Anti Smoking ads have been trying to convince smokers to quit for years. Exhausting every possible angle, attempting to shock, scare and guilt smokers out of the habit unsuccessfully.
So could the carrot rather than the stick approach work better? Give smokers a little positive reinforcement? Government campaigns have starting flipping slogans on their head. “Every cigarette is doing you harm” is now “every cigarette you don’t smoke is doing you good.” But it doesn’t tackle the heart of the issue.
Smoking is a craving, an emotional response. So we need to fight fire with fire, give smokers an emotional reward for not smoking. How? With an Instant Win Engine of course.
Instant Win competitions tap into a potent part of our brains that craves instant gratification. Smokers don’t necessarily see the long term benefits of quitting. So instead, why not give them an instant reward?
This is what Unite Campaign did by creating a cigarette eating machine. And this isn’t just a robot that walks around and talks (although that would be really cool too), the machine looks like a vending machine and allows smokers to insert an unused cigarette. When they do, the machine spits out a prize.
The prizes being given out by the cigarette eating machine are far from lavish (bouncy balls, packages of pasta, ect) but the idea still works. People are looking for instant gratification, so without breaking the bank, how do you make people feel good about depositing a cigarette instead of smoking it? Give them something.
So if “Every cigarette you don’t smoke is doing you good”, Instant Win could be the messiah to deliver this good to the world.
