Behavioural Science and the communications industry: we’ve come a long way, but why did it take us so long?

In the days of the Conservative-led coalition Government (remember that?), the Nobel prize winning behavioural scientist Richard Thaler made a flying visit to the UK. Riding the wave of the hugely popular publication, with Cass Sunstein, of Nudge, Thaler was in demand as a speaker. The purpose of his visit was to meet with officials at the Cabinet Office, who were seeking his advice on the application of nudge theory to population behaviour, but, in the evening, he found time to address a gathering of marketing and communications professionals. Visibly jet-lagged and probably dog-tired, he patiently outlined to a packed auditorium why most of what we were doing in our professional lives was ill-informed, ineffectual and frankly idiotic. People, he explained, are not rational; people do not always behave as they intend; it is not always necessary to change people’s intentions in order to change behaviour – small changes to the environment can make it more likely that an individual will make a particular choice, or behave in a particular way etc. 

And we loved it. To rapturous applause, people rose from their seats to tell Thaler how his book, his speech, and his ideas had made them think about communications and behaviour in an entirely different way. Our whole industry, our approaches, our skillsets needed to change, and change urgently. The paradigm had shifted. Then, we all went back to our jobs, and went on doing pretty much what we’d always done, producing witty, stylish, inventive (and expensive) communications products that, for the most part, sought to persuade people, as if they were largely rational and in control of their actions, to do something, whether to buy a new product or live more healthily, but ignored behavioural science. Desire was what we knew how to stoke, and so that’s what we did.

Over a decade later, things have, thankfully, shifted. Who now would write a brief structured around “insight, proposition, reason to believe”? Who agonises over the brand’s USP? Instead, we deploy our skills to creating the right environment, triggers and support for change. 

Behavioural science is now mainstream and high profile, particularly in my field, which seeks to change people’s behaviour for their own, and the social, good. In the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of behavioural science as a critical tool in improving public health. In May of this year, all 53 member states of the World Health Assembly adopted the Global resolution on Behavioural Sciences for Better Health. Behavioural science is now being deployed, at the highest level to address “wicked” problems, from vaccine hesitancy to tobacco consumption, throughout the world.

As I watched the UN’s excellent series of lectures on behavioural science (available here), I reflected on how far we had come, but also wondered why it had us taken so long to get here. If I were to take the behaviour of communications and marketing professionals as my problem, what would I diagnose? As always with behavioural challenges, I lean on the COM-B model, developed by Professors Susan Michie and Robert West at UCL. COM-B argues that, for behaviour change to occur, three factors need to be in place: capability (both physical capability and psychological capability), opportunity (both physical and social) and motivation (both reflective and automatic). Thaler’s speech (and the similarly brilliant speeches made by others, such as Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland or LSE’s Professor Paul Dolan) took care of motivation: post-Nudge, everyone in marketing and communications wanted to be a behavioural scientist. What was lacking was capability and opportunity.

And this has been the patient work of institutions like UCL’s Centre for Behaviour Change, whose conferences have improved capability and provided opportunities for people to think about behavioural science and of initiatives like Nudgestock. The Cabinet Office’s publications, first of Mindspace and then of EAST, spread the knowledge further. And the work of individuals, such as Laura de Molière at the Cabinet Office, Matthew Walmsley at the Department of Health and Social Care or Alexia Clifford at GambleAware , to mainstream behavioural science into our disciplines, improved capability by upskilling workforces and created opportunity by normalising the use of behavioural science. Not only do you want to do it, but you can do it and what’s more, you’re expected to.

Perhaps the biggest recent impact here at Freuds+ has been the development of the Freuds+ Model for Change, developed with us on Freuds+ (strategy led by Jeannie Wyness ) with Professor Robert West . Finally, we have a tool that guides us in how our discipline, communications, can, within a scientific framework, contribute to behaviour change. It is already impacting on how we work at Freuds+, whether that’s addressing gambling harms and stigma for Gamble Aware, looking at mental health issues for CALM, driving uptake of HIV self-testing kits for Terrence Higgins Trust or our ongoing work on vaccine hesitancy for DHSC and UKHSA.

As we look to the future, we need to get faster at changing our own behaviours. This time, the driving force for change is the opportunity presented by AI. AI is already being used to influence behaviours negatively for example in social media in the way that algorithms are used to serve people up information, nudge them and keep them online. But there must be a way to turn this on its head so that the technology can be used for good, and that is our task. This time, let’s ensure we all have the capability, opportunity and motivation to adapt our skills at pace.