Creating a prototype

To keep our idea simple, and most important, achievable, we decided that we want to print stickers we can put on trashcans that grab the attention and make people (especially children) throw their trash in it. Based on scientific knowledge about using characters in enhancing the good habit of throwing trash in the trashcans, we are now letting a graphic designer design the right characters.

According to S.M. de Droog, M. Buijzen and P.M. Valkenburg (2014), it’s important that the characters are liked, so they will trigger an affective response. Besides that, it doesn’t matter if the character is congruent with the thing you want to achieve. That leaves us with a lot of options for the characters.

Furthermore, we want to design some posters with the characters on it, to increase the exposure to the characters and to increase the awareness. These posters will also have some slogans on it. These slogans will be more effective, if they make the children actively involved. Therefor, they will be written as questions that the characters ask to the children, like for example: “Do you think I would be sad if you throw your trash on the street?”.

In conclusion, we want to design characters that become ambassadors for clean beaches by making people throw their trash in the trashcan. We want to achieve this by using social-marketing techniques that come from scientific literature.

reference:

de Droog, S.M., Buijzen, M., & Valkenburg, P.M. (2014). Enhancing children’s vegetable consumption using vegetable-promoting picture books. The impact of interactive shared reading and character–product congruence. Appetite, 73, 73–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2013.10.018