The Public Health Agency of Canada knew that young Canadian males were among the most likely groups to have stigmatizing or distancing attitudes towards people with HIV/AIDS/ As a result, this segment of the population was identified as a key target audience for a proposed social marketing campaign aimed at reducing stigma and discrimination. But to build the right message, there was a need to identify the key factors underlying the stigmatizing behaviours. It was assumed that homophobia among young men contributed to their general feelings around those with HIV/AIDS. Using focus groups, DECODE probed deeper, revealing a more generalized anxiety due to misinformation about how HIV/AIDS is transmitted. The Public Health Agency of Canada used these insights to develop a series of advertising and marketing themes that spoke directly to this anxiety.

Rogers Communications recently hired DECODE to design an employment engagement strategy for their Customer Care employees, and to help leaders at Rogers to understand this group of young people better—their needs, their influencers and their motivators—by collaborating with them to improve service levels. For this project, DECODE deployed our Innovation Engine which generated thousands of ideas and, ultimately, a well defined strategy for implementation that has been created with and for young employees. Throughout this project DECODE collaborated with Rogers’ senior executives, across multiple lines of business, in order to ensure that the strategy developed was one that would meet their needs, the demands from the overall business while ensuring this investment in strategy-design produced positive results.