Designing a cyber security awareness campaign to change behavior

Retail giant A.S. Watson understands cyber security awareness for its people is an essential ongoing process. The organisation’s Cyber Security department wanted employees to be more cyber aware – now and for the future.

Building on a previous collaboration with Ink Strategy on this topic, ASW wanted people to understand the dangers of existing and new data security threats. Without daily diligence and good habits of behaviour, the organisation could become yet another global victim of cybercrime.

The department asked us to design, build and manage its latest cyber security awareness campaign so the message would stick – and employees adjust their behaviours accordingly.

We worked with ASW’s people to design content focused for different stakeholder groups. We supported office employees to sustain cyber security awareness momentum from the original campaign drive. This addressed five new topics, such as remote working and advanced phishing. We helped stores define cyber challenges and tackle those.

Furthermore we took a sprint approach for rapid design work and to keep everything on track. We combined awesome interventions with visual tools and selected the most relevant type and level of intervention at each stage – to match the need and hold the change.

After clearly defining roles, we held regular multiple-stakeholder meetings with online tools, including a digital dashboard. A flexible and efficient way to gather ideas, co-create new campaign content, check progress on different workstreams and enable fast feedback.

Ink Strategy introduced gamification into the campaign. At the heart of it, we designed personas, or mascots. To embody the change, to make the learning experience more human and to bring the cyber security awareness challenges to life.

We facilitated playful sessions to iteratively design an engagement toolbox with a compelling story to support employee training in cyber awareness. The process included co-creative brainstorming, storyboarding and fast prototyping. This allowed us to design strong mascot characters and other powerful visual awareness assets.

We helped to design an E-learning program, Cyber Game. This was to visually engage the audience and evaluate their learning. 

Animations in each module introduced employees to typical cyber incident situations. When employees gave their response they were given an explanation for the correct answer as part of their learning.

This fresh campaign built on the previous cyber security awareness work Ink Strategy did with ASW from June 2019. We encouraged employees to follow the principles of Pause, Think and Protect in the new campaign messaging.  

This empowered people to play their part. Keeping personal and organisational data safe. Taking precautions around social media. The campaign increased cyber security awareness and has prevented potential cyber attacks. The engaging visual tools make learning fun and interesting. 

Ink Strategy created a toolkit of cyber security awareness assets – digital and physical – for ongoing awareness. The kit includes animations, online games, infographics, GIFs, WhatsApp stickers, posters, banners and branded clothing. ASW used these flexible assets for internal marketing. Furthermore we activated their employees to demonstrate their own creative contribution. Business units took some of our visual design assets and adapted them to create their own unit-focused campaigns.