Behaviour Change Strategy

Turning safe driving into an automatic habit

Road-safety campaigns often assume people make conscious, rational decisions behind the wheel. The evidence suggests otherwise.

We developed the strategic platform for a campaign encouraging Tasmanian drivers to drive to the conditions — adapting their behaviour to the weather, traffic and road environment, rather than simply observing the posted speed limit.

The behavioural problem

The challenge was not a lack of knowledge. Most drivers already know they should slow down in poor conditions.

The real problem is that driving is largely automatic. Habits take over, confidence becomes inflated, convenience wins, and people convince themselves that the risk applies to someone else.

The strategic insight

Rather than relying on statistics or fear, we looked at the behavioural science of habit formation and memory.

Our insight came from the rhyme-as-reason effect: the tendency for rhyming and alliteration statements to feel more truthful, memorable and persuasive than equivalent non-rhyming statements.

Proverbs survive because they compress complicated ideas into language people can remember without trying. That makes rhyme particularly useful when a message needs to surface quickly, under pressure, and in the middle of an ingrained behaviour.

Strategic Platform

Say the RHYME
EVERY TIME.

The idea

The objective was not merely to produce another road-safety campaign. It was to create a cultural cue: a simple, consistent and repeatable phrase that could appear wherever people drive.

Repeated across communications, shared experiences and everyday conversation, the phrase could become part of the social landscape - surfacing at exactly the moment a driver needed it.

Not making the message louder. Making the right behaviour easier to remember.