Most briefs assume the audience doesn't know enough, doesn't care enough, or hasn't seen the right message yet. The campaigns in this guide start from a different diagnosis. The audience already knows. They already want to. The thing stopping them isn't ignorance — it's the cost of being seen doing it. Awkwardness. Guilt. The fear of overstepping. The vague, persistent feeling that this particular behaviour, choice, or identity is somehow not quite right. The brand's job in those cases isn't to inform or persuade. It's to say: permission granted.
Here are five creative tactics from the Change Behaviour Engine that remove the friction standing between an audience and what they already want to do.
- Permission to Stop Hiding
- Permission to Be More Fully Yourself
- Permission to Choose the Unconventional
- Permission to Care About What Gets Suppressed
- Permission to Be Ridiculous
1. Permission to Stop Hiding
Name the behaviour the audience is already doing but pretending not to — and make the pretending unnecessary.
Get Comfortable — Andrex, FCB London, 2024
Everyone knows toileting is a universal bodily function. The problem is that culture still treats it as awkward, shameful, and best left unspoken — which means an entire category of products exists in permanent denial about what it's actually for. Andrex built a platform around the frank acknowledgement of that reality. Executions like First Office Poo turned the near-universal anxiety of public or workplace toileting into a moment of release and recognition, using humour and confidence to make honesty feel easier than avoidance. The campaign didn't reposition the product. It gave an entire nation permission to stop pretending a basic human experience was socially dangerous — and in doing so, gave the brand a cultural role no competitor was willing to claim.
Mucinex's #SuperSickMonday (McCann, 2018) built an integrated campaign around the Monday after the Super Bowl — citing research that 13.8 million Americans planned to call out of work that day — and used the hashtag to own a cultural truth that everyone recognised, but (again) one that no brand had willingly named. The brand made honesty feel easier than denial.
