Food Behaviour change and influencing consumer choice: fashionable mantra or marketing fundamental? | 1 for Thought Summer 2010
Paul Dolan
Professor of Economics, Department of Social Policy, LSE
Richard Allan
European policy Director, Facebook
Jane Hamilton
Consumer Editor , The Sun
BLUE RUBICON 6 MORE LONDON PLACE, LONDON SE1
2 | Food for Thought
CONTENTS 4 Paul Dolan
Professor of Economics, the Department of Social Policy, LSE
Richard Allan
10
European policy Director, Facebook
Jane Hamilton
16
Consumer Editor, The Sun
4 | Food for Thought
Behaviour change and influencing consumer choice: fashionable mantra or marketing fundamental?
Foreword
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Behaviour change, behavioural economics and choice architecture are increasingly the buzz words within marketing and social policy circles. But is this a new trend or a marketing fundamental? This is the question we posed at our latest Food For Thought event, where we drew on compelling insights and evidence from Facebook, the LSE’s Department of Social Policy and the motivations behind The Sun’s campaigning stance. The conclusions are shared in this booklet. At Blue Rubicon we believe that understanding how we are motivated to act, make choices and take decisions, are fundamental to effective communication. And while some new phrases and words are entering the communications vernacular, the current trend builds on old principles with the backing of stronger evidence and scientific rigor. Social psychologists have provided impetus for the power of behaviour change led communications by providing new frameworks to guide strategic planning about the way we choose. Importantly, they have confirmed what many of us may have suspected about ourselves but been too scared to admit: humans don’t act consistently or rationally. A lot of our behaviour is led by instinct and is rapid and ‘automatic’ in nature. With better understanding of this, it is easier to see why bombarding people with information alone or simply offering more rational evidence of the ‘right’ choices will not change people’s behaviour. Assuming people will make the best choice for themselves and their families if they are given full information and a range of choices is rational but not often true. Campaigns like our Green Streets work for British Gas have demonstrated the power of normalisation and the compelling influence of communities to encourage individuals to take action. In a nationwide social experiment, 64 households dramatically cut their streets carbon footprint and reduced their energy bills by an average of 25%. Our work on the Department of Health’s smoking in pregnancy campaign, where we set the defaults and identified the key messenger, motivating midwives to be the trusted experts who made referral to local NHS stop smoking specialists the easy ‘default’ option for pregnant women who smoke. This was backed up by a consumer campaign to normalise the majority (8 out of 10) of pregnant women who didn’t smoke alongside empathy for those who do by using women who have found it difficult but succeeded or are trying to quit as the voice for our messages. New research is providing us with greater understanding of our established biases and the rules of thumb we use to make decisions. Integrated marketing approaches have the potential to use emerging knowledge of choice architecture to compelling effect. But we will need to be less rational to achieve more measurable impact.
Fiona Joyce Partner, Blue Rubicon
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Mindspace: changing behaviour without thinking about it Paul Dolan,
Professor of Economics, Department of Social Policy, LSE Many of the challenges of the 21st Century involve getting people to behave differently e.g. in relation to their health, their finances and the environment. Traditional models of behaviour change have focussed on ‘changing minds’: changing our beliefs and attitudes by providing the right kinds of information and changing how we weigh up the costs and benefits of different behaviours by providing the right kinds of incentives. In short, if we change the way people think about and reflect upon things, then we can change their behaviour. The problem is that many of these ‘rationality-based’ theories and interventions have not often been very effective at changing population behaviour. A recent accumulation of evidence suggests that human behaviour is in fact, very susceptible to subtle changes to the context within which choices are made. Behaviour is not so much ‘thought about’: it simply ‘comes about’. At the same time, most experts agree that brain functioning is based on two types of processes or systems: the ‘automatic’ system and the ‘reflective’ system. It turns out that our behaviour is a lot more ‘automatic’ and less ‘reflective’ than we have previously thought. Any serious attempt to change behaviour must seek to join up the relationships between the three general types of interventions designed to change behaviour – information, incentives, and contexts – with the automatic and reflective systems in the brain. In addition to changing minds, we can seek to change people’s behaviour by changing their contextual cues. By using the ‘choice architecture’ (the environment within which our choices are made), behaviour change interventions may prove to be both more effective and more cost-effective.
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So we have gathered up many of the robust effects on behaviour that operate largely, though not exclusively, on the ‘automatic’ self. We have expressed them under the pneumonic MINDSPACE1: messenger, incentives, norms, defaults, salience, priming, affect, commitments and ego. MINDSPACE can be used as a checklist for anyone interested in changing behaviour. The following questions are basic questions that should be asked of any intervention. Have you got the right messenger? The messenger can matter as much as the message itself. So have you taken into account the facts that we react better to: a) experience – has the messenger “walked the walk”; b) expertise – who is the relevant expert; and c) familiarity – is the messenger somehow a person like those being targeted? Have you got the incentives right? We do respond to incentives but often in some strange ways for economic theory. So have you taken into account the facts that we: a) are loss averse (potential losses loom larger than gains of the same size); b) hyperbolically discount (today is given a lot of weight relative to tomorrow but the difference in value between a week today and a week tomorrow is much less); and c) we allocate money to different ‘mental accounts’ (we will travel across town to save £5 on a pair of trainers but not on a new car)? Have you tapped into the appropriate norms? We do what those around us are already doing. So have you presented the intervention in a way that makes it easier for people to ‘join the club’ they want to belong to (e.g. to be in the 8 out of 10 that are healthy rather than the 2 out of 10 that are unhealthy)? Have you set the defaults correctly? We ‘go with the flow’ of pre-set options. So have you made it easier for people to ‘do the right thing’ by sticking with the default rather than having to opt-in or out? Have you increased the salience of the information? We respond to things that are novel and that we can understand. So have you made the intervention attention-grabbing and intelligible (e.g. how many hours would need to be worked to pay off the credit card interest)? Have you accounted for priming effects? We react unconsciously to stimuli such as pictures, words and smells. So have you thought about how best to tap into these effects e.g. by using “spending money” for a savings account?
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Have you tapped into the right affect (feelings)? Our emotional associations shape our behaviour. So have you thought about the feelings that will be invoked by your interventions (e.g. the disgust that people feel about dirty hands that can be used in increase hand washing)? Have you got the right commitment devices? We seek to be consistent with our public promises. So have you made it easier for people to commit to something that they would like to do? Have you got the ego effect right? We act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves. So have you, for example, thought about raising the self-esteem of those affected by the intervention? Have you got the right combination of effects? Whilst each element of MINDSPACE is important in its own right, there are obvious overlaps and the best interventions will combine different elements. So have you got the right combination of effects? There are many exciting avenues for future research and policy development in this area. We can only show the potential — and the limitations — of interventions that target the automatic system if we carry out studies in naturalistic settings. MINDSPACE provides a fresh perspective from which conceptual developments and empirical advances can be made in meeting the challenges of behaviour change amongst a range of different populations. 1 Dolan P, Hallsworth M, Halpern D, King D, Vlaev I, MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy, Institute for Government and the Cabinet Office, 2 March 2010.
Paul Dolan is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Social Policy at the LSE. His research focuses on developing measures of subjective well-being for use by policy-makers and applying lessons from behavioural economics to understand and change individual behaviour. Paul has advised various UK government departments and he is currently chief academic adviser on economic appraisal for the Government Economic Service.
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SOCIAL NETWORKS: A PLATFORM FOR SOCIAL CHANGE RICHARD ALLAN EUROPEAN POLICY DIRECTOR, FACEBOOK In this short piece, I would like to do is 3 things. Firstly, to describe why social networks like Facebook might be important as agents for social change. I admit to drinking a fair amount of the technology kool-aid since working for Facebook. But my enthusiasm for social networking comes more from the fact that I genuinely believe Facebook to be an interesting platform, rather than the interest following the fact that I work there. I also want to talk about some examples that make social networking such an interesting platform, including one recent attempt to realise the potential of this platform. We called it Democracy UK and it ran throughout the recent UK election. Finally, I would like to describe some of the challenges and opportunities that I see for developing this further as we enter into a period of significant experimentation. To set the context as to why this might be important, it is worth noting that Facebook has now reached 500m active users worldwide. These are people who have logged on to Facebook at some point in the last 30 days. Of equal significance is the fact that around 50% of these users log on every day and this proportion has remained consistent throughout the growth of the site. This means that our daily reach is around 250m people who are typically spending around 30 minutes on the site. In terms of the demographics, our fastest growing segment is 35+ and users are slightly more female than male in most countries. As well as the reach, it is important that the platform has also evolved to be an open one, supporting a wide range of users and developers who create content and applications and find their own innovative uses. These may be applications that we would never have thought of at Facebook but add significantly to the user experience.
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We should also understand what Facebook is offering, which is the idea of a ‘soft identity’ through the creation of your profile. In the early days of the public internet, in 1993, a cartoonist famously coined the notion that ‘nobody knows you are a dog on the net’. This anonymity was seen as the norm and can indeed be of value for some things you do on the net. But increasingly today, there is value in internet users holding some form of genuine identity across online activities. This is not a ‘hard identity’, as government might create through official documents and biometrics but a representation of an individual based on the content and relationships that they are comfortable sharing with particular audiences on a reciprocal basis. As the internet becomes more important in our lives, an increasing number of interactions take place where it is helpful to know who you are dealing with, rather than interacting with anonymous individuals. We are also seeing a shift towards mobile technology. Social networks can now be accessed via a range of different platforms which help extend their reach and enable the development of new services, such as those based on location. As individuals and organisations get to grips with the potential power of these new platforms, there are some good examples which illustrate the various trends at work. Marks & Spencer has a strong community of around 120,000 people on its Facebook page. It hosts some fascinating examples of interactions both between M&S representatives and their audience and between the users themselves. So you may see users requesting a garment in a particular size and a discussion ensuing about the level of demand for this and how the retailer should meet that demand. On the political front, Barack Obama has famously been the most successful politician on Facebook with 11m fans. He has recently been challenged and beaten by a non-politician, Lady Gaga, who has over 13m fans. However, sheer numbers are not the only factor. Rather it is what people do on and through the platform that counts.
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The last US presidential election did see some very interesting work around the activation and organisation of people through online platforms. It will be interesting to see at the next presidential election how this is impacted by the existence of this large fanbase over several years. Another example of political use is the Democracy UK page which was created by Facebook in a project very ably managed by Blue Rubicon during this year’s general election. This page accumulated 280,000 fans interested in election-related content that users gathered both on and off Facebook. The levels of engagement with the site’s content were impressive and we recorded a measurable impact in terms of voter registration amongst younger people. We also discovered that there was a social element to the TV debates that formed the centrepiece of the election. We were faced with an audience who wanted to watch the debates in two-screen mode, commenting on them as they happened and who would no longer be happy with a purely passive experience. This culminated in a widget that people could interact with on election day to indicate they had voted. It clocked up over 2 million users. There are however some important challenges that make this environment uncomfortable at times. We take those cases seriously as, in a space that consists chiefly of user-generated content, nothing is easily centrally controlled. We also face challenges around notions of privacy and freedom of expression. For example, if you take a photo of a group of people and someone in the photo objects to this, a judgement has to be made between the rights of the owner of the photo to express themselves and the privacy rights of the subject in the photo. In terms of what we can look forward to, the new government in the UK has already indicated it is committed to innovation in this space. This has started with some specific announcements around consultations drawing on an audience from Facebook’s 26m UK users. But this is just the start of a period of experimentation where different forms of engagement are trialled. This will produce a huge amount of data and experiences that will genuinely help to answer the question as to how far these new platforms really can support behaviour change. Richard Allan, European Policy Director, Facebook Richard Allan joined Facebook in June 2009 to lead the company’s public policy work in Europe. Prior to joining Facebook, Richard was European government affairs director for Cisco from September 2005. In April 2008 the UK Cabinet Office appointed Richard as chair of the Power of Information Task Force to work on improving the use of government data. The Task Force completed its work in May 2009 with the publication of a report whose recommendations have been welcomed by the UK Government. Richard writes and speaks on a wide range of technology policy issues and has been an academic visitor at the Oxford Internet Institute. Richard was elected as Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam in 1997 and re-elected in 2001 before giving up his seat in 2005. Richard specialised in technology policy issues in Parliament and was a principal spokesman on a several bills including the Data Protection Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Communications Act. He was Chair of the Information Committee in the 1997 Parliament and a member of the Public Accounts and Liaison Committees in the 2001 Parliament.
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THIS IS EXPERI
MENTATION
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‘Lead All About It: How to be first and foremost using newspaper behaviour change campaigns’ Jane Hamilton, Consumer Editor, The Sun
I have a product which you can’t eat, you can’t wear and is obsolete in 20 minutes. You can get most of it for free somewhere else but I want you to buy it six times a week. Would you? Of course not, you think – but I bet you do. What am I talking about? Your daily newspaper. In this digital age where talk is cheap and news is free, why do people still buy papers? One of the prime reasons is because their paper gives them a strong identity and makes them feel connected to world and UK events. Buying a newspaper is a definitive marker of who you are, what you believe in and what you would like to do to change the world. While many in the UK shout about ‘press intrusion’ – the reality is Britain has the greatest press in the world. No other country has our sheer diversity of viewpoints, number of daily papers or wordsmith’s skills. British papers have raised millions for charity, toppled prime ministers, campaigned for new laws and changed the way generations of people think. Despite the advent of TV and the internet, nothing is as powerful as a newspaper campaign for changing Brits’ behaviour. A successful newspaper behaviour-change campaign can generate coverage on every other type of media including TV, radio and the internet — and headlines around the world. Success is also precise and measurable, as readers are usually asked to send in a coupon indicating their support, sign up online or donate cash. We know within hours if the campaign is working, as readers ring and tell us their views. The Sun is undoubtedly the most successful campaigning British paper of all time. We were founded 40 years ago to be ‘for the people, not the pundits or politicans’ and this holds truer than ever today. If you think about some of the campaigns we’ve run, not only will you recognise them, you’ll also have real opinions on them, and have maybe even taken part. Newspaper campaigns tend to be one of three types. Collaborative campaigns see a paper team up with another body, like the Help for Heroes campaign or Band Aid 20 years on.
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I have a product which you
can’t eat,
you can’t
wear
and is obsolete in
20 minutes.
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Reactive campaigns follow events in the news and encourage readers to change their behaviour to help the situation. Good recent examples of this include Jade’s Legacy, calling for the Government to drop the age of smear tests, following the death of TV star Jade Goody from cervical cancer aged just 27, and the Helping Haiti fund-raising music single. Proactive campaigns tend to be longer-running and aimed at addressing deeper issues affecting our readership. Recently we’ve run ones as diverse as Sunemployment, aimed at finding jobs for our readers during the downturn and an award-winning campaign against domestic violence spanning almost a decade. Our campaign for better standards of social work followed the tragic death of Baby P and is the biggest newspaper campaign of all time, with over 1.6million readers signing up – that’s almost five per cent of all the adults in the UK. It was followed by a national shift to improve the standards of people entering social work, which we wholeheartedly supported and ran several articles on. One of the most powerful behaviour change campaigns ever is Help for Heroes. This collaborative campaign is run by The Sun with the charity of the same name. Originally it set out to raise just half a million pounds to help injured servicemen at Selly Oak Hospital. But with The Sun’s backing, the campaign has raised a million a month, and now stands at £60m and counting. But just as importantly, Help for Heroes has been one of our most successful – and poignant – behaviour change campaigns. When we began, the streets at the Wooton Bassett repatriations and homecoming parades were empty, now the streets are lined five-deep. And once where servicemen and women were banned from wearing uniforms in some towns, now they are given free tickets to events, free meals and drinks in pubs and clubs. In short, because of this campaign, the nation respects our Armed Forces sacrifices once again. Behaviour change campaigns are the perfect way for newspapers to differentiate themselves from other forms of media as they give readers the chance to get involved, and the best examples galvanise the nation. Readers want to participate in campaigns as it costs them nothing – just the price of the paper they buy anyway – but they feel they are doing their bit to shift society and change the world. Many people assume newspaper editors choose campaigns through weeks of research and focus groups, but nothing could be further from the truth. In daily papers, time is very short and campaigns can be decided at 3pm and be on the next day’s front page by midnight. While collaborative and pro-active campaigns tend to take a little longer, reactive campaigns have to be almost instant before the moment is lost or a rival hits on the same idea. We don’t research a possible campaign as we don’t need to. Every good journalist has ‘news sense’ and we know what our readers want. We speak to them everyday through interviews and stories, and are in daily 24hour contact with readers ringing and emailing our news and feature desks. If there’s an issue on their minds, we know about it as they tell us. We are truly under the skins of our readers as we live and breathe their concerns and worries every single day. Campaign ideas can come from anyone on the paper, from the junior writers right up to the Editor. Everyone is encouraged to suggest ideas each morning – but it’s the Editor’s decision which is final. If a campaign is timely, will give us a sales upflift, increases
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readers involvement and will garner the paper further publicity, then it’s likely to happen. But we’ll only put our name to campaigns we know our readers will really believe in – and sometimes less is more. When the word goes out that a campaign’s beginning, it’s assigned a team of journalists who drop everything else to work on it. A team of designers and graphic artists work alongside them to ensure we have a recognisable logo for the campaign. The post room is briefed to expect huge mail sacks and a dedicated section is set up on The Sun’s website. Eleven hours after the new campaign hits the street, we have to give feedback to the Editor on how it’s progressing. We’ll check the numbers signed up online and the number of first coupons back in the postroom, as some people handdeliver them. But it’s on day two we begin to see the full impact. On the bigger campaigns, sometimes there are so many thousands of replies we can bundle them up into mailsacks and dump them outside the offices of the people we are trying to influence, followed of course by the TV news cameras. Some campaigns, like the recent one for retailers to ditch age-inappropriate clothes sparked by the Primark padded bikini for seven year olds, can be won and over with in two days. But others will run for months and years. In a decade on Fleet Street I’ve never seen a Sun campaign fail yet. And as readers can increasingly get the news for free on the web and 24hr TV channels, behaviour change campaigns will only become more important. We campaign about what our readers care about – and as a journalist it’s what you went into papers for. Not only are you doing your bit to make your paper better, it’s your chance to make the world that little bit better too. Newspaper campaigns are pure people power in action. In many cases campaigns work as the behaviour shift has started already - we know this as our readers tell us and show us. In other cases, we know they will work as what we’re trying to achieve is perfectly in tune with our readers concerns. But in both situations, by harnessing this groundswell of opinion and making it more publicly accessible, we make that behaviour change acceptable, desirable, and something people want to get involved in. The printed word is still more powerful that a flickering screen on a social networking site or a call to action on the TV or radio. It’s something tangible people can hold in their hands, take into work to pass round and discuss with their friends. Joining a newspaper campaign is proof you know what’s going on in the world, and more importantly proof that you care. And who wouldn’t want to put their name to that? Jane Hamilton is The Sun’s Consumer Editor. The Essex-born Cambridge graduate began her career working in marketing working at a variety of through-the-line and youth-specialist agencies. Aged 27 she went back to college to study journalism, swiftly landing jobs as Press Gazette and the News of the World. In her ten years at The Sun she set up the first Sun website, has been a feature writer, the deputy women’s editor and the only woman on the Sun newsdesk for six years until her current role. She has also contributed to a diverse range of magazines including Marketing, Marie Claire, Now, Love It and Practical Parenting.
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“Thank you for such a great event last night. It was really interesting to hear such diverse takes on the issue of changing consumer behaviour. Needless to say the event was organised with the usual BR brilliance.”
McDonald’s UK “Thank you for an excellent evening. It was really interesting and thought provoking – a fascinating couple of hours which flew by. All the speakers had interesting things to say and it really was an outstandingly good event.”
Populus “It was a great evening, very stimulating debate, especially the contrast between the speakers. How can one not enjoy an event that makes you think in two directions at once.”
CTPA “Many thanks for the invitation to your Food For Thought event. It was a delight to hear such insightful thoughts on a topic that was so different from the usual and more often than not dry panel discussions.”
BVCA
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