Emotional data / Kinokuniya needed to give people a reason to read and buy physical books from its stores as, according to the agency, the brand and sector was suffering with declining sales, year after year. As the country’s largest book retailer, if Kinokuniya could get Emiratis reading as a whole, its business would be sure to benefit.
The BookTok hashtag on TikTok has been helping somewhat to revive the UAE’s love for reading, as news platform The National reported. And yet, according to Saatchi & Saatchi, ‘Only 22% of people in the UAE consider themselves to be regular readers of books.’ The Time to Read campaign is a smart example of Kinokuniya inspiring people to want to read more by using data visualisation to evoke a sense of positive guilt. Of the survey’s respondents, 84% named ‘lack of time’ as the number one reason that prevented them from reading, even though they spend an average of eight hours on social media every day. Eduardo Cesar, senior art director at Saatchi & Saatchi ME, told Contagious, ‘This campaign broke that myth and got people back into the store and on Kinokuniya’s website. Even if they don’t give up on social media entirely, we believe the campaign has been eye-opening and even possibly instilled a little bit of guilt and got them thinking - “I could have read so many books this year!”’
A similar strategy of visualising time to change behaviour was used in Ruavieja’s We Have to See More of Each Other campaign, where people were told how much time they will spend together before (statistically) one of them will die. In both campaigns, data is used to guilt people into doing things differently.
Stars aligned / Using famous intelligent people to persuade people to read more was a sound tactic here. The message is that these smart people read books, so you should too. This strategy plays on what psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the authority principle of persuasion, which explains how people follow the lead of credible, knowledgeable experts. By revealing that well-regarded, smart people read a lot of books, Kinokuniya adds an element of credibility to its message.
