What’s the best way to challenge your target’s ideas and the spin they put on their misdeeds? Choose a high profile event and disrupt it creatively. Step out of the “combative speech box”, and consider alternate modalities, like visuals, song, theatre, and humour to outshine their message.
An Example: Stolen Beauty
In June 2009, a group of women entered the Ahava (which means “love” in Hebrew) cosmetics shop in the Tel Aviv Hilton. Sporting bikinis, they smeared mud across their bodies, scrawling the words “Stolen Beauty” and “No Love in Ahava.” Questions were asked, and a dialogue began. A few weeks later at a “Tel Aviv Beach Party” in New York, another group of women in bikinis conveyed the same messages.
These actions were just the beginning of a multi-pronged international boycott campaign against Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories, an Israeli company located in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The message is in the mud: there is nothing beautiful about occupation. Stolen Beauty used creative disruption to educate consumers, store managers, CEOs, and the general public about Ahava’s illegal practices.
