Last Friday we attended the IPAA Writers Forum as guest speakers and had the privilege to hear Bernie Dean, who is the Executive Director of Marketing & Communications at WorkSafe Victoria.  We have for a long time used WorkSafe Victoria  as example of using business storytelling right and it was great to hear first hand from Bernie how Worksafe have strategically used storytelling to influence and persuade.

Years ago when workplace safety was not high on people’s radar,  WorkSafe used negative ‘shock’ advertising to raise awareness to the problem.  That is the power of negative stories.  They raise awareness of a problem.  If you don’t abide by safety procedures, people die.  If we don’t change our strategy, we will become irrelevant.  If we don’t outsource this division, we may go out of business…in essence they create a burning platform. 

However, negative stories can only get you so far.  Those familiar with the workplace adverts over the last couple of years will notice that they have started using positive stories .   One such advertisement is about a boy sitting on the step waiting for his dad to come home, his mother is getting increasingly worried and all the time you are thinking the worstthen his Dad pulls into the drive way and the tag line reads ”The most important reason for making your workplace safe, is not at work at all.”  View the ad on YouTube 

The workplace safety ads often get criticised for their graphic content but again Bernie emphasised that you should not dumb down the message.  He said he learnt this from reading to his two young children.  When he moved from reading Enid Blyton to Treasure Island with them, they were introduced to some rough characters and language.  He thought he needed to ‘tone’ down the language but realised that as soon as you start to do that you start to diminish the impact.  So don’t underestimate your audience.

So the lesson we can learn from Bernie Dean and the success of the WorkSafe advertisements is that you need to understand that negative stories will raise awareness to a problem but will only get you so far.  Introducing positive stories will have more impact on encouraging the change of behaviour you desire.