Why do tornados still kill people?
Posted on | June 14, 2010 | No Comments
Author:
Jason Voiovich
Ecra Creative Group
Key Points:
1. Early in the morning of June 7, 2010, a series of tornados struck the Toledo area, killing at least seven people and injuring dozens.
2. Tornado forecasting is prone to false positives (a tornado predicted, but failing to materialize), creating a “cry wolf” set of scenarios.
3. In marketing, we call those scenarios “scripts”, and they are a powerful predictor of a behavioral response to a predicted tornado and ca inform public safety messaging.
The scene was both terrifying and sad at the same time.
Photo Credit: Toledo Blade
Last week, a set of powerful storms ripped through the upper Midwest, killing at least seven people in Ohio. Although people had ample warning about the potential severity of the storms, they struck overnight, catching people less aware than they would have been.
But did that matter?
Granted, fewer people were killed and injured in this round of storms than would have been the case 15 to 20 years ago, but one could argue this number still is unacceptably high. We live in an era of much-improved (but not perfect, of course) advance detection systems.
Meteorologists – even the best ones – can misinterpret computer-modeling data. That’s true. But we can, however, predict with startling accuracy the conditions under which a tornado is likely to form within a given storm cell. It’s not perfect, but it is a couple of orders of magnitude more accurate than it was in the 1980s or even the 1990s.
When people say “the predictions were wrong”, what they are really saying is “the conditions did not result in a tornado”. It may seem like I am splitting hairs, but this distinction (confusion?) is at the heart of why these storms still have the power to catch people seemingly “unprepared”.
In essence, what we need to ask is: Why don’t people heed the warnings?
On the surface, this may seem like a science education problem. I can see that. Americans, generally, do not understand science. We don’t understand what a “25% chance of rain” means, for instance. We have trouble with scientific “margin of error”. We want black and white answers – there will be a tornado or there will not be a tornado – but science (in any discipline, not just meteorology) rarely can give us one.
But I think on a deeper level, this is a human behavior problem, and one that we can understand using marketing psychology.
Specifically, I’m going to help us understand the killer tornado problem using something called a script schema.
In marketing circles, we use script schemas to help understand how “life situations” affect interactions with services and products.
For fun, let’s take a look at a simple example: Choosing what to eat for dinner. That choice could be understood many ways, but an important way people decide what to eat is the context (script) under which that decision is made. For example, if you are expecting guests, you may make a different choice than if you were “too tired to cook at home” or if you “just wanted something different to eat”. Marketers use this analysis to see how well their brand performs against these scenarios.
The chart below examines some common scenarios (scripts) and three choices – (1) Eating at home, (2) Davanni’s Pizza and Hoagies, and (3) Olive Garden Restaurant. The scale on the left refers to the perceived appropriateness of the choice to the situation at hand.
John Eighmey, at the University of Minnesota’s department of Communication and Journalism, did similar work with fast food restaurants. It proves an insightful way to examine how people see your brand and how your competitors stack up. From there, you can implement a strategy that addresses those strengths or weaknesses.
But let’s get back to severe weather and our tornado problem.
We can use the same method to plot scenarios alongside different choices. When we do, what may have been a bit murky becomes brilliantly clear: Our reaction is strongly influenced by the accuracy of the most recent prediction experience.
The graph is admittedly an oversimplification, and we could argue that we knew this intuitively, but if that’s true, why don’t we see messaging from public safety authorities consistently change based on the situation? In other words, why wouldn’t news outlets adjust their strategy based, not necessarily on the “weather facts”, but rather on the state of mind of the public?
Perhaps an interesting way to look at it.
A couple of other ideas: First, “Severe Weather Awareness Week” is in early April (a swing and a miss timing-wise, that’s like talking elections in August, no one cares). Second, the trend of “citizen journalists” standing outside during storms to get photos and video is probably the worst incarnation of this otherwise-promising trend. It presents storms and tornados as spectacles to be captured and rewarded with 15 minutes of fame rather than death traps to be avoided.
You could say the answer would be better prediction, but that’s only a long-term solution. In the short term, meteorologists need to get with the script.
Related Links:
Minnesota Severe Weather Awareness Week
Severe weather rakes Midwest; 7 dead
Photo Gallery: Toledo Blade
Comments
Leave a Reply
About
Jason Voiovich
Ecra Creative Group
Phone: 651.209.2778
Principal and co-founder of Ecra Creative Group, a Minneapolis, MN based creative services firm specializing in brand development, reputation process management, naming/trademark, and product launches to drive measurable business results.
