Why ‘stay home’ worked and ‘stay alert’ didn’t, and why it matters

Here’s a simple seven-word slogan, the centrepiece of an advertising campaign that worked beyond the wildest hopes of its creators:

‘Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.’

It didn’t merely get attention, it dramatically changed people’s behaviour. Across the UK people really did stay at home. The government itself was taken aback by how successful the campaign was.

Why did it work?

It makes logical sense. The slogan begins with an action, ‘Stay home’, followed by the consequences of the action, ‘Protect the NHS’ and ‘Save lives’. That’s a clear narrative structure, even in micro form, and stories are basic, archetypal ways that we understand reality. Stories work.

But there’s a further aspect to the narrative and how it ‘moves’. It starts with your life. It then zooms out to the entire NHS. So this isn’t just about protecting you, it’s about something far bigger. And then there’s a further shift of perspective. By protecting the NHS you will save lives. In other words, the reasons for staying at home are overwhelmingly important.

As for the use of language, it only enhances the messages. Short, sharp sentences express urgency. The alliteration and half-rhyme of ‘stay’ and ‘save’ tie the slogan together.

The slogan works as a piece of writing, as a ‘story’ and as an exhortation.

But there’s one final critically important aspect. It’s easy to act on. The key instruction is placed first. What follows is justification and explanation, but the thing you have to do is right there at the start. Stay home. And why is this easy to act on? Because it’s specific and concrete. We know exactly what to do.

Some weeks later the UK government began, very tentatively, to lift the lockdown. People should no longer just stay at home. So a new slogan was released:

‘Stay alert. Control the virus. Save lives.’

You can imagine how pleased those working on it were. Look how the first word is the same as in the previous slogan! Because this a clever evolution of the previous slogan. And we kept ‘Save lives’ at the end too! Kind of neat, right?

Well yes. But hang on. What does stay alert mean? What does control the virus mean? Not defeating or eradicating it but simply controlling it. How do you control a virus anyway – tell it what to do?

Perhaps people should have been able to understand that what the government was really saying was: Hey, we can’t totally eliminate this virus, not without shutting down our society totally and destroying it in the process, so the best we can do is stop it from getting out of control and spreading absolutely everywhere fast.

Unfortunately the government hadn’t felt able to level with the UK’s population and tell them hard truths before. So it avoided doing so now, and instead hinted at the hard truths. By being creatively unclear. Big mistake.

How does one stay alert? Well, presumably the idea was that we shouldn’t forget to stay two metres away from other people (of course, the government never told us the reasoning behind this advice, one more piece of an insultingly patronising messaging strategy). But it didn’t say that, it said stay alert.

On first encounter you might read ‘stay alert’ as commanding and authoritative, but only until you start thinking about it. As JK Rowling put it, ‘Is Coronavirus sneaking around in a fake moustache and glasses? If we drop our guard, will it slip us a Micky Finn? What the hell is “stay alert” supposed to mean?’

And so the communications strategy began unravelling. As soon as things needed to be more nuanced, the messaging failed. Faced with communicating something honestly complicated, the government’s writers and strategists bottled it.

There are many lessons here. A few are worth engraving on your heart. If you want people to do something, be specific. Don’t focus on wordplay over the actual message. If you have nothing of substance to say, don’t pretend to sound impressive. Being evasive usually backfires. And don’t patronise people. You’ll get found out.