“Lock up your bike? Lock up your brain.” That’s the message of a grad student’s guerrilla-marketing campaign about bike helmet safety that caught the eye of population medicine professor Karen Morrison this spring.

“I wanted to promote helmet use among young people,” says Sarah Wilmer, who developed the campaign for a communication and leadership course taught by Morrison this past semester in the master of public health program.

When she returned to Guelph last year from working in the national capital, Wilmer noticed that fewer cyclists here wore helmets. “In Ottawa everybody wears helmets,” says the student, who worked at Health Canada during the last year of her undergrad in international development at the University of Ottawa.

Guelph is not alone. Just over one-third of the more than 11.4 million Canadian cyclists aged 12 and older always wear a proper helmet, according to the 2009 Canadian Community Health Survey. Helmet use is lowest among adolescents aged 12 to 19 (30.6 per cent) and young adults 20 to 34 (30.5 per cent).

Ontario law requires cyclists 18 and younger to wear a helmet.

“A bike helmet can reduce the risk of serious head injury by 85 per cent,” says Wilmer.

For her guerrilla-marketing project, she designed brain-shaped cardboard tags on string loops as well as adhesive strips bearing the slogan: “Lock up your bike? Lock up your brain.” She visited the Guelph Farmers’ Market one Saturday morning and photographed the materials affixed to several bike locks and racks outside the building.

She removed the materials after photographing them. She says a more comprehensive project would involve leaving more materials in place and testing for behavioural changes.

Morrison says the idea fits the guerrilla-marketing mould that she wanted students to explore in the course. “Guerrilla marketing is trying to do low-cost health promotion that’s innovative, grabs attention and is non-traditional,” she says, explaining that public health has adopted this alternative form of marketing.

A project by the Portuguese health ministry replaced drinking straws with clogged straws at fast food restaurants to spread a message about heart disease. Another Canadian bike safety campaign saw cyclists coated with bubble wrap.

Guerrilla marketing was coined in a book of the same name by American ad executive Jay Conrad Levinson. The approach uses low-budget local means to promote messages that are creative, unexpected and interactive, such as street theatre. It relies on media pickup to create “buzz” about a product or an idea.

Other Guelph students developed mock pamphlets, advocacy letters and website links for various campaigns, but Morrison says Wilmer “actually went out into the community and did it.”

Unlike papering cars in a mall parking lot with flyers to tout a product, Wilmer says her approach allows her to spread an evidence-based health message. “I’m selling a behavioural change.”