Today's episode explains COM_B the behaviour change framework for busy communication and marketing professionals.

Designed for busy pro's to get started in behavioural science and use this tool to define and understand the behaviour they are tackling. 

Don't let the idea of using theory or behavioural science in your campaign planning stop you.

Using COM_B will illuminate the stages of your campaign planning and help ensure you don't go down the wrong road. Instead, go down your audience's road.

Don't simply step into their shoes - but look at the behaviour through their eyes. Only then will your content truly influence and activate change. 

Further Resources:
Email bootcamp@socialinsightmarketing.co.uk for your free interactive worksheet. 

ONE:  Systems Thinking is a fundamental term coined by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman who through is research established there are dual processes within the brain that function together. He published a ground-breaking book called Thinking Fast & Slow in 2011 which quickly entered the New York Times bestsellers list. He called  them System 1 and System 2 

TWO: System 1 also known as the homer brain (yes as in Homer Simpson) or the hare (yes the one from the tortoise & hare analogy) it is fast, automatic, dominant, developed over evolutionary to keep you safe. Making thousands of decisions a day on your behalf.

THREE: System 2. Aka Spock (yes the one from Star Trek) is slow, methodical, concentrates and is pretty lazy. 

FOUR: It’s important to understand that these processes work together and we should value both systems – although system 1. Challenge can be when using the right one. 

 FIVE: This Heuristics or biases or rules of thumb all mean the same thing. They are shortcuts that sit in our System 1 brain.  They have evolved with the human race, designed to keep us alive they make tens of thousands of decisions on our behalf – subconsciously  - every day. They pick up on the cues, the triggers, the fears within our environments and assign actions. They have been very popular in marketing and advertising for some time, for example anchoring the price or product, using scarcity or a sale to drive sales tapping into our emotions with powerful sensory tactics and using social norms to influence change. 

Why do I care as a communicator?

 Well because Spock is lazy and he doesn’t want to be used very often so if your work is confusing or unclear at any level Spock will kick in….and did I mention we’re lazy…. It is by no accident that advertising giants such as Ogilvy have been tapping into our emotions to prime us to associate that brand with emotions. 

In Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp Live & OnDemand we go deep into the world of behavioural biases to skill up on how we can use them inhouse to brief agencies, set strategy, develop copy and frame insight development. To ultimately understand our audience so we can communicate change, influence behaviour and increase impact.

Further reading: 

Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman 

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Cast your mind back to January 2021. When I do that, I just can't get the Simon and Garfunkel song, Hazy Shade of Winter out of my head. And that's because I'm now associating it with Time. In the sense that in January 2021, we were still in the middle of the pandemic, and of course, behaviour change and behavioural science and the demand for behaviour change marketing based campaigns was at its height.

 And so we ran a survey called “Help. I am not a behavioural scientist, get me out of here" across public sector, comms NHS, local government fire police, and we asked what are your biggest challenges and how confident are you feeling in delivering communications based messaging using behavioural science.

The overwhelming theme that came back was time.

Everyone was saying they just had no time to actually do it, whether to learn it, or whether to apply it to the standards that they wanted. 

Time just was the biggest  B.S. barrier. 

To really respond to the survey we've now running…drumroll please. We're launching The busy communicators guide to behavioural science. So this is going to be some core worksheets that will be made available to you for your CPD for free. And excitingly, we're going to lead with audio learning, it's a really popular style of learning. 

3:18  

Okay, so welcome to the busy communicators guide to Prospect Theory. 

We're going to do a very short overview on this. Clearly, we can't fit everything in. And what I've done is I've taken out the most salient points that I feel are most useful for us in our profession. 

But I will put in the shownotes, lots of links to more detailed conversations and more detailed reading for you.  But I just want to highlight that I don't think there's going to be anything in here that you don't already know. But I think the penny will drop as to why those things happen. As a communicator, you already know that things really need to be really salient, we need to break through the noise. And so Prospect Theory is just a little bit about the science as to why. And it's really good because if you're ever tempted or away from these gut feelings you've got, I'd say, as a marketer, stick with the gut, and there's some science behind it. So hopefully do prepare for some penny drop moments as we go through. 

And I like to start now with taking your mind back 300 years. So if this was a history book, we'd have a big chapter title -  the end of the rational era, 300 years of rule, and a heralded mathematician called Daniel Bernoulli a Swiss genius. He espouses a theory called Utility Theory to understand how humans make decisions based on risk. Little do you know, standing in this beautiful Swiss court in 1738, that this theory would come to dominate The Western world of economics for over 300 years. So to reduce years of complex research and modelling down to one sentence, basically, the utility theory was that we, as in humans, you and me, will make decisions primarily to avoid loss. And these decisions would be useful or have utility. So they would be in our best interests, aka rational. 

So now, just close your eyes for a moment and imagine the BBC news readers from the 1950s. You can hear this premise in action, the driving force behind the tone behind the delivery of the news, you know, it was very much I'm sharing with you some information with the expectation that you will take it seriously and apply it sensibly. There definitely was the sense of here's the information now make a very sensible, rational decision. 

So let's jump forward to the 1970s. And not only is the first female prime minister being elected, the Walkman has taken the world by storm. And interestingly, in 1979, the UK public sector workers were on strike, they were demanding a 60 pound a week minimum wage and the 35 hour workweek. So whilst all that's going on a revolutionary new economic theory has arrived, that basically ends this 300 year rule of the rational. 

This theory is called Prospect Theory. And it is the work of two geniuses, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague, Amos Tversky.

7:13  

It signalled a huge paradigm shift that has continued to grow in strength to this day. And essentially, I like to call it the beating heart of behavioural science. And again, to really drill down years of complex research (they continued working on this until 1992) so literally years and years, decades of work into one sentence, it basically says that we are irrational. And we don't always make the best decision in favour of utility. 

So it sounds obvious, right? Yeah. How is this revolutionary? 

What's really important is it really truly was, this is a huge paradigm shift. And if we take a moment just to pause, and reflect on that, and if you think about your work, and the amount of requests that come in for you to sprinkle your fairy dust of magic, am I say that because I know it's cringe worthy. And I know it's so hated in the comms world, but if you think about all the incoming requests, there is so often this rational assumption that comes with them that please share this information. Yes, make it fun and lively. But please share this information with the expectation that the audience will hear it and do what is expected. 

So yes, it's a huge paradigm shift. But it's still a baby, we've gone through 300 years to 1979. I am older than this theory, I was born in 1975. So not by much, but still in the terms of science looking at it is it's a young theory, and it's still growing and evolving today, which is why behavioural science is just exploding. The research industry is just is huge. And it's growing a lot. So this is a cornerstone theory, which you can if you learn and understand you can be really confident in applying. 

So of course, it is slightly more complex than that one sentence and I'm going to share with you three concepts that break it down quite nicely. 

Certainty – offer a guarantee

Your audience wants certainty of avoidance of loss. And your audience will take greater risks to achieve that. You're thinking, you know, the more people lose, the more people are likely to actually take greater risks to avoid the loss because they've got nothing left to lose. And if we think about the national smoking campaigns been for well over a decade, I know I worked on them for 15 years, I think, and we've talked about it before. But one absolute genius move that they started and is probably familiar to everyone is that they do say that you're much more likely to quit using the service, and they even have a number. So is it 2.5. But anyway, they have a guarantee, they say you are much more likely to achieve your goal. And this is really important, especially when you're asking someone to lose so much when you quit smoking.

Okay. A nice fun example -  think about it in terms of products, when you're buying a TV, you know, they might say yes, we guarantee you can watch endless streaming of Netflix on our TV, absolutely wonderful cinema surround sound. And if you don't bring it back, no questions asked, okay, this is great, you might spend my money if I don't like it, there's no loss here. And this is really closely linked as well to the endowment effect, which we will come on to in a later episode, which just talks about the importance of getting people to try and use your information. 

The second is isolation effect. – We focus on differences more than we do similarities

12:08  

No surprises to anyone here that salience is essential. Prospect Theory explains that we as humans focus on differences more than we do similarities. 

Think of the matrix and the girl in the red dress, very salient, very obvious, and everyone goes and looks, but you know that already – you know that to break through the noise, you need to be as salient as possible. 

So for me as a marketer, I like this, because it brings out the role of the other elements of communication. So it brings out the role of the actual product of design of packaging, and all these other intrinsic paths that actually will take go a long way to reaching your goal. 

Loss looms larger than gains (2.5x larger)

So the other one is loss aversion. Loss Aversion looms larger than gains, our fear of loss is at least two and a half times greater than our joy of the game. 

It is applied in varying degrees, but it does remain consistent across everyone as we have a psychological response to loss. It's human nature to prevent that pain prevent that hurt. 

Importantly  the research pointed out something called a reference point. So a reference point was brand new, it did not exist in Utility Theory. The reference point understands that people will make decisions based on where they are in that moment. And this is why it is essential, because when we working with deprived communities, people without financial safety nets, their reference point is very different to someone else's reference point, who perhaps does have that safety net, which is why segmentation and marketing is absolutely essential. 

So if you think about your work programmes, and your campaigns, think about, well, how different does my audience respond to this loss? Do they perceive a loss? Is my current messaging triggering a loss when it doesn't need to? Am I talking more about gains than losses is human nature to focus on the losses?

They found in the research that we will quite naturally focus on what we're going to lose more than what we'll gain? So is it our job to actually make sure that we're shifting the narrative and making the game the game that bigger shiny a brighter, brighter, brighter, brighter thing to.

Ask yourself, do you understand your audience reference points?

14:57  

In 1995, the American Psychological Association studied the medal winners from the Barcelona Olympics. So they studied those wonderful Olympians who won their gold, silver and bronze medals. And it's a lovely way to illustrate the concept of the reference point. Because they found that silver winners were a lot unhappier than gold, and bronze winners. And that's simply because their reference point was, they were going for gold. So they have lost something. Whereas often in training and expectations, at a bronze medal winners level was actually the bronze was the highest, and perhaps they'd get fourth or fifth place. So they didn't lose. The study was done by the American Psychological Association, in 1995 and is a really nice way to just understand the power of framing and the reference point. 

And ultimately, at the end of the day, these are economic theories. And they're based around probability. But they're really useful for us to have as a deeper understanding of people, especially if we know there's some easy wins, we can make an are copy, and we're focusing in on a loss.

 And you can also easily shift it or I know my audience, I thought I did, but actually I don't, because I don't know what their point of references.

 I don't know what their reaction is to this loss. And actually, it could change your market research and your insight plan. Because you can might think I need to understand what the gains are.

 Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In today’s episode, we welcome Professor Steve Maddern, Director of Public Health, Swindon Borough Council. 

The idea for this episode was for Steve to share how he rose to be Director of Public Health to inspire communications and marketing professionals to believe no senior management level is too high. 

Our main question was “Imagine you are doing your TED Talk on Leadership – what one message would you share with someone who is a couple of steps behind you.”

His advice is well worth a listen and includes:

•  saying yes to opportunities
• informal and formal learning 
• considering the impact of work decisions on your whole life not just your work life.  

But ultimately whatever your dream turning up as your best self and keeping abreast of the knowledge you need to do to be the best at your job.

But our conversations gave us so much more; as Steve discusses how public health and marketing and comms have become much closer bedfellows.

Public Health, like marketing,  is often referred to as an art and a science. 

We discuss how there is so much growing synergy between the disciplines and that ultimately they need to work in sync to make a difference and be effective. 

Steve talks about his experience delivering a community-based activity campaign called the Big Pledge across Wiltshire. A legacy of the Olympics it used micro commitment to reset social norms. Steve highlights that the first year wasn’t very successful but use of data and perseverance resulted in it running for many years to become a phenomenal campaign that created community spirit whilst helping people to begin and keep active

Steve highlights the importance of attitudes when delivering communications and marketing – the willingness to test, review, refresh and adapt where needed. The safe space to explore what is working and what isn’t. The confidence and leadership to have honest conversations around measuring and evaluation. 

After all how realistic is it to think you can get it perfect every time? (Editor’s note: Expectations run perfect campaigns can cause real stress for colleagues!)

Steve’s current COVID campaign is called  It’s Up to all of Us. It is a community-based campaign - a call to action to protect each other and consider the impact of their actions directly or indirectly. This work highlighted the importance of the application of insight and a deep understanding the audience. Swindon has 40 different languages, reaching everyone to help keep them safe was fundamental. 

Steve says

“Behavioural science is more important than ever and I think this has shown the evolving and advancement of public health, it isn’t just a leaflet or a poster telling you what to do it’s about actually taking the insights from the communities and the people you want to influence and using that along with the data and the science to develop the campaign. 

Q: What makes you – your best self?

“Knowing I can make a difference.” "I am in awe of the team I have around me” 

Q: What book would you recommend

Nudge. The goal is to make better lifestyle choices the easy choice. It highlights the role of policy but also translates how behavioural science can be used as a local level. A core text for public health and communications.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness: Amazon.co.uk: Thaler, Richard H., Sunstein, Cass R: 8601404213366: Books

You can connect with Steve via LinkedIn

Today's episode welcomes Claire Holm, Head of Communications and Customer Service at North Devon District Council.

We chat about how loss aversion can be applied to support customer channel shift in local government. In other words, how we can use the science behind loss aversion to nudge people online and free up resources for the most vulnerable. 

We talk about the expectations and feelings of ownership residents have and how reactions can magnify during periods of change. 

We talk about the sheer difficulty of reducing budgets and how once you give someone something and they feel they own it you cannot take it away. 

Claire shares ideas and tangible ideas to use loss aversion, the importance of staying positive and not increasing anxiety

Ultimately to use loss aversion for positive gain. Don’t build messaging around fear.

In today’s episode, we welcome Louise Ward, 

Louise is co-founder of the Behavioural Science Club and she shares the birth of the club following Nudgestock 2020.

We explore how the club brings together practitioners, academics, professionals from a wide range of backgrounds to explore their shared passion and understand why we do what we do.

Books Louise recommends:

·       Alchemy: The surprising power if ideas that don’t make sense – Rory Sutherland

o   The best ideas don’t make rational sense: they make you feel more than they make you think.

·       Ripple: The big effects of small behaviour changes in business – Jez Groom & April Vellacott

o   How to make small behaviour changes that have wide-reaching effects in the real world. 

·       Hype Machine – Sinan Aral   

o   A look at how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous. 

·       The Choice Factory – Richard Shotton

o   Essential read to understand what drives peoples everyday decisions

·       Behavioural Economics – Bri Williams  

o   How to apply Behavioural Economics to improve your business

Behavioural Science Club: Join over 3500 members on LinkedIn. Meet with like-minded souls every Saturday to hear from experts and authors in behavioural science and related fields. 

In today's episode, we chat with the #NHSCommunicate winners.

Edna Boampong, is representing the team from Cheshire & Merseyside Health & Care Partnership Trust whose behaviour change programme increasing vaccine uptake in ethnic and minorities made a significant increase of 5711%.

Edna is now Director of Communications & Engagement, Shropshire, Telford, Wrekin ICS formerly Director of Communications & Engagement,  Cheshire & Merseyside Health & Care Partnership Trust. 

Insights from this episode
Understand your audience. Edna developed a proposal and brought partners and their budget on board to be able to commission this work out.  NHSEI team, Directors of Public Health and Public Health England.

Stage 1: Census data was out of date. A refreshed view was needed. Commissioned a data mining company to get a better, deep understanding of who the audiences are; down to street level.

Stage 2: Quantitative survey in the areas identified. Reached over 632 people in the target audience! Success down to using the new data tool and targeted ads. Data arrived just as the vaccine arrived. Ahead of the curve as aware of which communities were more likely to take the vaccine. BAME audiences are not a homogenous group.  Able to drill down to 8 groups that were most hesitant and focus efforts.  Insights included:  The older you were the more likely you were to take the vaccine.  Worry about catching covid at the vaccine centre itself. No trust in the Government.

Stage 3: The quantitative data tells you the what. The qualitative tells you the why. Ran focus groups and conversations with leaders.  Then able to segment further based on attitude and likelihood to take the vaccine.  key insight: trust in message and channel is key. First, think about the messaging. Second, think about the channels to target the audience with the message.

Microtargeting can mean you duck under the very busy crowded airwaves to cut through the noise.

Created Place Plans to equip the Local Authorities so they can then also amplify the messaging.

Top tip for winter: Follow the data.

Top don't bother: Don't assume.

Book recommendation: Then She Was Gone, Lisa Jewell

Don’t engage too late! How to use social marketing concepts: reward & exchange  

With Social Marketer Luke van der Beeke

This episode explores how to use the core social marketing principles: Exchange & Reward. It also touches on the concept of customer orientation and the behavioural bias hyperbolic discounting.

Luke explains what the concepts are and why they are so powerful.  He ends with a powerful domestic violence case study. 

Definitions:

·       Exchange concept has been around for a long time, in commercial marketing it is a transactional – you exchange money – a marketer is looking to optimise that value for their customers.

·       In social marketing we are looking to is get people to exchange behaviours. More often than not it is swapping out something they quite enjoy for something that is maybe not giving them the same level of gratification e.g. drive safely, smoking, eating healthy.

·       Customer orientation – understanding what you need to do in terms of maximising benefits minimise costs so an individual can take up a new behaviour.

Challenges:

·       Factual based communications are useful but behavioural comms is a different beast altogether.

·       We know through behavioural science people discount long-term benefits …. It informs how we need to go about presenting choices to maximise opportunities (Hyberbolic discounting)

·       Start engagement to understand what the exchange and reward is at problem definition stage! It’s so often late or…..hidden in consultation. 

Tips:

·       Engage to understand intrinsic rewards, the intangibles around the change and what the exchange is through the audience’s eyes. 

·       Stop using long term health messaging. Focus on tangibles and move beyond facts to messaging that  motivates the desired action or attitude 

·       Use the insight to segment and frame communications messaging rather than what ‘we’ think it should be.

 Ultimately the exchange concept is a useful tool to break down benefits and costs as seen by the target audience not how we think! 

BOOKS

Strategic Social Marketing by Jeff French & Professor Ross Gordon

Freaknomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (Luke’s go to for behavioural economics) 

Optimists Tour of Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer “What’s Next?” Mark Stevenson 

Contact & Links

Luke@bcc.org.au

 https://thebcc.org.au/

The National Social Marketing Centre | The NSMC

 
If you would like to know more about how to apply behavioural science and social marketing check out our Autumn Bootcamp. 

Today’s episode is all about CommsCamp 2021 – Still at home!

We are joined three of the great minds behind the scenes Dan Slee, Lucy Salvage and Bridget Aherne.  Not only is CommsCamp free all the organising is on top of the day job.

Key points in this episode

CommsCamp is an Unconference for public sector communicators; the vision is it takes people out of their comfort zone and makes them even more comfortable!

It’s the tea break at a normal conference but stretched out over the whole day.

Key factors:

·       Leave your job title at the door

·       Agenda setting on the day

·       30 second pitching at the day

·       No powerpoint

·       Cake

·       Curry

·       Quizzes

·       Fundraising for the Christie Hospital in Manchester

Pitching 

A good pitch can be on personal well-being or it can be work related; it doesn’t need to be sophisticated just focus on what you feel strongly about. You can share knowledge, solutions as well as a therapy or rant session. 

It’s a safe container to get stuff off your chest. 

And it’s also about problem solving and passing on knowledge.

It’s like a live Facebook Sector Comms Public Headspace session – rather than posting on the Facebook wall we are there live together.

Dates for commscamp still at home 2021

Pre event social – 21st Curry and quiz social (early evening)

Day 1: September 22nd  9:30 – 1pm

Day 2: September 23rd 9:30 – 1pm

Links

Public Sector Comms Headspace

The Christie Foundation https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/commscampstillathome

Recommended Books

Dan’s choice:
 Harold Nicolson 'Letters and Diaries 1939 to 1945'  get it here Amazon and also on ebay second hand, too 

Lucy’s choice:

The Beekeeper of Aleppo: Christy Lefteri get it here on Amazon

Bridget’s choice:

The Manchester Man: Isabella Banks get it here on Amazon

Segmenting Your Audience:  Don’t over-cook then under-cook  with social marketer Professor Alan Tapp

 The second is the three-part series exploring social marketing 

·       Professor Alan Tapp began his career in marketing in commercial direct and database marketing and for the past 15 years has taught and delivered social marketing. He currently teaches at Bristol Business School and supports Local Authorities including Dorset County Council, South Gloucestershire Council.

·       This episode ends with an example of segmentation and cancer self-care. 

·       Segmentation is a key principle in social marketing. (Remember we are not talking about social media!)

·       It is also a huge subject. 

·       Segmentation is a way of grouping or differentiating audiences. You can segment by many factors, age, gender, socio-demographic, psychographic. It is a task that needs data and as this episode reveals it is very different in the public sector

·       Public sector and commercial segmentation are different. 

o   A commercial company will draw on years of internal data sources that are shaping their products, customer experience, and marketing.  For example a club card. 

o   Public sector balances political considerations, committee-style decisions, often with few streams of market research but loads of organisation based data. 

·       Once you have segmented ….then you target. 

·       Let’s be honest segmenting costs time and energy – it’s effortful and intensive so when making decisions consider how you will capture your return on investment.

·       How do you know if you have got your return on investment? That’s right – the ‘e’ word again…evaluation. Segmentation and targeting are different but both imply evaluation….otherwise where are you getting that data from????

Tips: 

• Keep it simple – don’t overcook the data and undercook the delivery. If you have core channels you will be using find out your target levels. There is no point in segmenting when you have one broadcast channel to use! 
• Hover above – look at the whole picture
• Get curious 
• Get some insight work and use it to think and plan

Recommended books

Persuasion in Society Herbert Simons. 2001   

Social Marketing: From Tunes to Symphonies,  Gerald Hastings 2013 

If you would like to learn more about how to apply social marketing and behavioural science into everyday communications & marketing check out our Autumn Bootcamp.

Social marketing is not social media

 Three things you need to know about social marketing

This is the first episode in a 3 part series and to  get started we talk about 3 things you need to know about social marketing: 

1)      Social marketing is not social media! Obvious? Yes. Social marketing uses intervention levers across multiple levers including training, education, public health, legislation. Smoking reduction is considered a successful social marketing approach to behaviour change as it tackles multiple influencers at once across policy as well as the individual. Macro efforts including legislation allowed local authorities to niche with services and marketing and reach those most in need. 

2)      There are three key concepts, segmentation exchange and reward.  Love Your Skin young person campaign is used as an example of how to do this and shift from a population approach to a segment that allowed a deep understanding of young people and understand what would motivate them.

3)      Insight is key, actionable insight will help you focus on measurable behaviour change. This is a huge win. Shifting from policy goals to behavioural goals and securing all your stakeholders is key. Remember if you can't measure it you can't grow it and you may be inadvertently causing a negative impact. 

Never take for granted that our audience will understand our message the way it is intended.

Want to know about Behaviour Change Marketing check out our Autumn Bootcamp 

3 research tips for inhouse communicators

Anneliese Levy Health Communications Specialist

Today’s episode offers two case studies that illustrate how easy it is to reframe impactful content as well as three useful research tips to help them develop their audience insight – with no budget. 

We are joined by Anneliese Levy a health communications specialist that excels in health content research and development. Founder of Thoughtful Content Anneliese is in high demand for her research plus copy skills – a winning formula for anyone tackling health messaging. 

Her clients include national charities such as Blood Cancer UK and global pharmaceutical companies. 

Anneliese shares two examples of how insightful based content can increase impact and three top tips for inhouse communicators on how to do research internally. 

Case study 1: Blood Cancer UK focused on reframing messaging around healthy eating that was turning people off to reshaping it to encourage a new love of food. Avoiding the loss aversion of giving her something else you love when going through cancer treatment. A small but powerful change that can positively help instead of hinder people at the most vulnerable when going through cancer treatment.

Case 2 : Physiotherapy for Older people: Anneliese’s research showed how important our feeling of  ‘being young is’ an interesting insight for anyone planning older person campaign’s. 

Her three tips include:

Tip 1: Speak directly to your audience, explore experiences, perceptions and barriers. Speaks to non-experts as well as your patient experts. Go outside a normal pool of people. Snowball sampling is when you build contacts on contacts often through social media. 

              e.g. Anneliese work on pancreatic cancer researched with older people in East London who knew nothing about pancreatic cancer which is most likely the same knowledge you would have when newly diagnosed. This also opens up opportunities to talk about 

Tip 2: Hang out with your audience indirectly, in social forums etc.

Tip 3: Review existing research –for example Cochrane Review and Google Scholar  don’t be put off by academic papers there are often plain language summaries. It’s time intensive but it’s ££ free. 

Book recommendation Content Design by Sarah Richardson

You can contact Anneliese via www.thoughtfulcontent.co.uk @annieislaurie  - Twitter and @thoughtfulcontent for Instagram

Want to know about Behaviour Change Marketing check out our Autumn Bootcamp 

Our expert guest is Shayoni Lynn, Founder of Lynn PR. Lynn PR is an award-winning full-service strategic communications and behavioural insights agency.

This episode takes a behind the scenes look at her award winning campaign #FreeYourMInd, delivered on behalf of NHS South East London CCG.

The brief was to help raise awareness of, and engagement with, relevant NHS mental health services. To educate and engage vulnerable and seldom-heard audience groups – and help them get to the services they needed during the lockdown. And to deliver at pace.

Three takeaway tips from Shayoni include:

One: Be data driven. Observe action not just intent to act. 

To achieve this the team ran a two-week test phase which  uncovered invaluable insights that saw a 4.5 x improvement in engagement.

Two: Real time monitoring of paid social

Real time monitoring of message saturation and cost per click across paid-for social meant Shayoni and her team could make swift decisions to shift channels as needed. 

Three: Segment 

Segment messaging and paid media buying, then monitor and act. This ensured target audiences including BAME and young people were driven into services. 

Extra Bootcamp Tip

Don’t forget that focussing on the problem or what you don’t want can actually increase unwanted behaviours. This bias known as negative social proof often pops up in mental health marketing as we focus on stigma and challenges rather than solutions.

  Book recommendations

1.     Nudge, Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. Thaler & Sunstein

2.     Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini 

3.     Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely

4.     Thinking Fast & Slow, Daniel Kahneman

5.     Inside the Nudge Unit, David Halpern

6.     Misbehaving, Richard H. Thaler

 Shayoni’s best self is when playing with Lara her dog and this will no doubt be double when her new puppy arrives.

Check out Lynn Pr at Home - Lynn PR

 For everyone interested in how to use behavioural science to max your impact check  out Bootcamp  at www.socialinsightmarketing.co.uk/bootcamp

Our expert guest is Kate Knight, Programme Director, South Central NHS Commissioning Unit. Kate has been delivering public health behaviour change marketing campaigns for over ten years. Our chat today focuses on her time with Smoke Free South West and Public Health Action.  Working on behalf of Public Health Directors scorss the South-West she led a specialist social marketing and behaviour change team to develop regional award winning campaigns whose legacy lives on today.

Campaigns  included: Illegal Tobacco, Smoke Outside, Be There Tomorrow and  outdoor smoke-free areas including play parks. Kate led the work that culminated in Bristol piloting the first outdoor smoke-free areas.

Top three takeaways to support communications planning for No Smoking Day March 2021 

One: Audience insight shaped every campaign: 

·       Understanding why people smoke and not demonising them was key. Kate and her team would not only run focus groups, they would spend time in people’s homes to observe their behaviour.  Bridging the recall gap! 

·       Kate shares her story of watching parents taking a bit of me time downstairs and smoking thinking they were doing the right thing having one out of the window not understanding that the toxins stayed on the furnishings. 

·       This ethnographic approach completely shifted and developed the message from a health harms approach to a behavioural steps approach. 

·       The insight showed awareness of toxins on furnishings was low.

·       The call to action was to walk outside and close the door. A clear direct call to action.  

·       The campaign reduced smoking in  homes across the South-West from 22% to 13% 

·       And there was a cute teddy bear in the advert. 

Two: make the ‘reward’  for the audience clear:

·       Habits are based on a reward, so if you want to influence someone to give something up (think loss aversion) then you need to highlight the rewards from the change. They also need to be bigger, more desirable than the reward they are giving up. 

·       Smoke Outside asked a smoker to walk outside in exchange they could be confident the toxins from their cigarettes were not harming their families. This is a big reward for a small change, it is tangible and immediate. 

Three: Invest time to find a great case study–  use the content to leverage channels and scale:

·       Kirsty was the case study for the whole South West region for the ‘unapologetically emotive’ campaign, Be There Tomorrow. She lived in Torbay and had a teenager daughter; she also had lung disease. Kirsty shared her story so others to inspire and motivate other smokers to reduce and quit.   

·       Kirsty’s story supported thousands of people across the South West. Invest in finding people who want to tell their stories. Good content has a long shelf life and attracts good PR.

·       Advice to focus closer to home means closer to your audience’s social norms. Local-placed based case studies do work, but a truly great story will cross geographical boundaries, meaning you can reach your audience and work with more stakeholders in a multitude of ways. Kirsty resonated in Reading as much as did in Torbay.

Kate and her team  sit within the NHS and so are uniquely positioned to support Local Authorities & NHS especially as we shift to Integrated Care Services to bring partners and voices together to&

Episode 3:
Dedicated to TikTok users, parents of teens and marketing and comms pros working with young people  - this interview with Pete Judodihardjo aka PeteBITs explains why TikTok is like crack cocaine.

Pete ‘s You Tube channel is highly entertaining and really brings behavioural science to life check it out at  PeteBITS

Key takeaways:

1.    TikTok is highly rewarding.  Our brain has a prediction error mechanism which means we can't predict the level of the reward. This makes variable content rewarding...not knowing (like spinning the handle on a one penny slot machine). 

2.   TikTok has no decision points. Tik Tok eliminates friction points which means we will engage more as we literally ‘don’t stop to think’.  E.g. as soon as you launch the app a video starts (TIKTOK decides!)

 3.  TikTok builds an aggressively simple habit.  A habit is a ‘mental shortcut’, a habit is n automatic behaviour. In other words you don’t feel, you  just act.  E.g. coffee in the morning. The habit TikTok is designed to build is the swipe habit... and it is aggressively simple. Swipe anywhere....again and again.... Which means it is a very simple habit to adopt. 

 4.  TikTok combines the reward with the habit.   The desire for the reward - dopamine hits - builds the habit. Simple, easy and with no switch off button.  

5.     Digital wellbeing is an important issue, nudges can break the pattern. 

 To learn about behavioural science check out Pete’s YouTube Channel and Pete BITS

 To learn more about ‘habits’ read Good Habits & Bad Habits by Wendy Wood  https://goodhabitsbadhabits.com/. 

Thanks for listening.

Episode 2.

In today’s episode we meet with Aaron Harverson workplace project manager at Active Devon.  Aaron and I worked together a couple of years ago to develop insight into sedentary behaviour within the workplace.

We used the now infamous sitting calculator which to reveal to our audience their sitting habits. That was step 1. Once awareness was awakened we could apply COM_B designed focus groups to delve deeper into motivations and opportunities for change.

Aaron shares how he felt getting started – brand new to behaviour change marketing – and shares some top tips for anyone else just getting started.

·       Tip 1. Stop yourself rushing in. Remember the reason we speak to people is to understand their issues and help them uncover their solutions. 

·       Tip2. Manage expectations by using the data and evidence. Use your newly found depth of understanding to challenge assumption.

·       Tip3. Lean into it and say yes to the mess! It will feel difficult sometimes – it’s a new way of thinking & that’s okay.

·       Tip 4. – MY FAVOURITE – awareness levels are about the behaviour not the big agenda. 

Aarons books: Who Moved My Cheese and the Chimp Paradox

Aarons workplace webinar – can be found here.

Sitting calculator is here (developed in my past life with Devon CC with superb Rachel H) - here

Hook up with Aaron on Linkedin and Active Devon. https://www.activedevon.org/

Interesting insight:  people feel they need permission in the workplace to move. If you’re at home – you now have so much more flexibility to sit less and move more! 

Enjoy the show

Hello Bootcampers!! In this episode we:

• Say hello!
• Acknowledge the explosion of interest in the application of behavioural science to marketing & communications and how it is now an essential skill.
• Say THANK YOU and send KUDO to all public health, Local Authority, LRF, ALL comms and marketing pros supporting COVID-19 emergency responses.
• Talk about the Triple A (Awareness, Attitude & Ability) cheat sheet! Well it's more a of a teaser!
• Flag the importance of Awareness and stress the importance of asking the right questions around behaviours not societal agendas.
• Introduce the idea of habits.
• Invite listeners to join the LinkedIn Group - Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp

This episode welcomes Dr Taylor Willmott behavioural scientist and thought leader in social marketing. Taylor is a lecturer in marketing at The University of Adelaide and also works with industry and government, climate change, reducing sexual violence, chronic disease, obesity prevention and much more.

This episode is all about why we need to use theory in our behaviour change intervention/campaign  design.

With so many people tackling similar problems we need to be able to share learning openly, transparently and evaluate with confidence – and that means using theory.

Using theory will reduce stress,  build confidence and

Taylor talks us through her recently published TITE process can help us get started and stay the course. TITE stands for:

T – theory selection. I – Iterative schematisation.  T – Test Theory E- explicit reporting

Taylor is very happy to take any questions and connect. You can reach her via Taylor Willmott | Researcher Profiles (adelaide.edu.au)

Book recommendation

Taylors book recommendation: “Think Big: Take small steps and build the future your want”  by Grace Lordan

(I have since read it and am saving it for my teenage son. I wish I had this book when I was starting my career. Deep lightbulb moments alert!)

Guest Resources/useful links

• TITE Process Paper: Willmott, T. J., & Rundle-Thiele, S. (2022). Improving theory use in social marketing: the TITE four-step theory application process. Journal of Social Marketing, 12(2), 222-255. doi: 10.1108/JSOCM-05-2021-0117
• *GEM Database (for theoretical measures): NCI (2019), “Grid-enabled measures database [online]”, National Cancer Institute, available at: www.
• gem-beta.org/public/MeasureList.aspx?cat=2
• *SOBC Database (for theoretical measures): SOBC (2019), “The measures [online]”, Science of Behavior Change, available at: https://org/measures/

3 AHA moments

1) Use theory to design evaluation before you get started. Don’t let theory stop at the insight planning stage include it in your process evaluation as well as outcome evaluation.

2) If we don't use theory to evaluate we will be forever circling the drain! Revisiting the same challenges because we cant confidently share what works and what doesn't. 

3) Process evaluation is important – some of the intervention may work. Some may not. You need to know, so you don’t throw the theory out with the bath water!  Evaluation isn't black or white we need safe spaces to be able to share what doesn't work as well as celebrate what does. 

Today's episode is all about making behavioural science real in the comms office.

Leanne Hughes and Polly Durrant both attended Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp earlier this year. Leanne and Polly kindly came on the podcast to share their experience and share how simple it can be to use behavioural science in-house.

Even though behavioural science is a relatively new skill set it is sometimes seen as ‘hard’ or complicated. But it doesn’t have to be -  you can use it – you don’t need a science background!  It’s also not just marketers with big campaign budgets it’s for all comms including internal, crisis and socials.

Thank you Leanne & Polly for making it real.

Book recommendation

Polly’s choice - Why we resist: The surprising Truths about Behavior Change: A Guidebook for Healthcare Communicators, Advocates and Change Agents - Kathleen Star and Lee Householder

Leanne’s choice  - The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy, Richard Shotton

3 AHA moments

• Meeting people where they are is fundamental – start there. 
• COM_B is a tool that can be used in-house for projects and strategies – not just big campaigns and interventions.
• You have a  much higher chance of success breaking through (information overload) when you use the science.

Come find out for yourself at the next Bootcamp we'd love to meet you

 Today’s episode welcome’s Jude Hackett to take us through the incredible free insight tool – The Empathy Map.

Jude is a behaviour change and social marketing consultant with 18 years of experience in Marketing and Strategic Communications, with specialisms in marketing for social impact, behaviour change and brand. Jude is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM). Basically a total pro!

The Empathy Map is a visualisation tool developed by Dave Gray in 2017 that we can use on our own, or with teams and stakeholders to capture our understanding of our users, patients, and residents. It helps build a shared understanding of our user needs plus aid decision making and shift messaging.

Dave Gray is a leader in the field of creativity. His website Gamestorming is well worth a visit for the wealth of resources he shares. Dave is dedicated to teasing creativity out of everyone by sharing the tools and systems of design thinking.

Book recommendation

The Power of Ignorance: How creative solutions emerge when we admit what we don’t know. Dave Trott, 2021

Guest Resources/useful links

Get your empathy map by visiting the Gamestorming website here. Plus have a look around it’s amazing!

Contact Jude on LinkedIn or email Jude@Creatinggood.co.uk

3 AHA moments

1) How well do you understand your audience? Are you clear what you want people to do? Using the empathy map captures what you know but flags what you don’t!

2) The ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ sexual health research published by Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational is a great example of demonstrating how our understanding of are audiences can completely change when and how we communicate.

3) A clear behaviour change goal is essential. (or value proposition!) Use the map to find yours.

Happy mapping and thank you Jude!

 If you enjoyed this episode please leave a review and share with anyone you know wants to get started and is passionate about making a positive change.

Kickstart your journey into behavioural science

Want to know about how to use behavioural science in your comms & marketing? We love empathy mapping so much we have incorporated it into our Bootcamp training  days on 6th & 8th July and into our Team Training days. Join us to kickstart your skills or book a call with me.

Today’s episode welcome’s Adrian Searle and Steven Carroll from Police Scotland to talk about the incredible award winning ‘Don’t Be That Guy’ campaign.

THAT guy aims to reduce rape, serious sexual assault and harassment by having frank conversations with men about male sexual entitlement. It won the Drum Awards 2022 Public Sector campaign and is nominated for many more.  ‘Don’t be that guy’ went viral with excess of 6 million views of the hero video. The microsite that-guy.co.uk was  viewed excess of 160,000 page views.

Adrian and Steven talk through the process of the campaign from understanding the challenge to the importance of the ‘north star’ aka your behavioural goal or value proposition in execution. They share their tactics and how they shifted the narrative around this incredibly important subject.

They share how they developed the challenge into a strategy and from there the strategy into powerful creative.

The insight and the strength of the value proposition was integral to the success. They highlight how your communications should reflect your values – something we all strive for.

Book recommendation

Stephen recommends – How To Stay Sane: The School of Life by Philippa Perry

Adrian Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhiill

Crime recommendation: Dark Winter – Look into his eyes and prepare to die by David Mark

Guest Resources/useful links

that-guy.co.uk

3 AHA moments

• Understanding the insight was step one and dedicated time to understanding the problems and seeking out the experts, capturing the insight and developing a clear narrative.

• Next step is to take the insight and turn it into a marketing strategy with a guiding north star – the proposition: Sexual violence starts long before you think it does and men have a key role in ending sexual violence by reflecting on their own behaviour and look out for their mates behaviour.

• Use the proposition across all agencies to ensure all content and creative is in sync. Use the strategy to ensure the creative stays objective not subjective.

 Bonus aha….

• Using influencers to create shareable content – this proved to be enormously important as it captured a tone the target audience could relate to and using talented young men built credibility that helped ensure the phenomenal success in sharing the asset.
• Good briefing behind the value proposition so everyone is just as important when recruiting influencers – conversations at the start are crucial so everyone has clear expectations.

Today’s episode is dedicated to career progression, building confidence and motivation. We welcome Carrie-Ann Wade, NHS Director of Communications & Engagement and founder of Cat’s Pajamas where she mentors communication professionals to grow and thrive in their careers.

We talk all things confidence, stepping up as the expert and the importance of clearly demonstrating to stakeholders and senior management the high level of expertise that communications brings to the table.

Carrie-Ann stresses how essential it is to really nail the brief in order to be able to shift from output to outcome.  

“Communicators have the knowledge but need to have confidence to articulate it and join the table.” Carrie-Ann Wade

Career progression

1. Build your network get peer support and mentors.
2. Say Yes to opportunities (within your boundaries!)
3. Invest in yourself! (Can your organisation fund or support this?)

 Carrie-Ann is available for mentoring and also runs a  12-week online THRIVE programme. This is a dedicated safe-space for communication managers and heads of communications to grow and thrive. Where you can have ‘unfiltered conversations’. The next programme starts in September.

 Carrie-Ann and her NHS Team also undertook the one-day Team Training we’re forever grateful for her kind words. It was a fantastic day.

"My team undertook Bootcamp...it was just brilliant for us..when you're embedded in an organisation that has lots going on and you're involved in so many projects sometimes it can be about just getting through the work and not applying the theory and evaluation. It was such a huge reminder about how important that is. I just wanted to say a massive thank you. It was such a brilliant day we all took something from it"

Guest Resources/useful links

Thrive Programme

Bootcamp Team training  

3 AHA moments

• Demonstrate to your senior team how much strategic value communications has played and across your organisation. For example a communications annual report or steal from the world of Social Enterprises with a Impact Report
•  Celebrating success. Keep your feedback. Show your boss. Keep a brag file. Make it a habit! C
•  Set boundaries. Don’t apologise for setting boundaries. Thank people for their patience in emails.

Thank you Carrie-Ann. Cat’s Pajamas everyone! 💡❤️‍🔥

🧠 Limited offer ends June 15 2022

Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp Team training days

Bootcamp team training days are all about your team, and your priorities, they are bespoke days built around behavioural science. Perfect for bringing a team together – at partnership level Integrated Care Service level or your immediate teams.

Book your training day before the 15 June 2022 and get a special bonus one–to–one campaign planning session with Ruth.

These 90-minute sessions (RRP£299) take place after the training day where we go step-by-step through your plans to ensure your application of behavioural science is the best it can be. Aka the cat's pajamas.

This can include the insight, behavioural proposition, channels & content, chosen behavioural framework (usually COM_B or E.A.S.T or both) and stakeholder plan.

Email Ruth directly ruth@socialinsightmarketing.co.uk or book a call to chat through your needs via calendy here -

This episode welcomes award-winning communicators Nicola Bonas, Keri Ross and Amanda Nash.  

Nicola and Keri both work at NHS Devon Clinical Commissioning group soon to be Integrated Care System for Devon. Nicola is the Associate director of communications, involvement and inclusion and Keri Ross is the Senior communications manager.

Amanda is based frontline as Head of communications at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust.

This is a jam-packed episode!

The theme for this show was winter pressures but as you will hear we cover so much more than that including

1: the importance of marketing as a system.

“working as one team with one plan that we all contribute to has been definitely something that we’ve continued to grow and seen massive success from” Nicola Bonas

2:  From the pre-pandemic days. Nicola shares her experience of developing the childhood flu vaccination campaign #thumbsupforcoby. This campaign was based on the tragic death of young Cobi, and driven by his parents.

“it came from a really real place, two parents experience and a community behind them is what led it to be successful” Nicola Bona

3:  Winters here Jon Snow! It’s all year round. For two reasons

• increased demand is all year
• resetting social norms takes all year

 “Winter did used to be a very defined time period with a very defined set of pressures that came with it I think those pressures now run right through the years and they have been for the last few years” Keri Ross

4: Insight is the core to the message development. Insight tips from Keri include good relationships with voluntary sector organisations, community groups and networks to draw down resources and expertise such as the  Academic Health Science Networks.

 “Insight is really the core of everything we then design and develop. We need to understand what peoples experiences are of services and what their understanding of services to really know how to reach them and design something that will connect with them and make a difference.” Keri Ross

5: Case study: Think 111 is a campaign built out from insight. An understanding of the need to reset social norms, make it easy and reach people all year round – when they are not in an emergency situation. The team worked with Healthwatch to run qualitative research sessions to understand their audience and why they had attended the Emergency Department.  Because the team evaluates they know that 78% people had tried another service before attending the Emergency Department.

The constant pressure is keeping up with demand

6:  Understanding people is at the heart of what we do: You can do this by reviewing published work too. Lift and shift!

  “Insight is core to behavioural change, its about understanding the people whose behaviour you are looking to change, understanding what motivates them, what barriers they face and what will drive them and sustain them -  intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  That’s what we’re good at – we always come back to – what do the people that we are trying to influence what are they currently doing and why?”

7: Case study: Reducing Do Not Attends (DNAs) at outpatient appointments

Amanda used the learning from a randomised control study at Barts Hospital (2015) that successfully reduced DNA’s by 3% following some simple word changes in outpatient text message reminders.

Text-based reminders: (messaging not exact)

1.  Control group received a reminder along the lines of “Remember you have your appointment at xxx on xxxx”
2.  Easy-call group received a reminder along the lines of “your appointment is xxx at xxx to cancel or rearrange call”
3.  Social norms group received a reminder along the lines of “we expect to see you at xxx at xxxx date 9 out of 10 people attend.”
4.  Specific costs “we are expecting you to attend xxxx not attending costs the NHS xxx ££ xxxx per missed appointment call if you don’t want to attend”

Plymouth University Hospital achieved their lowest ever rate of DNA’s to new and follow-up appointments. To read more about this study click on this link.

Recommended Books

Nicola’s books:

• European Dictators by Steven Bailey
• Lean in Sheryl Sandberg

Keri’s book:

• This Is Going To Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay

Amanda’s books:

• The Behaviour Change Wheel by Susan Michie
• Social Psychology, by Michael Hogg and Graham Vaughan
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

3 AHA moments

• The NHS pressures are constant all year round. Insight will help ensure messaging is as impactful as possible to support pressures.
•  The team work as a system and draw insight from across organisations and so elevate the standard of their work as they deepen their understanding of the challenge.
•  Shift and lift! Publish your work so others can benefit. You don’t always need to run qualitative research – start with seeing what’s out there and try it. N

Behaviour Change Marketing Team training days

Your team, your priorities, bespoke day built around behavioural science. Perfect for bringing a team together – at partnership level Integrated Care Service level or your immediate teams.

Book your training day before the end of 10 June and get a special bonus – one -to – one campaign planning session with Ruth.

These 90-minute sessions (RRP£299) take place after the training day where we go step-by-step through your plans to ensure your application of behavioural science is the best it can be.

This can include the insight, behavioural proposition, channels & content, chosen behavioural framework (usually COM_B or E.A.S.T or both) and stakeholder plan.

• Grab your free COM_B cheat sheet via our newsletter Brainfuel - it will really help when listening to this episode or email me at bootcamp@socialinsightmarketing.co.uk 
• COM_B introductory podcast episode E21 The busy communicator's guide to COM_B (socialinsightmarketing.co.uk)

This episode welcomes Elina Halonen, behavioural science advisor at Square Peg Insight to talk about her favourite tool for thinking behaviour change framework C.O.M._B

Elina’s experience draws from 20 years market research with 10 years within behavioural science space, she uses COM_B on her projects with public sector and commercial organisations.

Elina highlights the importance of defining the problem and defining the audience and however tempting it is not to skip past this – BEFORE using COM_B.

(This temptation is based on two things – this is the hard part and two pressure to get going and just do something!)

Unless you are as specific as possible and you clarify what you are talking about stakeholders will talk across each other.

When you stay vague you can go in circles.  (We’ve all been there!)

“It’s like building a house on shifting sands.”

It’s also important because without understanding the behaviours you won’t in turn understand the scale of change needed – different behaviours have different scales of change.

Elina also highlighted how “time pressure can lead to thinking errors” so use COM_B as a checklist to support your thinking.

Use COM_B to group data and expand thinking.

 Books & links

•  The Behaviour Change Wheel by Susan Michie
•  The Centre for Theory of Change
• Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change by Amy Bucher

 3 AHA moments

1.  To clarify your thinking. Start with your outcome and work backwards. What set of behaviours is needed to achieve this goal. Then go deep into each behaviour to understand the scale of change.
2. Use COM_B as a thinking tool and group existing data under each heading.
3. Use COM_B as a facilitation tool with experts and partners. Ask ‘have we considered the findings in this bucket’ where do our assumptions fit? How do they fit?

 Connect with Elina via LinkedIn or via her website Behavioural Design | Square Peg Insight

Behaviour Change Marketing Team training days

Your team, your priorities, bespoke day built around behavioural science. Perfect for bringing a team together – at partnership level Integrated Care Service level or your immediate teams.

Book your training day before the end of 10 July and get a special bonus – one -to – one campaign planning session with Ruth.

These 90-minute sessions (RRP£299) take place after the training day where we go step-by-step through your plans to ensure your application of behavioural science is the best it can be.

This can include the insight, behavioural proposition, channels & content, chosen behavioural framework (usually COM_B or E.A.S.T or both) and stakeholder plan.

In this episode, we look at 3 ways you can use behavioural science to help ease NHS pressures.

 ‘Long waits for emergency care, previously only seen in the depths of winter, are now commonplace. In April, more than 24,000 people waited more than 12 hours to be admitted to hospital from A&E – a more than 45-fold increase compared to a year ago.” April 2022, Siva Anandaciva, Chief Analyst at The King’s Fund

Tip one. Don’t talk to your patients

 When we are in a state of emergency behavioural science tells us that our evolutionary survival defaults and social norms will kick in. This is called System 1 and it is where our subconscious will drive our default decisions. And in our society, for so long our default norm, when faced with a medical emergency, has been to contact 999 or go to the Accident & Emergency department.

So the question is - can we reset that social norm?

Can we influence people to reset their automatic choices so that when with they need to make a health service decision they choose the best service for their needs and not automatically A&E?This means we need to communicate with patients outside of health settings  - in other words - not only as patients but as people going about their everyday lives. 

Public Health prevention messaging has always been upstream and now with the emergence of the newly formed Integrated Care Services, there is the opportunity for NHS health messaging to shift beyond the patient and talk to people.

This episode shares two examples 'Help Us Help You' as an NHS prevention campaign and 'Listen to Your Gut' as an example of a more upstream prevention campaign.

Tip two: Remove all uncertainty

The gods of behavioural science are used to illustrate how they reduce uncertainty in their homepage design and copy and I share how when running behavioural deep dives one key insight was people's uncertainty around diagnosing and treating health concerns. 

Tip three: Use social proof to remove uncertainty

When we are uncertain we look around for social proof.  We want to be part of the group and we will look for social proof to guide us in our decision-making and choices.  Fitting in was once essential to our survival and our evolutionary code can still demand that of us.  That’s why social proof, case studies, testimonials and stories are so important. Social proof is closely linked to the 'Band-wagon' effect.

AHA moments 💡🧠

1. Ensure your upstream prevention work is still clearly aligned with strategic goals of easing pressures. 

2. In behavioural science we talk about the barriers a lot - understanding our audience so we can reduce them. In this context - we must understand what is making them uncertain. Why are they hesitating to call 111. Without addressing this head-on all the marketing is pure noise.

3. Plan strategically Integrated Care Services are a unique opportunity for change communications. 

NHS Bootcamp on Wednesday 6th July 

Join as a Team or at  the next Bootcamp to get this stuff nailed! 

Wednesday 6th July - NHS pressures

“A really fun, interactive, and informative day which provided a wealth of information in a short space of time. Well worth making space in your diary for this course."

Sarah, Head of Communications NHS

"A really interesting course for anyone who is either at the start of their comms career, or is looking to build upon their knowledge and practice. Ruth was down to earth, friendly and extremely knowledgeable, without being intimidating." 

Laura, Head of Communications & Engagement, NHS

 "here's my hook - now what is their potential question  - next answer that question"

Today’s episode welcomes Jeremy Moser, an incredible content marketer. He is co-founder & CEO at uSERP, a performance SEO & Digital PR agency. Founded in 2019, Jeremy’s uSERP helps SaaS brands like monday.com, ActiveCampaign, Freshworks, Hotjar, and hundreds more, grow organic traffic and revenue.  

Jeremy has also written a brilliant copywriting course (links below) and is co-founder of a new time-saving SAAS tool called Wordable  - it takes care of a lot of the tedious aspects of content publishing, making it easy to publish things at scale. 

This is a conversation on copywriting fundamentals. It runs on one theme: naturally pushing your readers into going from one line of copy to the next.

Jeremy breaks down the strategies to adopt to make your copy interesting, relevant, and SEO-friendly. 

Book recommendation

High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Guest Resources/useful links

https://jermoser.com

Jeremy's course (I found it of great value) ➡️ https://www.copycourse.io/

A time-saving solution for content (I'm starting to wish we used this) ➡️https://wordable.io/ 

3 AHA moments

• "Read the room" Before writing your copy, make sense of where your audience is at in terms of their knowledge.  
• Do not write from scratch. "Writing from scratch and not taking into account any direct audience/customer conversations is one of the biggest mistakes copywriters make. Because they forget the purpose is writing copy to drive action."  (No we didn't pay him to say this! So essential!)
• Talk to your audience. Get on a call. Record it. Listen back. Use their words. Reflect on their words. Connect with the person behind the screen and drop the jargon. 

This episode welcomes the 👑 queens of communication Leanne Hughes & Rebecca Roberts  to chat about meaningful engagement with young people looks like and how to do it.

We focus on the fabulous Awkward Moments sexual consent campaign in Scotland. This campaign took a behaviour change approach and adopted COM_B to understand what young people needed to help them talk about intimate moments and sexual consent.

Leanne developed the campaign on the commissioning side with NHS Scotland and commissioned Rebecca founder of Thread & Fable to develop and activate the campaign.

Through engaging with young people the ‘Awkward Moment’ came through as a clear theme and trigger moment from which to enter these conversations.

There is so much in this episode – loads of learning points, aha moments and don’t dos! Ever!!

Young people are given the space to inform the campaign at every stage of the process.

Messaging is tested on young people that are not involved in the process!

Evaluation is incredibly focussed across behaviour and campaign tactics.

Channels: (2-week testing)

• Tik Tok replies and ads.
• You Tube preroll ads
• Snapchat
• Spotify ads
• Tested FB stories
• Tested Instgram stories

Professionals' resources are included.

Links

• NHS Awkward Moments
• https://threadandfable.com/
• Engaging Youth Report
• Assembly Style Messaging -  the Tik Tok Rebecca mentions

3 AHA moments

•  Bring young people came in at the agency selection stage to judge the pitches. Commissioners gold!
• Asking a self-selected group if they like your creative is not meaningful engagement and it is not fair. Develop a checklist with clear parameters – ensure your process is clear for everyone knows what and why they. Get as specific as you can. It’s not about asking whether they like something – uplevel your questions – ask for feedback on a specific angle and explain why that matters. Focus!
• Young people are not a homogenous group. Be careful of your assumptions and your stakeholders assumptions around this young people. Ensure you are representative get proactive and get the right and all the voices in the room.

   Don’t do this - tips from the pros

1. Don’t be preachy or create an assembly campaign – check out this tik tok!
2. Don’t talk at young people – talk with them. Talk not tell
3. Never forget accessibility. Don’t rely on ‘in-jokes. Test your creatives and messaging to find out.
4. Don’t forget subtitles are so important they are most likely watching with younger siblings and parents and carers about.
5. Don’t assume all young people have unlimited data – don’t jump to digital.
6. Don’t ask young people (or anyone) to comment on half-drafted plans or creative.
7. Don’t forget to prep and have a clear process for the engagement for the young people. Get specific.
8. Don’t ask do you like it? Ask specific questions and share why that question and their answer is important.
9. Don’t forget to test with young people not involved in the development process.
10. Don’t forget to show you value their time. Pay them.

Top quotes

“The learning was not to give over scripts half created for comment – that’s not fair on young people - they will be polite they won’t be able to say what they really think. What’s unique about our process and campaign is they had the space all the way through and had the ability to speak on every stage” Leanne Hughes

“ young people are not a homogenous group ....you have to go beyond and proactively get the right people in the room...." Rebecca Roberts

Behaviour Change Marketing Team training days

Your team, your priorities, bespoke day built around behavioural science. Perfect for bring a team together – at partnership level Integrated Care Service level or your immediate teams.

Book your call with Ruth

#commshero 2022 19-23 September

This episode offers you practical tips on community building by expert guest and #commshero community builder Asif Choudry.

Asif is marketing and sales director at We Are Resource and has built a global communications network called #commshero.

What started as an online communications conference 8 years ago is now a strong and vibrant community all year round. This year's #commshero conference lasts 5 days and...

• Has over 50 sessions.
• Is available on demand for 12 months.

If you look at the #commshero website you will see the saying - “With great power comes great comms responsibility” and we couldn’t agree more so we were delighted to welcome Asif to talk about how he created the legendary #commshero.

Asif's Quote 

“We are so good at making everyone else look good …that is why we set up the community - to create the safe space for people to actually be positive and shout about the stuff they have done and share that best practice with the community. It shouldn’t take a pandemic to make a CEO to recognise the value”

 Books & links

• #CommsHero Week 2022 – CommsHero 19-23 September 2022
• FuturePRoof (futureproofingcomms.co.uk) by Sarah Waddington Future Proof
• Sustainable Marketing – How To Drive Profits with Purpose by Gemma Butler and Michelle Carvill

3 AHA moments

•  Know why you are building the community and tap into the sense of belonging.
• #commshero is still used as a conversation tool still running after 8 years. Think how long are you planning your community to last?
• Be there – don’t post and disappear. Don't schedule and disappear. Go in with eyes wide open and be there.

See you at #commshero 2022 starts on the 19th September. 

The next Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp is live. The final date for 2022 is November 2nd. The Early-bird is open. Click here for half price training places before they run out.

Want your team to get on the same page around behavioural science? Book a call with Ruth to discuss your needs.  

 Episode 33 kickstarts our 3rd series The Problem Page.

Q. What is the biggest mistake when planning behaviour change marketing?

A. No behaviour change goal.

This episode explores the reasons why we may not start with behaviour change goal and the confusion between a policy goal and a behaviour change goal.

Ruth shares two case studies and how the focus shifted when using behaviour change goals.

We explore how you can stop running more awareness campaigns, and shift from piling knowledge onto people that doesn't lead to action.  How you can get more creative and increase your impact.

 Quote

“Not having a goal is a symptom of not actually knowing what we what our audience to do.” Ruth Dale

  3 AHA moments

• The pressure to deliver often means the insight part is skipped. Skip this at your peril. Without knowing what the desired behaviour is you cannot communicate it!
• By focusing on a goal that is about behaviour, it takes your marketing into new arenas that will unleash your creativity and connect with your audience in new ways.
• Our data sources may keep us focused on the problem – when considering your new behaviour ensure you can measure it. If not, don’t do it!

The next Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp is live. The final date for 2022 is November 2nd. The Early-bird is open.

Click here for half price training places before they run out.

Want your team to get on the same page around behavioural science?

Book a call with Ruth to discuss your needs.

Episode 34

Dear Bootcamp,

Every year we run health campaigns reminding people not to use emergency services for non-emergencies and we also frequently tell them not to miss their appointments as it costs loads of money and appointments are hard to come by. So if they cancel someone else use that appointment.  We are still tackling the same issues a decade later, what else can we do?

Best wishes

ANON

Bootcamp says…..

You are using a messaging strategy called ‘negative social proof’.

What is negative social proof?

Negative social proof is essentially when you use examples of the problem behaviour or your lead in your messaging with the negative message. What you want people to stop doing.

All it does is place the problem at the front of the mind and can go as far as to normalise that behaviour and in turn give permission for others to join the herd and do the very behaviour you don’t want.

Negative social proof explained in 60 seconds

Professor Robert Cialdini, Dr Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin ran a research project at the Arizona Petrified Forest testing what messages would stop the visitors from stealing pieces of petrified wood. They divided the park into three zones and posted two signs with different messages in two of the zones and left the third zone as a control group.

Sign one: Please don’t remove petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest.

Sign two: Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest.

What was the result? Did the messaging impact on behaviour?

Yes!

Sign two tripled the amount stolen! 😲

The lesson?

Tell people what you WANT them to do.

Do not lead with what you do not want them to do.

3 AHA moments

• Do you have a messaging strategy? Do you plan using a messaging strategy. Do you use negative social proof unknowingly?
•  Use negative social proof in your strategy but not alone. It will get attention, shock and drama but will not deliver action and can seriously backfire! 

• Focus on what you want people to do. The desired action. Reduce the noise. 

Links

BAD LUCK, HOT ROCKS (badluckhotrocks.com)

 The next Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp is live. The final date for 2022 is November 2nd. The Early-bird closes 12th October.

Click here for half price training places before they run out.

 Want your team to get on the same page around behavioural science?

Book a call with Ruth to discuss your needs.

Dear Bootcamp,

I have no time!

I have turned into the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland!

 ANON

Bootcamp says…..

Often the first thing we do when we have no time is drop our audience insight work. We need to understand our audience. The world is now too noisy to not lead with insight.

Quote

"Our messaging has got to be based on our insight & time. To do that give it some time. It doesn’t need to be a lot!" Ruth Dale

  3 AHA moments

•  Plan in 'understanding your audience' – safeguard this time. Make it a non-negotiable in your planning. 
• Pull in your stakeholder's learning and expertise during the insight stage.
• Respect your audience’s time. Don't waste their time with messages that are not tested or do not resonate.  

 The final Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp is on the 2nd November - click here

 Want your team to get on the same page around behavioural science?

Book a call with Ruth to discuss your needs.

Today’s episode (36) welcomes Dominic Ridley-Moy a consultant in behaviour change communications with extensive experience in Local Government working closely with the CAN Council, Co-Chair Local Public Services Group, Chartered Institute of Public Relation and the founder of the Behaviour Change Network.  

Dominic shares three predictions for behavioural science in 2023, tells us about his fantastic 5-week course ‘Behaviour Change Masterclass’(starts 19th January 2023) and his chosen book Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.

  2023 predictions from Dominic

1. Understanding the behavioural science frameworks a bit more. Comms pros increasing their understanding of what shifts people’s behaviours. Taking a step back more often to understand what people are not doing, and what the barriers are. Using the COM_B model can help you do this.
2. Behaviour change on its own is not enough. It will buddy up (even more) with lots of different friends including AI and data science. AI is really exciting! One to watch.
3. Climate change! This is the most important area and where we will see the most growth. We (communication professionals) need to get better at helping people take that first step.

 Links

• Behaviour Change Network- Masterclass 5 weeks online course
• COM_B explained
• Tiny Habits, BJFogg

 The next Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp is live. The first Bootcamp for 2023 is on Wednesday 22nd February.  Click here. The Early-bird is open.

Want your team to get on the same page around behavioural science?

Book a call with Ruth to discuss your needs.

In this episode we chat with the King of COM_B Professor Robert West as we discuss his popular behavioural science model --- COM_B --- As one of the original authors alongside Susan Michie and Lou Atkins we explore with Professor West how he feels about the success and popularity of the framework.

We cover the basics

• What is COM-B and how did it come about?
• What are some of the benefits of using behavioural science?

We chat about his current work with the new Welsh Behavioural Science Unit and their joint publication Improving health and wellbeing: A guide to using behavioural science in policy and practice: (Co-Author Ashley Gould) with a focus on:

• What is the egocentric bias and how can it be overcome?
• The NEAR and AFAR framework.

3 AHA moments

• The COM_B framework was inspired by Perry Mason. We didn’t know that when we developed the Murder Mystery COM_B training! (We were inspired by Death in Paradise.)
•  Egocentric bias is where we rely too heavily on our own opinions. We all have it to some degree so when running the COM_B analysis to overcome the egocentric bias always treat your perspective as a hypothesis until and unless you get insight or data from other sources to make you more confident.
• NEAR and AFAR are frameworks to help you design your intervention once you have completed your COM_B analysis. It works with the Behaviour Change Wheel.

Episode Outline

[00:01:07] - Thank you for your support

[00:02:11] - 2022 By the Data

[00:03:07] - 2023 2 Words to live By

[00:06:00] - A dosage of Kindness at the core

[00:08:15] - Introducing guest Robert West

[00:10:06] - Rise of COM-B Model

[00:12:56] - COM-B Model value in other markets and vertices

[00:14:51] - Wales creating a behavior science guide

[00:19:30] - Straight from the principles

[00:23:07] - Breaking down Egocentric bias

[00:25:57] - Energise: The secrets of motivation

[00:28:13] - Treat your Perspective as a Hypothesis

[00:29:13] - The NEAR-AFAR framework

[00:33:57] - Health and Well-being is a shared responsibility

Quotes

“The popularity of COM-B is due to its ability to provide a formal framework for a concept that has long been intuitively understood by many” Professor Robert West

Approximately mentioned @ 00:10:06

  “The COM-B model provides a starting point for understanding behaviour change, allowing you to use the four elements of normal, easy, attractive, and routine to determine the right behaviour change techniques to use in a given context.” Professor Robert West

Approximately mentioned @ 00:29:33

Recommended Book

Tools for Thought, by Waddington (1977)

Guest Resources/useful links

• Improving health and wellbeing: A guide to using behavioural science in policy and practice – https://phwwhocc.co.uk/resources/improving-health-and-wellbeing-a-guide-to-using-behavioural-science-in-policy-and-practice/
• Robert West YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@unlockingbehaviourchange
•  Academic publications here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cU9Sx1IAAAAJ&hl=en
• (2022) Harness your animal brain. Robert West & Jamie West
• (2021) The Secrets of Motivation. Robert West & Jamie West

Subscribe

Our February bootcamp sold out before the end of January. Be the first to hear about the next Bootcamp training by signing up to our weekly podcast email called Brainfuel - it's a mini breakdown of what we covered in the podcast and useful links to events and what's happening in the busy world of behavioural science. 

Subscribe by visiting  www.socialinsightmarketing.co.uk/podcast 

This week's episode is on books. 

We tried to use AI to write the show notes.

It didn't work.

But we did write a blog - or I should say - I -  a human named Ruth - wrote a blog that lists all of the books talked about in today's episodes.

Click here to head over to the full blog. 

Thanks for listening & reading.

In today’s podcast we dive into our top four favourite behavioural science podcasts. 

The recommendations are divided into two sections: Behavioural Science and Applying Behavioural Science to Marketing. Discover how to set your content and marketing to new heights, while also learning key insights from the world's top behavioural scientists. Get ready for your AHA moments today!

Core behavioural science 🧠

- Behavioral Grooves hosts Kurt Nelson, Ph.D., and Tim Houlihan 

-The Behavioral Design Podcast hosted by Aline Holzwarth and Samuel Salzer 

Behavioural science applied to marketing & comms 💞

 -The Brainy Business Podcast hosted by Melina Palmer 

- Choice Hacking hosted by Jen Clinehens 

Links

Behavioral Grooves 

The Behavioral Design Podcast 

Habit Weekly https://www.habitweekly.com/

The Brainy Business podcast 

Choice Hacking 

Timestamps

[01:10] - Recommending 4 Podcast

[01:40] - Our favorite behavioral scientist’s podcast

[01:59] - The Behavioural Grooves Podcast

[04:35] - Habit Weekly Pro

[04:49] - Behavioural Design Podcast

[06:46] - Behavioural Science Applying to Marketing

[06:56] - Brainy Business

[08:39] - Choice Hacking

[11:12] - The Recap

This episode features an interview with Samuel Salzer about building habits. Samuel is a renowned expert on the topic, and he shares his insights on how to effectively change your habits. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to learn more about building habits and how to make lasting change

Quotes from Samuel:

• “The whole idea here is that even if we give people the right information, they might go from knowing something to having the intention to do something. But that's still not enough. People have the best intentions. Doesn't really change the world. What changed the world is what people do.” Samuel Salzer

• “Get comfortable with getting uncomfortably specific” Samuel Salzer

Three Aha Moments

(There are so many it was really hard to pull out three aha moments. Your Brainfuel newsletter has a greater breakdown so if you are not subscribed you’re missing out!)

But if we had to choose our top three insights

• Habits make up almost 50% of our autopilot behaviour! Which makes changing habits especially difficult. Don’t take for granted your audience is aware of the habit you are asking them to change!
• Reward matters when you are forming a habit but not so much when it has shifted into your
• There is no neutral environment. We are always being influenced – intentionally or not. IKEA are a good example of intentional when we know it. Samuel shares a Google work project that increased water consumption 5 x and decreased biscuit consumption by 30%.

Extra one for luck

• Social belonging is the key that can unlock the door to change. There are lots of ways to adopt social proof to increase the desire to belong. FOMO is alive and kicking.

The book that changed Samuel’s life

• Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions and hurtful acts by Carol Tavris, Marsha Mercant et a

Useful links

•  Habit Weekly https://www.habitweekly.com/ & Behavior Design Podcast
•  More on the popcorn study here it’s a blog from Cornell University who ran the study – the claim is that when people have greater portion sizes they overeat. Samuel uses it as an example to explain why – habit of eating popcorn meant people just kept on going – on autopilot despite it being stale. The participants claimed they had eaten a smaller amount. They were unaware.

Chapters

[00:55] - The King of Habits Samual Salzer

[02:52] - Samuel Salzer working at improve

[06:48] - Understanding Habits

[08:00] - Components of Habit

[11:00] - The Role of reward

[13:00] - System 1 and System 2

[15:13] - Engaging with Long-Term Behavioral changes

[15:26] - Breaking down into steps

[19:11] - Duolingo Failing users

[20:30] - Easy or Rewarding

[26:09] - Understanding Motivation

[31:11] - The goal is not to motivate people

[32:20] - Autonomy Buy-In

[33:36] - Creating Intervention

[35:22] - Changing minds with Canvasing

[36:59] - Accessible Science

[39:26] - Dive into the driving forces of behaviors

[42:30] - Habitual Coach Professionals

[45:20] - The One Book

Our guest this week is Jennifer Clinehens, founder of behavioural science based customer experience consultancy Choice Hacking. Choice Hacking is a consultancy, book, podcast and TikTok sensation with millions of views.

In this episode Jennifer explains how to use behavioural science to improve  our customer/patient's experience. Jennifer shares how customer journey mapping can be used to think beyond the nudge and elevate conversations around behavioural science in organisations. She also discusses how behavioural science can be used to strategically navigate the psychological biases that exist in customer journeys.

Jen uses Netflix to demonstrate what she means and includes the cocktail party effect and peak end rule.

Quote from Jen

 “you can't really have a culture where behavioural science is taken seriously without a culture where experimentation is also taken seriously.” Jen Clinehens

No every moment punches at the same weight shouldn’t your marketing budget be doubling down on understanding them” How are people creating memories, the experiences they are creating.” Jen Clinehans

Three aha moments

• The Cocktail party effect is the bias that drives personalisation. It claims that our brains will focus in on the information that is most relevant to them. In other words it will zone in on cues such as your name.
• Netflix shows us the many opportunities to personalise when you plan across the whole customer experience. Have you ever been lured in to a show using this tactics. (I have!)
  • Top 10
  • Because you watched
  • Trending (herding bias also)
• When reviewing or reflecting on an experience people don’t average out the experience they will focus in on the peak and the end. Aka the Peak End rule. Know your peaks and invest accordingly.

The book that changed Jen’s life

 Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences, Nancy Duarte

Useful links

 Check out Jens episodes on the biases here  - https://www.choicehacking.com/podcast/

 Check out Jens customer experience and other online courses here - https://choicehacking.academy/silo-all-courses/

Today's episode is about our yearly survey Help I'm not a behavioural scientist get me out of here!

For the third year we are asking what is working for you and what is not.

We are pondering whether the term behavioural science is one of the blockers to adopting this work and proposing that maybe you do a lot of this work already but just don't know it.

So this years survey is slightly different as we try to chunk down - what exactly is behavioural science - and which part do you actually need to know to get the best results for your project/campaign.

Everyone that completes the survey before the end of March 2023 get sweets! 

Check it out here: https://www.socialinsightmarketing.co.uk/help

This episode welcomes Melina Palmer to talk about her new book "What your employees need and can't tell you". She has also published "What your customer wants and can't tell you."

Melina is an applied behavioural economist with a passion for helping people use behavioural economics aka behavioural science. In the episode we explore the difference between behavioural economics and behavioural science and Melina explains in a fun, engaging way how change is like riding an elephant and what to do when you smell cookies.

Melina runs the global consultancy The Brainy Business, teaches  behavioural economics and hosts the incredible podcast The Brainy Business.

Timestamps

6:25 What is the difference between behavioural economics and behavioural science?

10:10 Change doesn't have to be bad

12:05 How to brace for change at work

14:51 Why reducing the cognitive load is so important

19:17 Deadlines deadlines deadlines

21:34 It's not about the cookies

24:00 How to use behavioural economics to get people to buy in to your idea

Quote from Melina 

"So in your brain, you have that logical conscious writer that has a plan, you know, where you're supposed to go, what you want to do the best way to get there, you're set, however, you are at the mercy of the elephant, which if it wants to, like run in another direction, or just sit down and not do anything, you can't push or pull or logic it to do what you want it to do." Melina Palmer

Three aha moments🧠

One: Cognitive load is everything. Why do we keep on pushing out more and more information on people during stress times? Melina explains the importance of cognitive load and the importance of not tipping into it when you are leading change management.

Two: It's not the change - it's how you communicate it. Melina shares a fantastic example of cookies to illustrate how the way the change is presented is the as - if not more - important that the change itself. (or cookie!)

Three: We are all elephant riders trying to calm our brains! A lovely way to understand system 1 and system 2. Where is your elephant taking you...?

The book that changed Melina's life

A more beautiful question.  The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas by Warren Berger

Useful links

Free chapter:  ➡️ https://thebrainybusiness.com/ruth - use this link to get the first chapter of What your employees need but can't tell you free plus you will find all of Melina's podcast episodes here. They are all worth a listen! 

 Don't forget the next Behaviour Change Marketing  Bootcamp is on the 7th June 2023 and it's currently half price via the Earlybird! 

https://www.socialinsightmarketing.co.uk/bootcamp

Today's episode is for busy communicators and changemakers who have very little time to scope a project and get to know their audience.

You may be firefighting incoming requests, or were simply brought in too late to do the level of audience understanding you would like to. But playing this simple game can really help.

The Who Am I Game

Answer all questions as though you are the person. Have fun with it. Step into their shoes.

Who am I - step inside of their skin. 

Where am I when I perform the behaviour change

When do I do it?

Why do I do it? 

What must I overcome to get it?

Think of a dragon...who or what is your audience's dragon? What barrier stands in their way?

Remember this is about understanding where you fit in their life and having a go at understanding their motivator not your product benefits.

This episode also includes a quick tip: stop talking about behavioural science with your stakeholders. If you are having trouble getting buy-in use the words decisions. I need to understand the decisions people need to influence. Then explore those decisions in the Who Am I? game. 

 To delve deep into behaviour change join likeminded souls at the June Bootcamp. This will be last one until October 2023. The early bird is tweeting away - its a whooping 50% saving. Don't miss out!

This episode explores 'Beat the Street' a behaviour change game that gets people up and moving, connecting and has a little bit of competition thrown in to help motivate people to keep playing. Katherine Knight former Head of Communications for women’s football at the FA and now Director of Intelligent Health shares how this behaviour change game is helping reduce health inequalities whilst also encouraging people to have fun.

Beat the Street has been run in 150+ towns across England and also internationally.

Three Aha Moments

1) Beat the Street works because the focus is on small, everyday changes people can do for themselves. It celebrates and rewards these changes.

2) Beat the Street is a public health consultant’s dream behaviour change intervention because it tackles multiple determinants of health inequalities including moving more and connecting with towns and countryside and it focuses on the most vulnerable and it provides the data!

3) Beat the Street works because it is driven by engagement & behavioural science, the start focuses on bringing people together to plan together to ensure they get it right for their town.

Quote from Katherine

“We're not trying to make them play football or stop lacrosse, we're trying to get them to make those small changes in their environment and own them and feel like and be able to celebrate the fact that change they've done rather than it's been done to them.”

The book that changed Katherine's life

• Utopia for realists: and how we can get there by Roger Bregman

Links

• Beat the Street https://www.intelligenthealth.co.uk/programmes/beat-the-street/

Chapters

2:26 The importance of understanding the audience.
4:28 What is Beat the Street? -.
9:02 How do you make people feel safer in their town?
13:23 How do you engage with communities to get a project started?
16:22 What’s next for Beat the Street?
18:48 One book that has changed Catherine’s life.
21:30 What’s coming up at the Bootcamp.

🧠The June Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp half price early-bird finishes on the 1st May 2023. Click here to grab one of the few spots left.

This episode is an interview Nancy Harut author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing and co-founder and chief creative officer at marketing agency HBT.

 Quote from Nancy

“all of us really are our choice architects, when you think about it, there really is no neutral way to present information, you know, how information is presented, influences how people decide about it. And that's, that's essentially the core of choice architecture, how you present, you know, options or choices, determines or influences, see decisions people make about them.”

Three Aha Moments

1. Nancy highlights how behavioural science tells us people use shortcuts top make decisions and they will follow automatic, instinctive reflective responses. As marketers we need to add this understanding into our strategies and creative executions.
2.  To do this (esp if you have no market research) ask why your audience may not want to do what you need them to do. What will they lose of they don’t do it? What is stopping them. Then look to see which of the behavioural science strategies can help you reframe or overcome this barrier. For example if you need to build trust and people don’t know you then the authority bias is a good start. (Nancy includes 25 principles in her book).
3.  We are all choice architects.  Whether you like it or not how you frame and the words you choose influence people so you may as well be sure you are influencing them positively in the right way. 
4.  

Nancy’s Book

• Influence by Robert B Cialdini

Link to Nancy’s own book – MUST READ

  Using Behavioral Science in Marketing by Nancy Harhut

Chapters

4:19

The importance of behavioural science in marketing.

The barriers and levers in a creative brief.

The best arguments to overcome barriers to do something.

6:25

Three reasons why someone may not want to buy a product.

8:15

The importance of market research and customer testimonials.

11:05

Loss aversion and the endowment effect.

The biggest mistake in health.

13:27

Nancy shares one of her favourite client case studies.

What is Choice Architecture and how does it work?

15:15

How to get a triple digit increase in meeting attendance.

What is choice architecture in messaging, and why it matters.

18:36

One book that changed Nancy's life

Bootcamp News

The next Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp is on the 7th June 2023. The Early bird ends 1st May.

Today's episode explains what behavioural science is in 3 fun ways.

Listen in to understand behavioural science from different perspectives.

This is the question many people want to ask but don't because you feel like you should know.

Enjoy!

It's one thing for you to love behavioural science. To read the books , get some training and get going - but you need to take your team and stakeholders with you.

This weeks episode explains how to do that.

The idea is based on a decades experience selling in to public health as the lone marketer in the team and selling in to the corporate comms team. A double whammy of selling in - selling up and pushing the vision. 

See what you think!

Let us know!

If it peaks your interest the final one-day Bootcamp training until the Autumn is on June 7th 2023.

Come see what you're missing!

In this episode we welcome Advita Patel to the studio. Advita is the founder of Comms Rebel, a consultancy that helps organisations cultivate inclusive cultures through effective communication. She is also an experienced confidence coach and the co-founder of A Leader Like Me and Comms Edged Rebels. Vita shares her journey and discusses her book, "How to Build a Culture of Inclusivity," which focuses on building a culture of inclusivity through effective internal communication for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But that's not all! Advita is also organizing a remarkable event called InnerRebel 2023, an inclusive Manchester-based event dedicated to doing things differently in the world of work. Advita's frustration with attending events that lacked diversity and different perspectives led her to create the Underrepresented Speaker List, which features over 180 names of individuals from diverse backgrounds and experiences. InnerRebel 2023 aims to showcase what a great inclusive event looks like, featuring high-energy speakers and topics that challenge the status quo.

The event boasts an impressive line-up of keynotes, including Thomas Erickson, the author of "Surrounded by Idiots," a book on human behaviuor and communication; Sam McAllister, the ex-Newsnight producer known for bringing controversial figures to TV; and Nisha Katona, the founder of Mowgli restaurants, who will share her inspiring journey of humanizing leadership.

Alongside these keynote sessions, the will be there running a workshop on behavioural science in marketing!

Advita is kindly offering listeners to the show a 20% discount 💪🏿💪🏿🔥🔥

Unleash Your Inner Rebel 2023 takes place on Wednesday 14th June 2023 in Manchester.

Check out the agenda at https://www.commsrebel.com/events/unleash-your-inner-rebel

Use coupon code: RebelRebel20 

Come say hi! 

* disclaimer* written by AI

In this episode, we welcome Phil Barden author of Decoded and Owner & MD of Decode marketing consultancy.

There are exciting developments happening at Decode, a consultancy focused on applying behavioral science to marketing. We talk about how Decode has incorporated AI into their work, specifically in the area of human vision and testing creative artwork.

The AI developed by Decode has been trained using 15,000 hours of human eye tracking video and has achieved an accuracy of nearly 99%, replicating human vision. This AI can analyze videos and static images in minutes, providing insights on areas of interest, legibility of text, reading time, word familiarity, visual complexity, and even memorability.

The book "Decoded" written by Phil, the founder of Decode, is praised for its valuable insights and case studies that apply behavioral science to marketing strategies. 

We chat about how that understanding goals and motivations is crucial in developing effective marketing strategies, and that Decode's approach helps bridge the gap between engagement and application of this knowledge in marketing campaigns.

Timestamp:

Phil’s most memorable marketing moment. (2:36)

Why do you not believe in change? (6:48)

How to link goals and motivations to the value proposition? (9:05)

How to link the value chain. (14:24)

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (16:48)

Creative effectiveness measure at scale fast. (21:38)

Solving a real problem in marketing. (23:31)

Optimising the implementation gap. (28:35)

Why writing in capitals makes it harder to read? (31:40)

Are you an idiot magnet?

Todays episode is a short and sweet one following the excitement of the Unleash Your Inner Rebel conference led by Advita Patel. 

The day was headlined by Thomas Erickson, author & behavioural scientist and Sam McAllister, Broadcaster & soon to be Netflix star with many other incredible speakers. 

It was a day about leading change – it offered a huge amount from both a personal and professional perspective.

 We ran the behavioural science session so folk could get going in this wonderful stuff and get active in making positive change.

 You may tell when listening we were very excited! And sorry I think I mispronounce the name of the Unleash Your Inner Rebel conference is my haste to share the many insights from the day.

Listen in for a dose of inspiration and to challenge your thinking so you can accelerate change.

Quote

“If you cannot communicate you cannot lead!” Thomas Erickson, Author & Behavioural Scientist

3 AHA moments

•  Own your decisions especially those made in moments of change.
• If you think someone is an idiot maybe you need to reflect on your need to right.
• You don’t influence people by being right, you influence people by listening.

Timestamps

 Are you really surrounded by idiots? (1:36)

Leadership is a communication process. (3:08)

The problem with confusing clever words with personality. (5:17)

Own your decisions when things don't go right. (6:53)

Leaving the BBC to write her book. (8:45)

Behavioural Science Workshop. (10:17)

The importance of having a framework. (11:51)

Two fab quotes (14:04)

Links

Unleash your Inner Rebel

Want your team to get on the same page around behavioural science?

Book a call with Ruth to discuss your needs.

Case study - internal comms. 89% increase in actual change

This episode welcomes Josephine Graham.

Josephine is a communications and marketing writer and strategist with a couple of decade’s experience across the private and public sector. Josephine aims to raise the bar of how we communicate with sometimes neglected audiences, such as internally with colleagues, by using behavioural science and testing to achieve measurable results for stakeholders. 

After Bootcamp she applied the theories to her day job with brilliant success.

She saw an 89% increase in actual change!

In this episode we focus in on COM_B and discuss the reality of using behavioural science in the workplace.

Quotes

…it was really satisfying to do something properly, and do something that made a difference. Because, you know, you know, what it's like when you're on that hamster wheel of just churning stuff out, and to actually be able to take the time to step back. And think through, like you say that the journey that people were going on, and, and, you know, what their blockers actually were… Josephine Graham

Three aha moments

1. You can use COM_B as an effective prompt tool as an exercise at your desk. It doesn't need to be overcomplicated. The end result was the tone and messaging within two emails!

2. The upfront time means you have saved so much time for the future. Audience insight has a long shelf life.

3. Josephine had a clear measurable goal … so she can share it …and we can learn from it! Did I mention two emails!

Josephine recommends to just get going - start small, use the skills regularly!

Book

The Inner Rebel came out of Josephine. She highly recommended a journal instead of a book!

Chapters (time-stamp)

• Introductions. (0:01)
• Meeting John Peel and Bootcamp. (2:13)
• The importance of a COM-B. (4:24)
• What are the capabilities people are missing out on? (6:53)
• How did you build the email campaign? (9:07)
• The importance of content. (11:33)
• How much time did you spend on the course? (14:01)
• How to start with behaviour change? (16:21)
• One book that changed her life. (18:45)
• The power of journaling and the importance of memories. (20:15)

Join us at the final Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp of 2023! 🧠

Every training day has been booked out this year.

The last one is 31st October 2023 with two extra bonus masterclasses.

One on Internal Comms and one on Insight Mapping. 

Check out the day here. 💗

Four signs your comms won't shift behaviour

 There are 4 cornerstones or ‘must haves’ to using behavioural science effectively in comms & marketing. If you want to shift from raising awareness to action - to get started - you need to tick four boxes.

Remember behavioural science is of great interest because it helps us understand our audiences. To find the best way to communicate and get max results.

In other words - it is a way to deeply understand our audiences.

And that is the secret sauce.

That is why we love it.

Yes there are loads of biases and loads of frameworks …..

But to get started there are four cornerstone points you need must have clarity on.

 4 signs your comms will add to the noise and not activate action

1. You don’t know the vision. The ultimate why you are doing it.
2. You don’t know who else in delivering or influential in your space.

3. You target everyone.

4. You do not measure your work.

  So to help you find out we developed a fun quiz so you can test yourself.

Take the Impactful Change Quiz

It takes three minutes tops.

It will show you how strong your foundations are and where you need to focus and what behavioural science tools and frameworks can help you do that!

Plus.

You get the Interactive Communicator to Changemaker Dashboard which will talk you through the ‘why’.

Because this stuff will often get skipped to get to fun creative part - design and content. But that will never create sustainable change.

I highly recommend you do them in order as they are like the building blocks to your foundation of success.

Timestamps

 How to get started with Behavioural Science. (1:58)  

You don’t know the vision of your stakeholders. (6:25)    

Know your stakeholders and your audience. (11:26)    

Set a measurable goal. (15:19)

This episode is a Behind the Scenes look at the reality of using behavioural science in the workplace. Alison Trout works with Ruth the host to run behavioural insight deep dives and shares the a behind the scenes look at the framework COM_B.

Quotes

"you have to quite courageous to use this approach...!" Alison Trout

Three aha moments

1. 1. Be prepared to tell people what their real problem is!
   2. Be prepared to get comfortable - uncomfortably
   3. Be prepared to check for unintended consequences

Book

Thinking Fast & Slow, Daniel Kahneman, 2011 

Chapters

    Applying behavioural science in public health. (2:35)   Applying behavioural science in local councils. (7:16)   Using behavioural science in organizational projects. (11:18)   Using behavioural science in marketing campaigns. (16:53)   Applying behavioural science in organizational change management. (22:59)   Using Combi and TDF for behaviour change insights. (29:58)   Applying behavioural science in the workplace. (35:43)

Episode 52 dives deep into uncertainty and how you can use it to write killer messaging - specifically key messages.

We share why uncertainty is a decision killer - not great for behaviour change comms! 

And how you can turn that around.

We talk about the Status Quo Bias and The Curse of Knowledge Bias - two cognitive biases it is worth comms leads being aware of.

AHA moments

1) Your audience would rather not make a decision and revert to the status quo bias than make a wrong one! Check if you are overloading, too many choices, being vague or too technical.

2) You are not the best editor! Sorry! But you need someone who isn't part of the work to check your messaging. This is due to the Curse of Knowledge bias where we - as experts - just can't help forgetting what it was like before we had he knowledge.

3) Check your content is using concrete language. Has your creativity trumped clarity? 

In one-day figure out HOW to use all this knowledge....

Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp takes place on 31st October.

It is one-day where you learn then apply the behavioural science. Bring your work because you will get loads done!

You then get TWO bonus masterclasses after the Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp day.

Why?

Because you will need time to digest the day. But also so you can laser focus in on your speciality. 

Because your get FREE access to ALL MASTERCLASSES for LIFE!

Join us at Bootcamp - doors only open 4 x a year!

www.behaviourchange.marketing/bootcamp

Today's episode explains why Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp training is not a course!

Not because we don't love training.

But because the training is designed to focus on skills development and for busy pros who are short on time.

It accelerates your learning through a dedicated one-day where we can kick-start your application of behavioural science to your work. 

This November we have four weeks follow up for everyone - so that when you get going back at the ranch you can check in with questions that you never thought of in the day.

Plus we're all about stopping the duplication and starting to stand on each others shoulders by sharing our wins and hints and tips!

That's why - once you have been through Bootcamp ALL MASTERCLASSES are then free!

So you can keep learning and growing.

This episode is late out and we missed the early bird - so for any Podcast fans reading this - use the coupon code PODCAST and it will give an extra 25% saving!

Today's episode welcomes Nedra Kline Weinreich, president and founder of Weinreich Communications. Nedra has over 25 years experience delivering social marketing to create positive change on health and social care issues.

 Quote from Nedra

"I would say the the biggest issue that I see in campaigns that are trying to reduce stigma, whether it's around mental health issues, or any other kind of stigmatised issue is you want to avoid the S word, which is stigma.

If you keep talking about how there's a stigma to mental illness, or to getting treatment, and that we need to remove the stigma, what that actually does is reinforce that there's a stigma. We shouldn't be talking about the stigma over and over again."

What is social marketing?

Nedra explains what social marketing is in 60 seconds and how it is different to a traditional behavioural science research approach. 

Social marketing Mental Health Campaign

Nedra shares the campaign "Take Action for Mental Health" a campaign designed to help you check in, learn more, and get support for your own mental health or the mental health of someone you care about. 

3 aha moments 💡

1. Stigma is not the main barrier. Tools to talk are.

2. Talking about stigma normalises stigma. Avoid the 's' word

3. When talking about suicide, don't normalise it as an option instead talk about the hope and help. Hope that it can be stopped. Help - where the services are. Who people can turn too.

Nedra's book recommendation

Made to Stick by Chip &  Dan Heath 

Links

• Take Action for Mental Health - https://takeaction4mh.com/
• Take Action for Mental Health evaluation - https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2101-1.html
• Suicide prevention messaging toolkit -https://www.suicidepreventionmessaging.org/
•  Nedra's website includes free social marketing resources - https://social-marketing.com/

Few seats left! Join us at Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp 

The next Bootcamp training takes place on 31st October 2023. 

➡️Click here to find out more. ⬅️

This episode talks through what habits are and how to write a behavioural statement so you can get clarity on the challenge you are working to solve.

3 AHA moments 💡

Your audience may not be aware of their habits. They are behaviours that take place on autopilot. 

Habits are contextual so by focussing on the trigger and time before the behaviour takes place is key to changing behaviour.

Once formed habits do not need rewards but they will use them when forming. When thinking about your audience's barriers and rewards ask if they are still relevant and if the barrier is now lack of reward.

Subscribe to BrainFuel 🧠

To get the Habit Worksheet join the podcast's sister newsletter 'BrainFuel' 

www.behaviourchange.marketing/subscribe

Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp News ⚡

Final date for 2023 announced 

Wednesday 13th December 2023

This episode explores the murder mystery genre and how thinking like a detective can help you understand your audience - the first step to communicating change.

The three key questions -

1. Do they have the means (to make the change)?

2. What is their motive? 

3. Do they have opportunity!

Anyone near Plymouth, UK on 7 November - come along to our in-person live workshop to find out more! 

Click here for more info

Anyone not online - keep an eye out for our murder mystery meets behavioural science challenge - coming soon!

This week we are joined by Jen Clinehens from Choice Hacking to chat all things social proof!

She is an expert in applying behavioural science to marketing and you can check out Jen's work over at Choice Hacking,

We chat canned laughter, the need to be part of a social group, how Apple took it a new level, why disaster preparedness never happens, The Bear and much more.

Listen to understand how we use social proof to signal our social norms.

Why it's important to think beyond messaging to product details - Jen talks through the classic Apple example.

How social norms can be used to drive action.

Recommended book

"Unreasonable Hospitality - the remarkable power of giving people more than they expect" by Will Guidara 

Check out Jen's work

 https://www.choicehacking.com/

The episode we chat about is Social Proof: The Persuasive Power of Crowds

This episode takes a slightly different approach to our usual style.

To celebrate our behind the scenes working together Rebecca & I interview each other and look back at top tips we would give ourselves and also we look forward to our future events.

The title does give away the unveiling - but as they say the devil is in the detail so for more information go to www.behaviourchange.marketing/FEHE

🐓 Don't miss the Earlybird too!

For more on Rebecca and to listen to her youth focussed podcasts go to https://www.threadandfable.com/podcasts

Summary

• Marketing and education news with Rebecca Roberts. 0:02

•  Teenage years, hobbies, and identity. 1:35

• Marketing careers in higher education and public health. 5:14

• TV shows, including "Stranger Things" and "Selling Sunset". 10:01

•  Self-belief and self-care for working mothers. 12:58

•  Work-life balance and career development for working mothers. 14:33

• University decisions and the impact of cost and pressure on students. 19:20

• Student debt, decision-making, and marketing strategies for higher education. 23:48

• Using behavioural science in higher ed marketing. 28:20

In today's episode we highlight 3 books recommended by 3 of our 2023 podcast guests and an ask for you (see below!)

1) Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me - Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions & Hurtful Acts by Carol Travis & Elliott Aronson 

Recommended by Samuel Salzer from E40 How to build Habits that Stick.

2) A more Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas  by Warren Berger

Recommended by Melina Palmer E43 Applying Behavioural Science to Internal Comms

3) Made to Stick By Chip & Dan Heath

Recommended by Nedra Weinreich E57 Top Mistake When Communicating Mental Health

Perfect for colleagues secret santas or your 2024 reading list.

Do you want to join the Bootcamp BookClub?

We're touting for interest.

Would you enjoy a relaxed, informal bookclub reading the latest behavioural science, marketing & comms books and... coming on the podcast to talk about it (not obligatory!)

We are at the very early stages. 

We all love books, read books, share books - seems bonkers not to talk books too!

Email ruth@behaviourchange.marketing and we'll chat!

Happy 2024!
 

In today's episode we welcome Nathan Monk and Rebecca Roberts as we go deep into Behaviour Change and Further Education and Higher Education. 

Nathan Monk is cofounder of Smile and one of the brains behind Prospectus Plus, the innovative and personalised prospectus solution that is transforming the conversation around digitally tailoring recruitment journeys. We talk about how those shifts in recent years align to wider behaviours when it comes to tech, and why understanding human nature can help advance your campaign strategies. 

Rebecca Roberts is founder of Thread & Fable a youth agency and an expert in Higher Ed & Further Ed marketing. A specialist in youth agency she is a huge advocate for putting the audience at the centre of planning and targeting your audience - knowing where you fit in their lives.

To go deeper into Behaviour Change Marketing and FE&HE join us on 29th February 2024 

www.behaviourchange.marketing/FEHE

This episode deep dives into 8 top tips for effective Smokefree messaging this No Smoking Day - 13th March.

For details check out our blog

Want to do more?

Come to the Smokefree Training Day 2024  - the day after No Smoking Day on 14th March 2024

Early bird is on!

In today's episode we are joined by Stuart King. Stuart founded BeeZee Bodies 17 years ago whilst working in public health. A hugely successful service it supports people all over England. At Public Health England he was senior scientist in the obesity and healthy weight team and he still works closely with Public Health producing and hosting The Real World Behavioural Science podcast with the Public Health & Behavioural Science Network.

We look deeper into an ethnographic video Stuart developed on behalf of the London Borough of Hounslow. The video walks you through a day in the life of Veena a mum so you can see the influencers and patterns that are we are being exposed to every day. Shining a spotlight on the importance of the wider determinants of health.

Three key aha moments

• On a short walk Veena was exposed to fast food advertising 27 times. This is important because when running a healthy weight messaging you need to remember what else people are seeing. 
• Dogs motivate because they are external triggers - they will nudge you into movement. Do you know what other external triggers your audience may have that you can draw attention to?
• Does is the environment your audience is exposed to bombard them with negative triggers? Such as the 'food' options in local shops and are these triggers the norm? If so recognise and celebrate the resilience it takes to overcome them. 

Links

Veena - A Day in the Life - 

Real World of Behavioural Science podcast

Books

The Spirit Level  by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson

Loonshots  by Safi Bahcall

Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed

Japanese Art Of Kaizan

Linchpin by Seth Godin

This week, we dive into a fascinating conversation with Daniel Preece, Public Health practitioner extraordinaire. Daniel sits with the Plymouth City Council and commissions the local Stop Smoking Service. 

We explore insights from our recent Behavioural Insights Deep Dive where we listened to routine and manual workers and why the want to - or don't want to - quit smoking tobacco. 

This episode is packed with actionable insights and real-world examples.

3 Aha Moments:

1. Autonomy is Key:
   Many people who smoke want to feel in control of their quit journey. They prefer an approach that keeps them in the driver’s seat.

2. Vaping is complex:
   Vaping is a hugely complex behaviour and plays many different roles. For some it's a help, for some it's confusing and for others it started them smoking tobacco. Understanding this reality is critical to effective services,

3. Knowledge doesn't matter if the offer is wrong
   We often see a COM-B analysis that highlights the lack of the knowledge of the service and so we may then think - oh we need a communications campaign. But taking a behavioural insights approach means you consider beliefs too. And if the offer is wrong it doesn't matter how much you communicate. The service offer needs to match the needs - then you market it to the audience.

Quote

"Quitting is like walking a tightrope. People need to find their balance and build confidence on their own, with services acting as a safety net beneath them rather than pulling them along." Daniel Preece

Links

Hidden Voices Heard is the home of the popular Behaviour Change Marketing Bootcamp where we run the behavioural insight deep dives - www.hiddenvoicesheard.com