Behavioral Changes

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