Changing a society’s perspective on dementia

The goals of the Samen dementievriendelijk campaign are to make the Dutch public aware of the impact of dementia, to train people to recognize the signs of dementia and to teach them how to help someone with the disease. The emphasis is not on the disease itself, it’s all about a societal change in awareness and mentality. This is not something we can do overnight. It’s even more challenging given that the campaign needs to work on awareness, and at the same time persuade people to do an online training program (conversion). A second challenge is the cultural trend of less and less offline contact. People use their phones all day and evade personal contact; especially with strangers on the street.

For this campaign, we pivoted these challenges into advantages. The marketing perspective was turned to the target audience instead of to patients. By putting dementia and its consequences in the spotlight, we were able to show how insecure, unaware and sometimes unkind society is when it comes to dealing with people in need of help. By holding up a mirror with an uncomfortable reflection to the viewers, they were prompted to ask themselves: ‘Why is no one helping? And what would I do?’ This idea was emphasized by a short and powerful pay-off: ‘Zien is 1... Doen is 2.’ Meaning: ‘Seeing is one thing... Doing something is a second.’ A pay-off that combines awareness and conversion.

The commercial and social media publications were aimed at ‘Seeing’, raising awareness of the disease, showing people how to recognize someone with dementia and how to help. The second part of the social media campaign shifted more towards conversion ('Doing'). The campaign was supported by an offline publicity stunt, in which hundreds of coaches took to the streets with an interactive test to check how dementia friendly the Netherlands actually is. The results of the nationwide test were published in national media.