VOLUNTARY MEDICAL MALE CIRCUMCISION CASE STUDY
VMCC
In 2021, we worked on an advocacy and social mobilisation campaign using health care professionals as crucial influencers in Zimbabwe's Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision programme (VMMC). VMMC was adapted as part of a comprehensive HIV prevention program in 2009. To date, the country has circumcised 1.3 million men however the program still lags in achieving the epidemiological impact in the 15 to 29 years age group that HIV primarily impacts.
01 CHALLENGE
Our task was to help create an enabling marketing environment that would use Health Care Professionals as crucial influencers in communicating the benefits of VMMC to men in Zimbabwe.
This was not easy to do because when we looked at the totality of all the insights, it was clear that men in Zimbabwe don't care about circumcision and its benefits. A challenge the programme called lack of benefit relevance.
So telling men who don't care about circumcision; that it could help them last longer in bed, protect their partner from cervical cancer, or that it's more hygienic for them or be at lower risk of getting HIV wouldn't make a difference because uncircumcised men think all those benefits are accessible even if they don't get circumcised.
02 INSIGHT
Those benefits took a back seat to something else that was factored into their decision-making process. And we found out that the most significant barrier was fear of a painful procedure. But we also realised that these men had gone through far more painful emotional and physical experiences in their lives. That led us to an important discovery.
Zimbabwean men didn't see any benefit in getting circumcised because they didn't need a benefit; they needed a purpose for the pain. They need to believe in a purpose and set of values greater than any pain you could inflict on them physically or mentally.
03 THE OPPORTUNITY
So we saw an opportunity to reboot what being a man is for the modern era, where the term being a man can operate as shorthand for a purpose and set of values that a generation of men is lacking in Zimbabwe, so we coined the creative proposition, VMMC is the good in men. And deployed a communication strategy that used Health Care Professionals to mobilise the uptake of VMMC and communicate its benefits to men.
04 STRATEGIC CHALLENGE
How were we to make VMCC relevant to our target audience? Our objective was to make circumcision mean more than those benefits. We can create a VMMC proposition for the masses by connecting their aspiration (self-worth) with the means (circumcision). And positioning self-worth as being accessible once you face your fears and get circumcised with the procedure being two things: -
1. Physical - snip of the foreskin
2. Mental snip - snip of the fear
05 CREATIVE PROPOSITION
Our creative proposition focused on defining a man.
Ultimately, we landed on the thought that VMMC represents the good in men and growth stays when fear goes.
06 OUTCOME
Our communication tasks ultimately became:
1. To help him care
2. To help him decide
3. To help him share