Stump the Strategist Video: How to Make People Take Action against Type 2 Diabetes

A couple of months ago, we brought Stump the Strategist to The Innovation Enterprise’s Chief Strategy Officer Summit, and one of the questions brought to the table was this:

We’ve just started a business that helps solve Type 2 diabetes as a problem in Western Sydney, where there’s about under a million people that are either pre-diabetic or diabetic. Where do we begin?

And our team of marketing strategists had 9 minutes to answer this — live — in front of the audience.

Watch the whole footage here:

No time to go through the entire video? Here are some of solutions they presented:

Change the default. Look for people’s heroes (the people they look up to) and use them to model the default.
Gamify it. If you want someone to do something, don’t ask them to do it. Use social proof. Tell them that their neighbour is doing it. For example, in hotels, don’t ask the guests to reuse the towels. If you let them know that 60% of the guests in this hotel are doing it, you get a slightly higher response. Moreover, if you say, “People in this room have recycled their towels this many times,” the social proof kicks in and you get a higher response.
Know the triggers, barriers, and the drivers.
- Triggers – What could trigger people to start thinking about it and having a conversation about it? Find the trigger that we can use every day and benchmarking so it becomes the default. (E.g. The colour pink triggers the cause for breast cancer foundation.)
- Barriers to action – What’s stopping them to do the action? (E.g. “I don’t want to see a doctor”, “I don’t want to wait in the waiting room”, “I don’t want to go through blood tests”.)
- Drivers – What’s going to cause them to act on it?
Make it easy for people to do the right thing. Find out who has got your customers and partner with them.
Know the one thing that you could get people to do to prevent diabetes. Focus in on the one thing that’s going to make a difference.