“Smoking Is Sóóó ... Sandals and White Socks”: Co-Creation of a Dutch Anti-Smoking Campaign to Change Social Norms

Abstract

This article considers co-creation as a new persuasive strategy in health campaigns. Co-creation enables target audience members to become active campaign producers. A recent Dutch anti-smoking campaign applied co-creation, inviting the target audience to complete the slogan "smoking is sóóó . . . " with something outdated on social networking sites (SNSs) like Facebook and Twitter to stress non-smoking as the new social norm. From a corpus-linguistic perspective, we investigated how the slogans from the target audience resonated with or deviated from the campaign's original message. In general, the target audience slogans followed the campaign's approach, but on the SNSs, differences were found regarding the valence, type of utterance, and domain to which smoking was compared. The target audience frequently compared smoking with other (inter)personal social norms. Co-creation thus provides the target audience with an opportunity to disseminate campaign messages from their own perspective, but at the same time a co-creation strategy risks diluting the intended campaign message.

Methods for Coding Tobacco-Related Twitter Data: A Systematic Review

“…In 6 articles, sentiment was described in terms of being supportive or against tobacco, tobacco users, or decisions regarding tobacco, which suggests an assessment of message attitude. Furthermore, 1 article assessed valence, but it was not clear whether positive or negative valence suggested an attitude or emotional tone [ 35 ].…”

Advancing complexity-informed health promotion: a scoping review to link health promotion and co-creation

“…For example, Daykin et al (Daykin et al, 2017, p. 123) state that "Effective co-production can be undermined by structural and cultural barriers as well as unequal stakeholder relationships". Other challenges included the time-consuming nature of the process of coordinating all involved and unrealistic resourcing (Daykin et al, 2017;Freebairn et al, 2017), unequal engagement between participants (Freebairn et al, 2018), as well as deviation from and changing objectives between stakeholders (Daykin et al, 2017;van den Heerik et al, 2017). Ultimately these barriers and challenges can be linked to the complexity of health and the multitude of stakeholders involved.…”

Thinking out of the box

“…Co-created metaphors in this setting can either just copy or be slight variations on previously created slogans (presupposed resonant) or can be more creative, even including a completely novel source domain (creative resonant). This shows how participants have different ways of echoing campaign slogans or deviating from them (Van den Heerik et al 2017). Creativity in this setting can thus be seen as a phenomenon that can take different forms.…”

“…Through advertisements, commercials, events and social media, this campaign asked its audience to finish the slogan "Smoking is sóóó…", by comparing smoking with something outdated like "Floppy disk". 90.5% of the slogans co-created for this campaign on Facebook and Twitter was metaphorical, making a creative comparison between smoking and a distant concept (Van den Heerik et al 2017). This large number of comparable metaphorical slogans makes the campaign a perfect context to identify possible triggers of metaphor production and to gain more insight into the co-creation of metaphorical slogans on social media and their (perceived) creativity.…”