The Behaviour Change Collaborative is pleased to announce it has entered a formal partnership with Griffith University’s Social Marketing@Griffith (SM@G).
The move officially links the world’s largest university-based social marketing centre with one of Australia’s leading behaviour change outfits.
The BCC has enjoyed a strong relationship with SM@G for more than a decade during which time we’ve collaborated on projects, and most recently co-hosted Change 2024.
The new partnership will further strengthen both organisations’ ability to generate actionable insight, deliver impactful change programs and build the capacity of others to do the same.
The BCC’s Co-Founder and Managing Director Luke van der Beeke said: “The BCC has a strong track record of working closely with academia for positive impact.
“Our partnership with SM@G is based on a clear values alignment and a desire to leverage the unique strengths of both organisations to deliver behaviour change programs that shift the dial.”
SM@G’s Director Sharyn Rundle-Thiele echoed Luke’s sentiment, and said her team was excited about the new partnership.
“Our change agents will be working under The BCC brand to extend upon our current partnerships that are focussed on delivering change.
“The partnership removes red tape and improves our team’s agility. We look forward to achieving more than ever before.”
The BCC is confident this new partnership will enhance the ability of both organisations to drive positive social change.
Social marketing – the use of commercial marketing and communication techniques for social purposes – is a powerful tool for positively and voluntarily changing the behaviours of individuals and populations.
Social marketing is more than the use of just social media, or advertising, or any other single tool; it is the strategic choice and use of a combination of techniques, products and technologies to achieve voluntary behaviour change for social good.
Social marketing in New Zealand has a varied recent history. It has come in and out of fashion with different administrations, and the public sector’s institutional understanding of the evidence base and key tenets of good practice has waxed and waned. Achieving social behaviour change is complex and there are many traps for inexperienced or careless players: underinvestment, over-communication, and short-termism to name just a few.
But through this history New Zealand is blessed with a number of experts – within the public sector and in its partners in the private, academic and non-government sectors – with practical experience and theoretical insights to contribute.
The pandemic and the long term social-impacts it will create provide fresh challenges for social marketing and behaviour change practitioners in the public sector. Many of the social problems that social marketing sets out to address will be more difficult to solve; more complex and more entrenched. But these challenging times also bring an opportunity to reflect on lessons of the past and change how we work; to modernise our practice and make it more progressive.
Three enduring features of good practice
The success of the Government’s COVID-19 communication and marketing programme, causing nearly the entire population to change working, social and recreational habits almost over night, is evidence of just how powerful this tool can be, and how capable the public sector is of wielding it effectively, alongside strong policy and regulatory initiatives.
The actions of the New Zealand Government in March set out almost a case book for how to approach behaviour change. That’s not to say they’ve got everything right – and time will no doubt be the critic’s friend, as hindsight reveals flaws like no other kind of vision ever can. But the scale of public behaviour change relating to COVID-19, and the rapidity of it, is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
In part, we can attribute this to the clear and obvious need to act, that was playing out on the global stage. But in mid-March the Government was walking a tightrope: if it had moved too soon, it would have moved ahead of public willingness to respond and comply. If it had moved too slowly it would have risked panic, confusion and losing the trust that was so crucial in bringing people along. So the COVID-19 programme is a great case study for the enduring features of behaviour change best practice.
First, it took a multi-layered and integrated approach to communications, ensuring they were unmissable for the target audience (in this case – and perhaps for the only time in history justifiably – all New Zealanders). Rather than relying on one mechanism (for example, television advertising), the campaign is visible through news media, social media, advertising on a very wide range of channels; through partnerships and use of collateral; through word of mouth and aligned spokespeople from every agency of Government (and beyond). And it was repetitive and enduring — with briefings to media and the public happening daily and all other forms of marketing and commentary sustained throughout the lockdown phase and beyond.
The second key tenet of best practice, where the COVID-19 campaign is so strong, is its clear focus on behaviour (and a single, “non-divisible” behaviour [1] at that). The Government didn’t ask people to “be virus-wise” or promote a bundle of behaviours (eg “protect our community”). Instead, the simple catch cry that headlined every communication from the start of the COVID-19 response was “stay home”. Although there was debate about what we might be allowed to do if we didn’t stay home (can I surf? Can I go mountain-biking?) these were marginal to what was a very swift response at a mass level, that was enabled by the absolute clarity of the message.
The third tenet of best practice (and perhaps the most important) is a focus on the audience, or citizens. The UK’s National Social Marketing Centre’s Benchmark Criteria make this clear, placing Customer Orientation as their first criterion. Successful behaviour change programmes understand and respond to what will motivate people; and what will stop them from behaving the way you need them to. We have seen with the COVID-19 communications a powerful balance held between the policy changes required by the science and economics of the pandemic; and the emotional and practical needs of the citizens who would be asked to implement those changes.
Not every programme over the years has had the success of the COVID-19 communications, in part because not all programmes have been designed in a way that is consistent with good practice; but other difficulties have also been in play. Less perceived urgency, less investment, less combined expertise in the creation of the programme and less strength in leadership have all been a feature of our practice’s history – and will likely be so in the future, for we are all human, and human behaviour change is particularly complex and difficult.
And if it was complex in the past, in the immediate, post-COVID future we will have new challenges, as communities are harder pressed than ever before. Even at its evidence-based best, old social marketing practice might not be enough to see us through. This is a moment to test the State’s involvement in social marketing, and to find new ways to operate to meet these challenges.
An invitation to change
As we imagine the post-COVID-19 future, some features stand out more than others as potentially challenging for public sector behaviour change practice; and open the door to some interesting new ways to work.
These features were not absent in the past, but our practice has generally been slow to respond to them. My hope is that now it will be clear we must tackle them; and that now we will be able to find previously unreachable ways to do so.
First we have an opportunity to really examine how social marketing practice contributes to or reduces inequalities. Despite generally setting out to reduce inequality, in some cases social marketing practice has had the opposite impact; either by increasing inequality; or increasing the stigma that is associated with inequality. To a degree, it is in the very nature of social marketing, which targets communities perceived as being most in need of change; but this is exacerbated in the way many programmes are initiated, conceived and conducted; by reinforcing dependency and deficits, and taking an expert-led, rather than community-led approach.
With the very real risk of deepening health, social and economic inequality as a result of COVID-19, we have the opportunity and the obligation to ask ourselves, how can our practice contribute to reducing inequality? What can we do differently to shift the balance of power? How can we shift our practice from paternalism to partnership?
Community-based practice and true co-design are not new concepts, and they are in place in some programmes and some areas. But these days they are the domain of the brave and the patient; they are like the slow food of policy and behaviour change practice; they demand a degree of flexibility and openness that isn’t always easy to achieve. But what an opportunity we have now to find the time and the space to deeply and genuinely engage with communities, and to ensure our approaches are designed in ways that enable those communities to participate in engagement.
A second area for reflection for behaviour change practice lies in our response to the deepening complexity of social problems. The problems themselves do not arise from a single source; so the solutions should not arise from a single source either. And so another opportunity we can seize now is to act on what UK think tank Demos has called the public sector’s “moral obligation” to collaborate.
Collaboration has been an unresolved question for social marketing and behaviour change practice for many years. It’s an area where intention and action have been slow to connect, as the time needed to collaborate generally works against the sometimes urgent (and perhaps artificial) deadlines for many behaviour change programmes. COVID-19 has shown us that collaboration can happen, even in genuinely urgent circumstances, and that determined leadership can make it happen. The benefits of that collaboration are obvious, and enduring.
The third challenge and opportunity that the pandemic and its aftermath invite us to consider is an external one. Like the others it is not new; and like the others, the current environment makes it more urgent to confront than ever – and more possible.
How does the rapidly changing media environment change our ways of reaching people with our behaviour change programmes? What does the loss of orthodoxy mean for our ability to communicate with many people, from a single source? What opportunities and risks arise from the voice that social media has conferred on people previously invisible in a heavily mainstreamed media and entertainment context?
If good communications is “simple clear messages, repeated often, by a variety of trusted sources [2]”, how can we take advantage of the new environment to identify, empower and motivate a greater variety of trusted sources? And let us be careful not to transfer our old over-reliance on “above the line” communications (advertising) into the new paradigm, but find ways to elevate real and diverse community voices through a rich portfolio of channels.
The benefits of these approaches will be manifold: In a future of greater collaboration we may see fewer social marketing programmes initiating from Government, and at the same time, more that address root causes of harm. In a future of greater citizen-centricity, we may see greater shared ownership of problems and solutions; in a future of more diverse communication channels we may see a wider range of voices sharing social good messaging in more intimate and trusted ways.
Marketing and communication are powerful tools government can use to generate real and positive change for New Zealand citizens. Right now – when so much has changed; and we are rethinking what our future might look like – we have the opportunity to embed good behaviour change practice more consistently, and create new approaches that put communities and citizens at the centre. It’s a bright future, if we are patient and brave.
[1] Doug McKenzie-Mohr, Community Based Social Marketing www.cbsm.com
This article was first published under the title “The State and Social Marketing: Can We Embrace Change” by the New Zealand Public Service Association as part of its Progressive Thinking series. You can read other articles in the series here.
[2] Dr Edward Maibach, in conversation.
Featured Image Credit: “Covid-19 handmade facemask” by Flickr User Olgierd
Last week I came across this fundraising box at Subway.
The sign promised that in exchange for helping I would feel good. My inner philanthropist thought why not! So I donated the coin contents of my purse and instantly received a good, warm fuzzy feeling. Given that before making my way to the counter I had no intention of making a donation anytime soon, this campaign demonstrates the power of an appropriate value proposition to encourage voluntary behaviour.
The social marketing ‘exchange’
Exchange in social marketing is often non-monetary and typically involves something else the target audience wants for performing the behaviour; where the benefit is most often personal and psychological in nature, such as a good feeling, social recognition or praise. People always want to know what’s in it for them. Therefore appealing to an individual’s self-interest, through a direct and timely exchange, is in every social marketer’s best interest – particularly when encouraging voluntary behaviour change.
So how can you appeal to an individual’s self-interest? One way is by increasing the perceived value of what they receive in return. Social marketing programs should attempt to manage social issues by ensuring the benefits (or perceived benefits) outweigh the costs associated with the advocated change – increasing the likelihood of voluntary adoption.
Whilst the concept that giving to others can make you feel good about yourself is not revolutionary, it is often overlooked or forgotten; replaced with classic campaigns involving images of in-need individuals designed to elicit sadness and guilt. The ACT for Kids feel-good campaign is a perfect example of where a direct and timely benefit is offered in exchange for a voluntary behaviour, in this case a donation.
Another great example of an effective self-interest value proposition is from Kotler and Lee’s text ‘Social Marketing: Influencing Behaviours for Good’ (3rd edition). An environmental social marketing campaign, aimed at reducing pollution affecting an estuary famous for harvesting blue crabs, reframed the issue as a culinary, not an environmental, problem. The appeal to the target audiences’ stomachs (self-interest) rather than their environmental consciousness (societal benefit), provided a direct and timely exchange for changing pollutant garden care behaviours to more environmentally friendly behaviours and, consequently, was more effective than previous initiatives to change behaviour.
Whist the underlying objective is distinguishable between social and commercial sector marketing, an understanding of exchange principles is fundamental to both. Recycling may decrease pollution, reducing energy consumption may help the environment and giving up your leisure time to volunteer may help those in need. But ultimately, everyone’s focus is on themselves, so providing a good answer to the question of ‘What’s in it for me?’ is extremely important to behaviour change campaign success.
About the author
Dr Kathleen Chell is based at the BEST Centre at Queensland University of Technology. Her research examines the use of online platforms to communicate, engage and recognise donors. The BEST Centre is one of our valued academic partners.
“Preparation, patience and a willingness to play the long game.”
These were some of the insights shared by Lisa Cohen, National Programme Manager of Scottish mental health programme See Me at a recent seminar I attended in Wellington, New Zealand.
Many of the factors she raised that contribute to and hinder the success of social marketing programmes are the same ones we’ve been thinking about at New Zealand’s Social Marketing Network. In particular, we’ve been examining the challenges faced by two distinct groups – practitioners (the ones designing and conducting social marketing programmes) and authorisers (the ministers, managers or chief executives who create the budget parameters, time frames and programme boundaries).
Some of these are worth giving a wider airing. Combining some of Lisa’s lessons with discussions we’ve been having on this same topic in New Zealand, here are four factors that contribute to the environments for creating real and sustained social change.
Programmes, not campaigns
Social problems require a systematic response, and social marketing, in its true sense, requires a programme approach. Too often, we hear talk of “social marketing campaigns” – generally one-off or single-layer interventions that are often advertising based. But while advertising campaigns can be powerful, on their own they rarely change behaviour, and do not actually constitute social marketing.
“A ‘campaign’ may be a part of a social marketing programme, but it’s crucial to think about the programme as a whole”
– Lisa Cohen
The challenge here for social marketers is that an advertising campaign is something you can outsource; it’s finite, tangible, and easy to measure. Programme authorisers often ask for the campaign, without also demanding the rigour of a broader programme.
The trouble is, there’s not much sizzle in an integrated programme. They have less well-defined boundaries, tend to be slower to build, and less glorious to trumpet. But they also work better and in the long run can be more cost effective. So our call to practitioner and authorising forces is to demand and invest in programmes, not just campaigns.
Co-design, collaborate and engage. Don’t Preach!
Engage and involve the target audience in programme identification, design and implementation as much, and as soon, as you can. The sooner you do, the more you invest in meaningfully gathering and implementing their input, the better the results in the long term. In the Scottish See Me programme, it’s possible to see the strengthening of the programme (in terms of its reach and impact), the more they involved the voices of people with lived experience of mental illness in their programme planning.
Lisa Cohen says it’s all about talking to people – reaching them one conversation at a time.
The requirement for practitioners is to identify communities early on and engage them meaningfully in programme design and development. For programme authorisers this means giving your teams the time and space to do this respectfully and properly.
Be specific about the change you want
The See Me programme put real effort into clearly identifying the specific actions people could take to make a difference and targeted those actions to specific audiences.
In our rush to implement, we often to keep our programme goals vague and our calls to action general. Being specific requires patience and a robust analysis (including audience research) to properly understand your programme goals and the behaviour you’re seeking.
To increase the likelihood of positive change occurring, practitioners and authorisers alike need to adopt the discipline of being very clear about exactly whose behaviour they want to change, and what they want them to do.
Invest in the planning process
Lisa said they were put in the difficult initial position of creating a campaign before they had a programme in place – “building the plane while we were flying it”.
While this is frustrating for practitioners it’s not the real problem. The real problem is the potential financial and social costs of this ad-hoc, tactical approach to addressing social problems. The costs include, at worst, creating a campaign that has negative impacts and causes unintentional harm. Other risks include wasting public funding and depleting sector, stakeholder and public goodwill.
To successfully create positive social change will require a stronger and more robust authorising environment that understands the value of a programmatic approach and properly engaging with citizens.
It might take time but, to quote Sun Tzu, it’s the slow route to victory.
About the author
Tracey Bridges is a professional director, business owner, mentor & public speaker with expertise in strategy, behaviour change, social marketing and leadership. She’s a co-founder and director of New Zealand based social enterprise, The Good Registry.
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to behaviour change.
But that doesn’t mean encouraging people to adopt new behaviours has to be complicated or expensive. In some cases, simply altering the way in which options are presented can encourage people to make better choices.
This
approach is called ‘choice architecture’ and is based on a deep
understanding of how people think. It can be a simple,
cost-effective means of influencing people’s behaviour.
Choice architecture is great for dealing with simple behaviours. For example, Google uses choice architecture in its cafeteria to encourage staff to make healthier food choices.
But when
it comes to more complex behaviours, choice architecture isn’t
enough. People don’t make choices in a vacuum. In most cases there are
other determinants of behaviour that need to be identified and
addressed.
One of
the better behaviour change frameworks I’ve seen is Susan Michie’s
Behaviour Change Wheel.
The Behaviour Change Wheel highlights nine ‘intervention functions’ and seven ‘policy categories’ that can be applied to support the selected interventions. For more information you can read Understanding Society – How Do We Change Behaviour by the Ipsos Mori Social Research Institute. It’s an excellent document and includes interviews with several leading thinkers in the field.
A few introductory behaviour change tips
Although
every behavioural challenge is different there are some tried and tested
techniques that can improve the chances of designing and delivering a
successful behavioural intervention.
Incentives
Incentives
are used in the commercial and public sectors to influence behaviour.
They can be extrinsic or intrinsic.
Extrinsic
incentives come from outside the person and comprise things like cash rewards,
bonuses and subsidies. As an example, just a few weeks ago the British
Medical Journal published a study that found financial
incentives for smoking cessation in pregnancy could be quite effective.
But
incentives need not be monetary. Finding opportunities to incorporate
non-financial incentives (e.g. peer recognition) can also work.
Intrinsic
incentives are psychological. If you can structure a specific
behaviour to make a person feel good about themselves they’re far
more likely to adopt it. For many people, simply believing that they’re
‘doing the right thing’ can be enough.
So when
looking to encourage a new behaviour it’s always worth thinking
about how can you incentivise.
Of course
the use of incentives should be tailored to your specific
audience. It can be easy to assume that people will respond in a certain
way, but when it comes to what people value, the only real way to find
out is to ask.
Reduce Barriers
Barriers
are all those things that stop people from adopting a new behaviour.
They take many forms but most are either structural or personal.
Personal
barriers are often psychological and include things like habits, fears and
beliefs. Because personal barriers are just that – personal, it’s
important not to assume you know what they are.
Ask your
target group what’s stopping them from changing their behaviour? You can
use social research methods like focus groups, surveys or phone interviews
or perhaps make use of social media to start a conversation.
Most
importantly, listen. Communication is a two-way
process. Many campaigns fail because too much time is spent telling
people what they should think or do, rather than asking how they can be
helped to do it.
Structural
barriers can also seem obvious, but even the most simple ones can be
missed.
Not enough bins?
For example
– anti-littering campaigns won’t work if you don’t provide enough
bins for people to dispose of their rubbish. Nor will it help if the bins that
are provided get put in the wrong places. I’ve lost
track of how many times I’ve walked along the street holding an empty
coffee cup, muttering under my breath because I can’t find a bin.
Instead, all I see are signs reminding me not to litter or risk a
fine.
Most people
want to do the right thing so it’s important to remove
the barriers that might prevent them from doing so.
Personal Motivations
What
moves and motivates your target audience?
People’s behaviour
is influenced by a range of factors that may include:
Attitudes and beliefs
Likes and tastes
Pleasures and gratifications
Control and choice
Hopes and aspirations
Life stage
Building
an understanding of what motivates your target group may help you to
design a behaviour change approach that’s more likely to succeed.
Prompts
Prompts
are often used at the point of decision-making. That might be a
point in time, or a physical location.
Most
people know that commercial marketers use prompts (e.g. special
offer signage, point-of-sale displays) to encourage consumers to purchase a
given product or service. What’s less well known is that prompts are also
used by social marketers to encourage positive individual
and community outcomes.
The image
below is an example of a visual prompt that was used as part of a
week-long road safety campaign back in 2010. It was run by advocacy group Preventable, and the British Columbia
Automobile Association. You can read more about the project here.
An innovative visual prompt to slow down drivers.
What’s The Competition?
What
other things compete for the time and attention of your audience?
Competition
can be internal or external. Internal competition might
include psychological factors like pleasure, desire and
fear. External competition includes wider influences that promote or
reinforce alternative behaviours (e.g. social norms).
Remember
– your message needs to cut through a lot of other noise. Think
about it. How much information are you exposed to every
day? Again, it’s very important to work with your target
market to get a good understanding of what’s competing against
the wanted behaviour.
For
example, let’s say you want to encourage a group of young males to start
drinking low-strength beer instead of full-strength beer. The
competition will include things like the peer pressure felt to drink
full-strength; and a perception that more low-strength beer needs to be
consumed (and more money spent) to achieve the desired effect.
To
succeed in eliciting the wanted behaviour you need to find ways to nullify
competing factors.
Defaults
Changing default choice settings can be an effective means of influencing people’s decision-making. Simply put, the default option is that option which people choose when they do nothing.
The
manipulation of default settings to increase organ donation rates is a much
heralded example of its effectiveness. In Germany people must opt-in
to organ donation program. The donor rate is only 12% of
adults. But in Austria where the default option is to opt-out, 99%
of adults are organ donors.
Substitution
It’s been
shown that people are more likely to try something new if it’s similar to what
they’re already doing. The use of inhalers and nicotine gum as
substitutes for cigarettes is an obvious example.
When
seeking to discourage a specific behaviour think about what can be offered in
its place.
Make it FUN, EASY and POPULAR
If you
can make the desired behaviour fun, easy and popular you increase the chances
of it being adopted.
Of
course, ‘fun’ speaks to motivation, and ‘ease’ speaks to barriers.
‘Popularity’ may also increase the chances of word of mouth
promotion, social sharing etc.
Cue this great example from The Fun Theory which I (and many others) have used numerous times over the years to illustrate how effective fun can be at modifying people’s behaviour.
Piano stairs – The Fun Theory.
Self-Monitoring
If a
person can monitor their performance towards a given goal they’re more likely
to succeed.
That’s
one reason there’s been an explosion in the design and use of health and
fitness apps.
A
good example is My Quit Buddy which allows people to personalise and
monitor their own milestones and targets.
Of course
self-monitoring tools don’t need to be high tech. The very act of
writing things down has been shown to reduce the likelihood of people
repeating unwanted behaviours.
Error Proofing
Effective
design can make it difficult for people to deviate from the
desired behaviour by making it easier to avoid errors, or by making it
impossible to make an error at all.
Error
proofing is used just about everywhere, from rumble strips on our roads to
safety switches in our fuse boxes. Alcohol ignition switches are another
good example. They’re used in several Australian jurisdictions to prevent
convicted drunk drivers from re-offending.
Rumble strips – a great example of error proofing.
Many of
the best examples of error proofing are so well integrated into everyday
life that their presence goes unnoticed.
Simple, Concrete Actions
Make sure
that your target group is provided with relevant and meaningful
information.
And
rather than talking about the problem in broad terms,
provide discrete and simple actions that can be taken to overcome it.
A Few Final Thoughts
Behaviour change is achievable. Sometimes it can be realised quickly and easily with a little nudge, but in other cases it takes a more holistic approach over time. Either way, being clear about the specific behaviour you want to change is critical. Set SMART objectives. Measure outcomes.
