How we turned high blood pressure into a ‘mystery’ to be solved – fusing popular culture and behavioural science

Following the launch of the NHS ‘Get Your Blood Pressure Checked’ campaign, associate director Emily Rosselli explains how behavioural science and popular culture informed a striking PR approach…

Blood pressure is seen as something fairly mundane. We know it’s important, we know we should be on top of it, but it’s not a particularly ‘sexy’ topic – and it’s not exactly new. And, if there was anything really serious going on, we’d know about it, right? Wrong. The vast majority of high blood pressure cases have no symptoms at all. But the consequences can be deadly.

So, when? Freuds+ was tasked by the? Department of Health and Social Care ?and? NHS England ?with bringing this topic to the forefront of the news agenda, (as part of a multi-agency collaboration including? MullenLowe UK , 23red ,? Multicultural Marketing Consultancy , Wavemaker and MG OMD ), we?needed a strikingly different approach – especially given the unprecedented period of global and political news we find ourselves in.

Armed with the latest prevalence data, which was already in the public domain, it wasn’t going to be enough to simply report on the numbers of people who are undiagnosed – we needed repackage this figure to make it personally relevant to each individual reader/viewer, so they stop in their tracks and take notice.

How? By turning this silent killer into a ‘mystery’ to be solved. There are 4.2 million people undiagnosed with high blood pressure. But their identities are unknown – because in most cases, there are no clues or symptoms of the condition.

Ultimately, we needed to invite our target audience to wonder for themselves?- ‘could I be one of the ‘missing millions’?’

So, dovetailing and extending the ‘TV detective’ theme for MullenLowe UK 's?above-the-line campaign, we developed a striking PR hook using two of the most recognisable formats within popular culture – mugshots and police line-ups.

Celebrity mugshots are firmly embedded in popular culture – it’s hard to forget the infamous post-arrest images of Paris Hilton, Donald Trump and Hugh Grant, to name a few. Meanwhile the motif of a police line-up is similarly recognisable to the public, from album covers to movies, most notably in the iconic Usual Suspects.?

So, informed by behavioural science, we used these two instantly familiar formats to confront our audiences with the fact that, even if they feel healthy, it could be ‘people like them’ who are affected by high blood pressure (i.e. not necessarily the ‘usual suspects’) – and to highlight the jeopardy of not getting it checked. We featured real people in a police line up, including celebrities affected by the condition alongside an NHS pharmacist, before revealing who among these had high blood pressure - through the medium of a ‘mugshot’.

For our wraparound narrative, we leaned heavily into the ‘silent killer’ message - this soundbite was consistently applied everywhere from our press release headline, to interviews with our celebrity supporters. Deceptively simple, this soundbite worked incredibly hard for us – bringing to life the symptomless yet fatal nature of high blood pressure, and perfectly aligning with the police-themed visuals.

And the message truly resonated. Three days after launch, with 124 pieces of coverage and counting, we’ve seen near blanket coverage across the national newspapers, and an incredible 14 pieces of national broadcast coverage - everywhere from Good Morning Britain and BBC Breakfast, to Sky News and Channel 5 News – all running with the ‘silent killer’ angle. Meanwhile, consumer coverage continues to land everywhere from Men’s Health to Stylist.

So, what can we attribute this success to, in the absence of new prevalence data? Like any good whodunnit, the core components were there all along – we just needed to package them up in a way that forced our audiences to look differently at the case.