Behavioral Changes
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Behavioural Change
In principle there are only three ways
in which communication can be useful.
I want just to run through them now:
The first is the easiest, which is Information
Informational Transfer presents data or facts
which were not previously know to a person
and the transfer means that the person now knows facts or data.
For exmaple the longest recorded flight
of a domestic chicken is 13 seconds.
If you didn't know this fact you do now.
News bulletins, financial statements and announcements
all fall into this category.
The second way audiences can be changed with communication
is through attitude change.
Attitudes deal with how you feel about things,
and involve some cognitive and comparative processing in the brain.
For example if said that eating chicken was better for you than beef.
This might change your attitude towards chicken.
Especially if you are nutritionary minder.
This is the denay of advertising agencies.
They are highly skilled with associating values
and attitudes with products in our mind.
And they hope that when you go shopping you will choose
one brand over another.
And despite the fact that of course advertising works on everybody else
but not us, brand preference is surprisingly effective
at differentiating between comparable products.
The third area where you could have direct effect on people
using communication is Behaviour change.
This is really the holy grail of persuasive communication.
Because it results in people actually doing something.
It's all very well people having favourable attitudes
towards chickens, but if you are KFC
you need people to actually come in and buy some.
So these are three ways people can be changed by communication.
Now, obviously
there is an implicit link between the attitudinal approach
and the behavioral approach.
Advertisers hope that if you can sufficiently
change people's feelings -- that is, their attitudes --
towards a product, then there is a greater chance
that will go out and buy it i.e.change their behaviour.
Indeed it seems like completely common sense
yet surprisingly the signs does not support this.
in fact, there are countless studies
that show that changing people's attitudes
is not a very effective way of changing their behaviour.
It turns out that our behavior is motivated by
a whole number of influences
of which attitudinal change is only one
This has opened up a whole new approach
to behavioral change.
In many aspects the old approach has been
turned on its head. The old model saw attitude change as the
precursor to behaviour change.
In contrast, the new model identifies
under what circumstances will the behaviour change
and only then considers the role that
attitudes and information may play, if any
This approach is significantly
more effective, as it does not need
to have product with values and attributes
to achieve behaviour change.
It just needs a Motivation.
For example if you were trying to persuade a number of teenagers not to smoke
the old attitudinal approach would concentrate
on the negative health effects of cigarettes
addiction and cost.
some of these might hit their marks.
But the behavioral research shows that these teenagers are not particularly
interested in the long-term health consequences of smoking.
And even the expense is not really a major factor.
In fact the behavioral data shows that
what really matter to these teenagers are
their boyfriends and girlfriends.
Teenage romance it appears is a powerful motivator.
So this case:
if we can demonstrate that smoking will limit the chances
of finding the right boyfriend
and reduce the number of valentine cards that comes through the front door
then we are now talking about something that really matters
to teenagers.
and even more importantly because we can
rank an audience's motivations
from strongest to weakest we can identify
in advance which approaches are likley to work
and lead to the greatest behaviour change.
Marketing can obviously
benefit greatly from this behavioural approach
But the really exciting applications are in sectors
which do not attempt to sell a product
but where communication outcome is critical.
For example in the defense sector
where changing behaviour can really be a matter
of life and death
the behavioral approach is already being used to understand
the motivations of terrorist organizations and populations
from which terrorists emerge
This analysis is
then used to produce highly persuasive communications
which strongly resonate with audience
and encourage behavioural change.
Every success in this influence arena
replaces the need to use force and reduces
casualties on both sides of the conflict.
There are obviously many
other critical areas
such as health, education and social responsibility.
Perhaps even global warming
where behavioral approach to persuasive communication
can lead to quantifiable results.
Subtitles by https://www.vk.com/make_ideas_not_war