectory is brutalism. When it comes to safety it’s too often the 8Bs: Barricades, Brick Walls, Bollards, Bashing, Bureaucracy, Bamboozling, Brainlessness and Brutalism.
Of course, none of this silly stuff is effective or evaluated from a semiotic perspective. Effectiveness is often assessed by confirmation bias and hits on the Internet to validate effectiveness. Most safety people I know pull their hair out in frustration with how the industry promotes itself. There seems no cognizance in the safety industry that choice of semiotics and linguistics carry by-products and trajectories that damage the brand. It seems the last thing that safety wants to be identified with is the basics in tackling risk.
The Competition
First the prize, a free autographed copy of It Works, A New Approach to Risk and Safety (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/).
To submit to the competition, we want to see your findings on crazy efforts in branding safety, from campaigns with silly slogans and maniac mantras, from silly semiotics to BS branding. Basically, anything that tries to anchor to safety something that it is not, anything that avoids the basics of helping, conversation, listening and advising about risk.
So, search about what you know and send in your entry to:
Entries will close on Friday 15 July and winners announced through the blog
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
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- Zero is a Delusion - October 12, 2021
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- Sexual Harassment – The Basics - October 9, 2021
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