Pattern Disruption
&
Generating Attention
In this episode of Creativity & Compliance, Tom & Ronnie discuss the concept of pattern disruption and how ethics & compliance can benefit from creativity and surprise to increase engagement and impact.
Pattern disruption is a technique to grab attention and stand out by breaking away from the ordinary or the expected. A pattern disrupt alters a person’s mental, emotional, or behavioral state to break their typical habits. Think of it as an unexpected act that jolts them into another state of mind.
THE PROBLEM: This technique can be really helpful for ethics and compliance programs. Most people feel like they have integrity so when it comes to ethics & compliance, they tune it out. Exacerbating the problem is that fact that most E&C training tends to be long and boring. The communications tend to be unimaginative. It’s all dull and muted. Ethics & Compliance has a reputation and its mostly not good. People don’t notice it and if they do, the don’t want to engage with it. Plus, we are constantly bombarded with other kinds of communications that are trying to attract our attention. We need to break the pattern to jolt our audience into another state of mind.
We should have consistency of messaging while increasing the variety of delivery mechanisms that house that messaging.
BREAKING THE PATTERN: If we want to stand out and get noticed, create awareness, create engagement and improve stickiness of learning, we need to look for ways to break the pattern. We need to show up differently. We need to surprise them. There are lots of ways to do this.
- Name, Logo, Tagline, Character: You can start with the E&C brand. What do you call yourselves? What image are you presenting? Is it interesting and approachable or sterile and intimidating. Compliance mostly leaves the impression of “have to” and a “finger wag.” Marketing 101…if you have a bad brand…change it! See previous podcasts about BMO, The FED, Yum!, Dexcom and Ferguson for techniques on how to change the E&C brand.
- Training: Find away to surprise them
- Wrapping the training in game show, a talk show, a movie theme…anything that looks and feels surprising and different
- Asking an unexpected or surprising question, e.g. Are you corrupt? Yes or No
- Inserting a fun song or jingle that highlights the main message or an important acronym
- Having the host “knock on the screen” and ask if they are still paying attention
- Inserting fun sound effects
- e the E&C brand.
- Communications: Trying different campaigns each year that have some entertainment value
- Fake commercials
- Tic Toc Style videos
- Talk shows featuring your execs
- Movie trailers
- Songs & Jingles
- GIFs and Memes
- L&E has a variety of fun formats. Here are some examples: Compliance Confessions, E&C Jams, Tales from the Hotline, Policy Tip Minute, Workplace Tonight.
By showing up differently and sharing information that is surprising and unexpected, we can grab attention and focus so you stand out. E&C clickbait is good! We also get the benefit of improving engagement, memory and recall. Last but not least, we need to reinvent ourselves on a regular basis, because even great campaigns will start to fade back into the norm over time. We can improve awareness, engagement and stickiness of learning through variety and surprise.
Ronnie Feldman is the CEO & Creative Director at Learnings & Entertainments, a learning content provider made up of comedians and entertainers with a focus on corporate risk. www.LearningsEntertainments.com