February 11, 2014
On their second visit to Zambia working with MSI to increase youth engagement in reproductive health services, the IDEO.org team sought out the perspective of boys when talking about birth control.
We all know the age-old adage “boys will be boys,” but what about the boys? We focused a great part of our conversations about birth control on girls, but realized that we needed to get the boys perspective too. For a start, we had a group of 11 boys join us for an afternoon focus group. After a short chat, we gathered them around a table with glue, paper, markers, and scissors to… collage! The exercise worked very well, with boys choosing from a list of pre-prepared slogans and messages to craft their own contraceptive posters. Their slogan choices were often rather unexpected and led to rich conversations.
The result? A great collection of birth control advertisements written by teenagers for teenagers with a number of interesting, unexpected learnings.
A few highlights:
• “Go Hard, Play Safe,” was one of the favorite slogans.
• Many boys chose messaging around “a true diva takes control,” meaning they thought women were in charge of their birth control decisions.
• Boys looked for imagery that was aspirational as opposed to discouraging.
• Their interpretation of “boys will be boys, but real men use condoms,” was that they were not ready for condoms yet because they weren’t men yet (the absolute OPPOSITE of what we expected it to communicate!).