Basic marketing or sales training stipulates that repetition is important. Years ago, I was taught that approximately 62% of sales occur after the sixth selling attempt. That’s why some salespeople don’t stop selling after you’ve already said no. They know, or at least have been trained, that no doesn’t necessarily mean a potential customer can’t eventually be convinced to say yes.
The same general rule applies to marketing techniques. If I see an advertisement once, I’m unlikely to recognize and remember the message. But when I see an ad repeatedly, it begins to register, and that’s the first step toward behavior change. A marketing professional told me that making people aware of your product has a price, but getting them to pull it off the shelf and put it in their shopping cart costs a great deal more.
Marketing Messages
So how does that apply to our fire safety messages? If you consider the fact that we’re trying to market our message to our communities, then the principles are pretty easy to understand–messages need to be repeated to be remembered. And repetition is what will change behavior. Even better, repeating the message in different formats will help reinforce the point.
So putting a message on a milk carton, a billboard, in a newspaper ad, on the radio and TV, and in a classroom will increase its exposure and improve the chance that our target audience will absorb it. If you take that marketing a step further, we could then present our messages in the medium that most appeals to our target audience. But for now, we want some safety messages to reach everyone, so the broadest possible reach is desirable.
Selling Fire Safety
We’re facing a golden opportunity to embrace this marketing concept and maximize its value for our collective fire safety efforts. The U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) is leading a coalition of organizations to combine their resources and promote a common fire safety message, which was developed after the Salter Mitchell Agency conducted interviews with high-risk groups for market analysis.
So what did the agency discover? The people who were interviewed knew that home fire safety was their responsibility, but predominantly, they felt they were already doing what they needed to do in order to keep their homes safe. They also didn’t respond favorably to messages about personal responsibility. What they did like were messages that made them feel like they were part of something larger than themselves.
After testing out several themes, the group involved in the analysis arrived at the action-oriented phrase, “Fire Is Everyone’s Fight,” which focuses on the entire community’s involvement in fire safety. Additional analysis of the matter revealed that almost no one misconstrued the phrase as a message to grab a garden hose and fight their own fires. Focus groups understood that their role is to act on what they can do before a fire starts. The message allows us to combine our specific educational messages with a common theme that could become as readily recognizable as “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires.”
But we must do our part to help the messages take hold. The national fire service doesn’t have $30—40 million for an ad campaign. But we do have more than 30,000 fire departments, as well as national fire safety and fire service organizations with communication outlets of their own.
What if we all said the same thing, at the same time, in the same way? And what if we did this for years? What if we tagged our fire safety brochures, our bus benches, our fire engines, our billboards and our public safety messages on radio and TV with the same theme? The market equivalent to that kind of promotion would be worth millions of dollars.
Final Words
It’s time for us to support this effort everywhere in the United States. We will still have local messages, but we can make them more effective by combining them with the national message: “Fire Is Everyone’s Fight.” This will allow a visitor in my small hometown in Washington State to see the same message they see in Washington, D.C., and a common message will provide a collective benefit.
Author’s Note:“Fire Is Everyone’s Fight” has been trademarked to help us track and support usage in the field, not to make money. To find ways to incorporate this phrase into your own prevention efforts and to help with this national campaign, contact Teresa Neal, USFA fire program specialist, at Teresa.Neal@dhs.gov or 301/447- 1024.
