Charlotte Bergmans

A Campaign Proposal Against Binge Drinking

[Academic Project]

– Resistance & Persuasion Project 2024,
Master Business Communication and Digital Media

As part of the Resistance & Persuasion course in my Master’s program in Business Communication and Digital Media, I explored resistance within a specific target audience. My team and I focused on the issue of binge drinking among college students, investigating their motives and sources of resistance through in-depth interviews.

Based on our findings, we developed a campaign aimed at reducing this resistance and promoting healthier behaviors. Our work included an academic paper, with the abstract provided below, as well as a campaign proposal that we presented through a pitch. Both the abstract and campaign proposal are available below.

Disclaimer: Although our course was in English, we found that the Dutch term gezellig captures a concept that cannot be directly translated. With our professor’s approval, we used this term to preserve its cultural and contextual significance.

ABSTRACT
This research was conducted to create a campaign proposal against binge drinking among young adults. In the Netherlands, young adults experience various physical and mental health problems resulting from binge drinking. Five interviews were conducted to get more insights into why young adults binge drink and which resistance strategies they use. The results showed that the main reason why participants binge drink is because it is “gezellig”. The resistance strategies that the participants mostly used were social validation, assertion of confidence / self-assertion, and attitude bolstering, which are all empowering resistance strategies. Based on these results, several persuasion strategies were selected to neutralize resistance, namely reverse psychology, self-persuasion, and humor. This resulted in a video campaign explaining why binge drinking is actually not “gezellig”, by showing situations that may occur when people binge drink that become progressively more serious. The video ends with the recommendation: “Keep it gezellig, met ‘n drankje minder”. The purpose of this campaign is to reduce alcohol consumption by using humor to attract attention to the campaign and reverse psychology and self-persuasion to persuade young adults to change their binge drinking behavior.