Behaviour change and media

If you want to change behaviour, you need to demand action first and think later, writes Mindshare’s Rosie Baring.

Advertising is all about behaviour change: getting someone to move from one product or attitude to another. Old-school advertising firmly believed that the role of communications was to motivate: move the consumer from awareness through interest to desire and then hope for a (commercially advantageous) action. And what was media’s role in this? The trusty mule – mere transport for the heroic motivational message.

Of course, I’m exaggerating; naturally there have been nods to the importance of context, or who the message comes from to make it more motivating; but really, that was just about the extent of media’s contribution to the behaviour change conversation.

Thankfully, advertising, in the era of behavioural economics, has moved on considerably since then. Modern behavioural theory has action very much sitting at the heart of it; the consensus being that behaviour change is made much more effective through involving the consumer.

Adam Ferrier based his brilliant book, The Advertising Effect, on just that. Ever heard of the phrase ‘actions change attitudes faster than attitudes change actions’? If not, you will.

Let’s take the traditional route to behaviour change:

Thoughts > feelings > actions > behaviour change.

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With this route, the role of communications would be to inform with a rational message, connect with an emotional message and then prompt an action until you have achieved the desired behaviour.

That seems like a lot for an advertiser to do to get to that all important behaviour change. So what if you could skip a step or two? What if you could go straight to the action?

If you do (or, perhaps, if you can), what you will find is that people will adjust their thoughts and feelings to match the action they have just taken. The principal driver is the subconscious desire to avoid cognitive dissonance – (the internal discomfort we feel when our beliefs don’t match our actions).

But how do you get people to take an action, without going through the palaver of educating them on a rational level, and then connect with them on an emotional level? You make it attractive (i.e. something they would want to do), make it easy (i.e. one click) and then just ask them to do it.

The growth of interactive, technology-led media allows us to do just that. We can “ask” our consumers to like, share, comment, vote, sign-up, buy, donate, or pledge – all with just one, frictionless click/tap/swipe. It is through these media actions that you have the opportunity to prompt that first, albeit small, crucial action to kick-start behaviour change.

Walkers ‘Do Us a Flavour’ campaign is a great example of this. They launched by getting fans to suggest new flavours, then took the top suggestions and asked Britain to vote on which flavour they like best. People could vote by text, tweet or within ad placements across digital and social. One action, made super easy through media.

The simple act of voting made consumers more likely to feel invested in the brand and, therefore, more likely to go and buy Walkers. This activity is reported to have resulted in 68% YOY sales growth.

So what can we do in the agency world to start involving our consumers more and using media to trigger actions to short-cut behaviour change?

To start with we should be looking not just to our creative, but also to our media agencies for behaviour change strategy. It’s no longer about identifying the right message and then the right media. It’s about identifying that the right consumer-centric action and, from there, determining the optimum creative (motivation) and media (action) to make it happen.

Rosie Baring is strategy director at Mindshare.