Every year, there are hurricanes. Every year, there are floods. Every year, there are weather events that disrupt everyday normal life. Every year, someone in this nation will find their community facing hardship. It could be a long-term power outage or impassable roads. It might be difficult to get food, fresh drinking water, or a way to stay warm when the night gets cold. Every year, the CDC tries to educate the public about the best way to deal with these inevitable events.
They’ve just had one of their most successful campaigns ever by urging people to get ready for the unlikeliest event ever.
Bring on the Zombies!
Part of the CDC’s job is to provide hurricane preparedness education to the public. David Daigle had the idea of using a Zombie Attack Preparedness theme to raise interest levels in the group’s regular (and relatively regularly ignored) communications.
It worked. A typical CDC blog posting centered on hurricane preparedness usually gets 1,000 hits. The Zombie post got 40,000 hits in two days. Why was this missive so much more appealing to the CDC’s audience? We think it’s because the agency used one of the tenets of Brand Modeling: Understanding the power of cultural narratives.
The Power of Cultural Narrativeas
If you want to know a people, you need to understand the stories that shape and define that culture’s worldview. Stories are incredibly powerful tools of social engineering. Over time, people have used stories to teach morality, model expected behavior, and inspire greatness in each other. There’s a natural human tendency to look to the stories we’ve been told for guidance about how we should live our own lives.
There are many classic stories. The details might change with time—the name and appearance of a character, the details of a conflict—but the same plots recur time and time again. The CDC selected an oldie but a goodie; the resourceful, prepared hero who is not only brave enough to face down an enemy but prepared to triumph over it.
If you can stretch your imagination in one direction, you can easily see the impending winds and pounding waves as an enemy to face down and defeat. The battle dynamic is built in. Man’s struggle against the elements is a classic interpretation of this tale. The CDC has been flogging this tale for decades.
And then they tried zombies. It may be the most brilliant thing they’ve ever done. Zombies play a large part in the current American cultural mythos. The undead have escaped their traditional haunts of horror movies and creepy novels to be read in the dead of night. Now they’re shambling through video games and populating internet memes. Why has this happened?
The Zombie Mythos
Every story needs a hero. Every story also needs an adversary. There must be someone or something that the hero must fight against in order to triumph. In medieval times, stories would feature heroes facing down dragons and great giants—creatures who symbolized the collective fears of the people of the time; the unknown, the foe too big to be defeated.
Other times we thought we knew our enemies, and our stories reflected that. Cowboys fought Indians, the Allies took on the Nazis, and Rambo punched out all the Russians. Now we don’t name our enemies anymore. Leaders, politicians, and media figures perform linguistic backflips to articulate that we are not fighting a country, a people, or an ideology—it is the extremist element of any group that refuses to abide by the rules of a civilized society. It is not evil we abhor; it is excess. And what could be more over the top than zombies?
Zombies are thus far free from any ideological associations. There’s no pro-zombie movement. No one has deep, meaningful cultural alignments with zombies. You are free to impugn zombies to your heart’s content without fear of offending anyone. They are complication-free enemies—open for obliteration without a flicker of conscience, remorse, or guilt. It’s an opportunity not many people even bother trying to resist.
The CDC’s campaign gives people a chance to cast themselves as the hero in an action movie. If they learn something about hurricane preparedness along the way, the CDC’s mission has been accomplished.
Will you complain when you have batteries in the flashlight and extra prescription medications available when you need them and it’s just a garden variety hurricane and not the end of the world? Probably not … and that’s proof someone at the CDC is using their brrraaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnsss!