Understanding the foundations of risk taking

ACC supports New Zealanders to recover from around 2 million injury claims per year. This costs ACC (and by extension, the nation of New Zealand) billions of dollars annually, on top of the impact of injuries on business productivity and whānau wellbeing.

ACC engaged Verian (formerly Kantar Public) to provide foundational understanding of risk-taking to feed into the creation of a long term communications platform that aims to shift injury risk related attitudes and behaviours.

We developed a multi-stage qualitative and quantitative research programme to explore the conscious and sub conscious behavioural drivers of risk behaviour in Aotearoa. This encompassed 30 paired interview sessions, 8 groups, and a survey of 2,100 respondents. Throughout we worked in close partnership with ACC and their communications agency, developing hypotheses and workshopping insights throughout the process.

This understanding of the behavioural motivators and barriers enabled a segmentation model that could be related to ACC claim data and provided behavioural insights to guide campaign strategy. The work directly led to the ‘If you get hurt who gets harmed?’ proposition and ‘Have a Hmmm’ call to action which are key features of the campaign.

The campaign is proving to be remarkably robust and successful which is testimony to the depth and breadth of the foundational understanding that Verian helped deliver.

This campaign was awarded the Excellence Award for Public Sector Marketing at the 2022 TVNZ NZ Marketing Awards.