Posts filed under ‘behaviour change’
From cash to commitment
Amy Tomkins writes:
Tackling climate change requires collective action. Yet inspiring consumers to change their behaviour is tough. Lack of engagement, lack of understanding and a sense of powerlessness can all prevent people from taking steps to reduce their carbon footprints.
So I was interested in the presentation that Hermione Taylor, founder of The DoNation, gave when she came into the London office recently. Her new sponsorship site seeks to replace cash with action and help people inspire their friends to live more sustainably. By harnessing the social and viral nature of sponsorship, The DoNation encourages people to engage with environmental issues and take action to change their behaviour. As her diagrams above show, this changes the traditional sponsorship model and makes the whole transaction more direct and efficient. To sponsor a friend, you have to commit to at least one of a number of Do-Actions, or carbon-saving pledges, instead of giving money. Actions can be small steps, such as reducing the amount of meat you eat each week, or more significant, such as committing to installing solar panels.
By using friends seeking sponsorship as messengers, The DoNation aims to reach people who know they should do more for the environment, but need a nudge to inspire action. Sponsors have to commit to their action for two months, with the hope that it will become an ingrained habit. Early indicators suggest that some longer term behaviour change has been prompted, but time will tell if Hermione’s vision is realised.
Looking to the future, The DoNation raises an interesting challenge – does the key to environmental behaviour change lie in making it personal? Whether it be supporting a friend; saving money through energy efficiency or improving your immediate living environment, providing a personal connection point seems essential if people are going to reappraise their own behaviour and start to live more sustainable. Governments, companies and third sector organisations need to understand better the personal motivations to being more environmentally aware if they are to help achieve a sustainable global future.
You can visit The DoNation at http://www.thedonation.org.uk/
19 August 2011 at 4:19 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Climbing Mount Everest one stair at a time
Amy Esser writes:
Prompted by recent work with clients on changing behaviours in the area of physical activity, I decided to enrol London office employees in a fitness challenge; to collectively climb the height of Mount Everest in four weeks by climbing the stairs at work.
So, doing the sums, Mount Everest is 29,029 feet high, or 8,848 metres, which equates to 58,070 steps or 3,871 flights of stairs. There are 10 flights of stairs leading up to our office, which means in order to complete the climb in four weeks (20 working days) we need to complete a total of 388 climbs – an average of 19.4 times a day. There are around 40 people in the office on a typical day which means that each individual needs to climb the stairs every other day – but will they? …
So far I am feeling positive – by Day 2 we had already reached the height of Ben Nevis, and if we continue like this we will reach the top of Mount Everest in half the time, although I sense enthusiasm may decline as the days go by.
My theory is that we need to change people’s habits so they fit exercise into their daily routine. Our challenge is about getting people to ditch the elevator for the stairs. And it’s tougher than it should be – our office building has been designed to lure you straight into a lift as you enter whilst the stairs have been hidden behind doors and corridors. One of the first questions I was asked about the challenge was, ‘where are the stairs?’! The actual experience of climbing the stairs is poor and uninspiring. The walls are grey, there are no windows, and our building managers prohibit us from putting up any motivational posters in the stairwells.
What we have been able to do is to encourage people and to communicate the benefits of taking part. One stair climb burns 30 calories, climbing the stairs will tone your legs and bum, and increase your confidence. Having a visual representation of the climb also really helps people engage. We have a log sheet where people sign their names after they have finished a climb, and this act of making your mark gives a sense of achievement and a sense of being part of a group activity.
Personally I’ve found this rewarding: I started a small social movement, and people are thanking me for it, so it seems that some people did want to be prodded to act. And I’ll be interested to see what happens once the challenge is over – will people continue to take the stairs instead of the lift?
From fear to pleasure
Alex Oliver writes:
Looking for better sex? Interested in ways to save money and lose weight? Want to be a better parent and live a long and happy life?
If these questions got your attention, they certainly grabbed mine at the recent Global Social Marketing Conference held in sunny Dublin last week, where Josh Hunt and I spent an intense couple of days presenting our recent behavioural insight work, chatting to academics and practitioners from across the globe, and attending seminars on the latest thinking in social marketing theory.
The conference covered a range of social policy challenges from contraception in African sex workers to breast feeding amongst Texan minority ethnic groups, to reducing extreme racist behaviour in deprived inner city London councils, and a whole bunch of interesting subjects in between. But in amongst the many theoretical debates, one basic but hitherto understated insight was repeatedly reinforced for me. That traditional social marketing theory has relied far too heavily on fear as the lever to challenge behaviour, rather than using pleasure or happiness as a motivator to drive change.
Academic research does show that fear can be a highly effective lever in motivating behaviour change. When it comes to men and drink driving, for example, the more that risk of death is highlighted, and the more grisly the description of death, the more likely the subjects are to report a change in attitudes. And it’s not difficult to think of any number of government campaigns across the globe that have applied the same principle – the famous AIDS campaign of the 1980s, the motorcycle campaign (which I still can’t watch – my husband being the owner of a BMW 850R), and the ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. (The posters for these became fashion statements, opening up the idea of ‘heroin chic’.)
But it’s possible that over-exposure to these many frightening messages over time has de-sensitised us, or worse, made us angry and caused us to reject the moralising messenger? This was the compelling case argued at the conference by Professor Nadine Henley from Edith Cowan University Western Australia.
She proposed an alternative: that social marketers should make their subjects the heroes of the campaigns rather than the villains or victims. So, instead of scaring people with the consequences of diabetes and heart disease, we might celebrate weight loss through game shows like The Biggest Loser. Or we accept that teenagers will have sex and tell them what types of contraception fit best with their lifestyle, however debauched it may be.
In practice, good social marketing campaigns will always use a range of levers and messages. But whether supported by academic research or not, intuitively it makes sense that we need to feel good about ourselves and the world we live in – a lesson that commercial marketers have certainly learnt, but governments perhaps need to think a bit more about.
The green consumer
Josh Hunt writes:
The Futures Company’s recently-launched multimedia report, Greenprint, looks at the UK public’s engagement and behaviour in sustainability. The research, based on both quantitative and qualitative data, shows that while people report relatively high levels of engagement, this does not necessarily translate into changes in everyday behaviour.
Consumers, it appears, have a ‘costs and benefits’ view of sustainable behaviour, in which they assess trade-offs involved. Direct benefits to home and family have most influence, perhaps unsurprisingly, followed by benefits for neighbourhood and social networks. More general benefits, for example to the planet, have the least sway.
Consumers also find it difficult to conceptualise complex issues such as ‘embedded carbon’. There’s little understanding of why eating less meat improves sustainability outcomes, for example. Finally, consumers generally underestimate the benefits of more sustainable behaviour. But when they do change one aspect of their behaviour they tend to find that it leads to other benefits elsewhere in their lives.
The quantitative analysis led to the development of our Greenprint segmentation. The segments are differentiated by the extent to which people feel able to live an environmentally-friendly lifestyle, or are constrained, and the extent to which they are motivated by the idea of an environmentally friendly lifestyle. There are six segments, shown below: two engaged groups (Pioneers and Adopters), two interested but uninvolved groups (Strugglers and Confused) and two unmotivated groups (Sceptics and Passives). It’s also worth noting that – to a significant degree – consumers find sustainability messages confusing, and not sufficiently relevant. But there is considerable scope to change behaviours with the right messages.
The right messages are those that tap into genuine consumer motivations for change, and those that work across segments, rather than assuming that people will be moved by a desire to live more sustainable lives. Thus, encouraging people to pump up their tyres is more likely to be motivating if people are made aware of the potential cost savings as well as the environmental benefits (rather than reducing their carbon footprint). Equally, people are suspicious of the motives of marketers and wary of greenwash, so communications which explain how sustainability can benefit multiple parties can cut through this. Finally, we don’t want to be preached to: messages which provoke thought and encourage re-evaluation are more likely to be seen as relevant rather than those which take a position and assert it, loudly.
The Futures Company’s Greenprint Insight Package (opens pdf) is a paid-for resource which explores UK consumer attitudes to sustainability. It comes on on a USB pen drive. It includes includes multimedia presentation and video resources to help you bring the opportunities and challenges of sustainability to life within your business.
More books… and a film
A couple of late arrivals for our review of favourites from 2008.
J. Walker Smith, Chapel Hill:
Let’s say you develop some idea of what the future is likely to hold. Do you then know what to do about it? That’s the question that University of Chicago law professor and prolific public intellectual Cass Sunstein tackles in his thorough discussion of planning for Worst-Case Scenarios. This has obvious relevance for the most frightful worries of our age like climate change, suitcase nukes, anthrax, avian flu and GMOs. But it is relevant as well to every policy action and business decision. Sunstein critiques the Precautionary Principle and Cost-Benefit Analysis to recommend an alternative that he believes better balances risks and benefits. This book is another must-read from Sunstein for anyone doing strategic analysis or scenario planning.
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wasnick (Bantam Books, 2006) Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, Tom Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008′)
Behavioral economics is all the rage these days, and the bestsellers Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have helped popularize this branch of social psychology. But do we really understand how these classic psychology experiments and even the more recent work in economics apply to real life, particularly to business and marketing? Two recent books make this connection for eating and traffic. Brian Wasnick teaches marketing and nutritional science at Cornell where his lab has done pioneering work deciphering the workings of the
‘mindless margin’ that lies between healthy and unhealthy food choices. Tom Vanderbilt is a science and culture journalist who embedded himself for three years with traffic researchers and engineers to answer questions like ‘why does the other lane always seem faster’ and ‘why are dangerous roads safer’ and ‘why do women cause more congestion than men.’
Larissa Persons, New York:
5×2 is the story of an unhappy marriage told backwards in five parts. It begins with the divorce. And it ends with the couple, Marion and Giles, meeting for the first time. Each of the five ‘chapters’ focuses in on a particular scene from their lives together. We see the couple hosting a dinner party while their young son sleeps. We see the birth of their child. We see their wedding. Each scene peels away another emotional layer and offers another insight into the individuals and their relationship.
Ozon exploits the construct of reverse chronology to the full. So the film is not about what happens – after all we know the end from the beginning – but rather is about why it happened. And by the time you get to the end (of the film) it is clear that the roots of the couple’s demise are there, plain for all to see, right from the start of the romance. You can see the drivers that created the future.
And while the construct turns the viewer into a clinical observer of the dissection of the marriage, the details revealed and the style of the narrative are almost disconcertingly intimate. This serves to ensure that you become intensely involved in the story itself and with the two main characters, rather than simply remaining an innocent bystander. The film therefore manages to be gripping, despite its removal of conventional suspense.
It’s not exactly an enjoyable 90 minutes, but I found 5×2 powerful and memorable. It’s also got an excellent soundtrack, courtesy of Philippe Rombi.
The ‘five gaps’ around behaviour change
Courtesy of DEFRA
Rebecca Nash writes:
Behaviour change is much talked about, but still not well understood, which is why it seemed a good subject for the IIPS – the Institute for Insight in the Public Services, the think tank jointly run by Henley Centre HeadlightVision and BMRB – to take on in its third breakfast briefing of the year at the ICA in London. The challenge is how to link the ambitions of behaviour change in policymaking with the various levers which can influence it, such as legislation, incentives, taxation, policy, fines and, most specifically, communications.
The event was unique in explicitly positioning policy making and communications within a shared ‘behaviour change strategy cycle’, and approaching strategy planning (top down) and communications planning (bottom up) from a coordinated perspective.
The speakers were Alex Oliver, who’s recently joined the IIPS from the Cabinet Office, who made the connections between behaviour change and Whitehall’s ‘Public Service Agreements’, and BMRB’s Helen Angle, who’s an expert at campaign evaluation.
In their presentations, they identified five key challenges or ‘gaps’ faced by both ‘sides’ of the cycle: the gap within and between policy areas, the gap between high level strategy and implementation, the gap between success factors and evaluation measures; the gap between government action and public reaction; and the gap between incremental insight and strategy.
Bridging the gaps is hard but not impossible. Success requires, among other things, internal coherence, cross-policy alignment, and agreement about common success factors. The panellists, Sam Davis of the Central Office of Information, and Dr. David Halpern of the Institute for Government suggested that behaviour change theory informs both halves of the strategy cycle. And picking up one thought from the audience comments: that the government’s behaviour change efforts should be linked, explicitly, to a broader project of political and social renewal.
For more information about IIPS events, please visit the IIPS website.
7 October 2008 at 8:32 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Nudging language
Russ Wilson writes:
Following on from the earlier post on the subject of ‘nudging’, I was recently in Dublin and Limerick and found the variable dominance of Gaelic and English intriguing- It appears that there has been some attempt to promote the use of the Gaelic language in both public and private life – similar to the Welsh renaissance and the protectionist policy in France.
The result of this seems to be that the majority of public information signs are now either exclusively in Gaelic, or with both Gaelic and English present but the Gaelic very much foregrounded.
However, where it was more important that the sign was immediately accessible – warning signs, security messages, or temporary diversions on the motorway, the signs were exclusively in English. So it seems that the policy of promoting Gaelic is secondary to public safety.
Although there might be some teething problems, I’d have thought that a policy of making all the really important signs exclusively Gaelic would be a pretty strong incentive for people to to learn and use the language.
Understanding the ‘Aldi effect’
Alastair Morton writes:
The Guardian last Friday splashed pictures of baked beans and ‘Beamers’ across its front page to make the point that consumers’ habits are changing as a result of the credit crunch and other pressures on incomes. In particular, there are some startling statistics about BMW sales (down 40% on last year) and people’s levels of savings (down 48% on last year). In all of this, they suggest that a number of companies are benefiting from the ‘Aldi effect’, meaning that budget retailers and products (such as Aldi, Premier Inn budget hotels and own label foods) are more in demand as consumers tighten their belts.
However, the headline effects of downturn mask some more complex value trade-offs that consumers are making, and will continue to make, as they manage their squeezed finances. Over the last 5 years, discounters (especially Lidl) have added branded goods to their shelves, reaching levels as high as 30% of the product assortment in UK stores (sourced from MVI research). So switching to these retailers need not mean buying different products. Are consumers trading down and buying lower quality, or are they simply looking for the same quality, even branded, products at a cheaper price? Paul Foley, UK Managing Director of Aldi, argues ‘there is no trading down in buying the same quality product. You are just trading down in price.’
In ‘Feeling the Pinch’, a piece of research that we did recently, we were able to dive deeper and unpick the different ways that consumers are managing their money differently. Using a factor analysis, we found eight themes of coping behaviour that consumers are likely to draw on over the coming year, from spending wisely to borrowing to cutting back to reducing ethical consumption. Obviously there’s far more detail in the 70-page report, but a couple of core findings stand out.
First, people’s initial response to downturn is to try to buy the same things cheaper rather than buying fewer or different things. After this they buy less or cut out treats or luxuries. Secondly, levels of anxiety about economic downturn are a strong predictor of consumer behaviour – the more anxious consumers are, the more likely they are to make specific changes to their consumption behaviour in order to save money. Measuring consumers’ anxiety levels about their economic position – and how they’re changing – is the best way to gauge how rapidly consumer behaviour is likely to change.
The ‘Feeling the Pinch’ report is available for £3,500+VAT. Tailored briefings, which explore the findings and their implications for individual companies’ strategies and brands, are available from £6,000+VAT. To find out more, please email ftp@hchlv.com.
dowconzki § 8
© Jake Goretzki
Jake Goretzki adds:
Reading recently about this ‘Nudge‘ business, I couldn’t but help thinking about how shrewdly it was branded – certainly in the same league as Tipping Point, Make it Stick, or The Wisdom of Crowds. In fact, as they flock together they almost seem to constitute a whole new publishing equation: Punchy Title + Panacea = Bestseller. Where did Charles Tilly go wrong with Why? That said, I’m still scratching around to identify examples of ‘Nudging’ in action, and I seem not to be alone in this. The one mentioned in most of the reviews is the effect of making organ donation ‘opt out’ rather than ‘opt in’ – more a thwack than a nudge, I would have thought.
Growing support
Jo Phillips writes:
This weekend I bought 20 lettuce seedlings for a £1 from a country market. Should even a few of these grow into healthy sized lollo rosso, I reckon I will have saved a few pounds on the cost of equivalent produce at the supermarket, even taking into account the cost of compost and water. But perhaps more interesting than the potential to save money on food at a time when food costs are escalating and consumers are feeling the pinch, is the intrinsic value of homegrown produce to the grower. As Monty Don pointed out recently in his session at Hay, a person who grows food from seed wouldn’t even consider wasting it.
In his role as the new President of the Soil Association Don has been smart to encourage all growers, great and small, to consider themselves as part of a sustainable food movement. He clearly appreciates that those who have narrowed the gap between soil to plate to its minimum could, if connected to each other, be a powerful network for change. Linking small steps to big effects and harnessing the power of the collective may be a powerful way to address concerns about food security and food footprints and encourage behaviour change. And with sales of vegetable seeds overtaking those of flowers this year, the movement shows signs of burgeoning.
The greatest challenge perhaps will be in cities –people living within view of farms at least have a regular reminder of the provenance of food, but in urban spaces the mental gap is greater, and the knowledge less intuitive. But with the return of Victory Gardens in London and San Francisco, and vertical farms on the horizon, we are moving closer to the Soil Association’s vision of “a national policy of self-sufficiency in staple foods.”
