The challenge​

Use the global travel lockdown in 2020 as a springboard to permanently change behaviours in a global pharmaceutical company and reduce travel for internal meetings, which accounted for 70% of travel spend.​

​

The solution​

Working with our Behavioral Science team, we surveyed the most frequent fliers to understand travel behavior, which helped us to identify our target: for employees to ‘choose travel’ when needed, instead of having international travel as the default setting. ​

Our creative campaign – ‘Where we meet’ – reflected existing and emerging norms around travel, did not demonize travel, and chimed in with the autonomy of the organizational culture. ​

The acronym PAUSE was a reminder of the types of meetings that work well virtually, as well as encouraging people to stop and think about their decision. Badges gave people a way of signaling their travel preferences and senior leader communications gave overt permission for people to choose whether to travel.​

​

The impact​

The campaign ran in 13 countries in 2022 and contributed to a 52% reduction in travel spend that year, compared with 2019.​