14,000 people gave up smoking as a direct result of the campaign.20
Source: BHF Fatty Cigarettes Campaign Ad, 200421
When Waters compiled our department’s marketing strategy a few years later, she brought in insights like this from behavioural science to help people quit more successfully. The strategy changed from simply giving people rational reasons to quit based on the long-term consequences of smoking (e.g. increased risks of heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer), to more emotive and immediate short-term effects that leverage heuristics and biases, as in this example.22 Additionally, the campaign put equal focus (and budget) on providing tools to help people stay smoke-free, after the initial attempt to quit. These included a number of psychologically informed nudges at relevant times to boost quitters’ motivation and willpower, delivered by text messages and email, including positive messages about the health benefits that non-smokers experience.
This worked spectacularly. Over 100,000 people responded to our 2008 campaign to seek NHS help to quit, and we delivered the 21% target by 2009 – a year early. And it personally inspired me to start applying these principles more regularly in my work, in both the public and private sectors.
Nudging for good
A few months later in 2008, the book Nudge was published. Written by Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, and Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economics professor, this showed how insights from behavioural economics could be used to encourage better behaviours, through ‘nudging’ or ‘libertarian paternalism’.
Few books have had such a widespread impact on the practices of governments and beyond. The premise is relatively simple. Using their Spock and Homer analogy, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrated the most effective way to change behaviour is often to ‘nudge’ our desired behaviours – eating better, saving for retirement, donating our organs – because we lack the ability or willpower to achieve this due to our innate biases.
Rational appeals to our system-2 processes will be ineffective in those situations. In the smoking example, a smoker’s Spock brain knows it is better for them to quit – but Homer stops them doing it.
They define a nudge as a subtle, often seemingly insignificant, change to the ‘choice architecture’ – the way a choice is presented – which influences the choice taken. The numbers of people registered as organ donors, for example, can be significantly increased by moving to an ‘opt-out’, not ‘opt-in’, model, i.e. everyone is assumed to consent to be an organ donor unless they explicitly say otherwise, typically when completing a government form.23 Similarly, putting healthy food on more accessible (e.g. lower) shelves in a supermarket increases the number of people buying those products rather than unhealthy snacks.
The visceral warnings on cigarette packs also qualify as a nudge, because they do not restrict the ability to buy cigarettes, but instead make it more cognitively difficult to buy (less attractive). Similarly, making cigarettes more physically difficult to buy (putting them in an unmarked locked cabinet, for example) is another nudge.
The approach gained instant favour among government policy-makers. The advantages are clear: firstly, it does not force citizens to change behaviour, as their ability to choose is maintained and their individual liberty is upheld; secondly, changes to choice architecture are typically low-cost, low-impact interventions; and thirdly, by ‘going with the grain’ of peoples’ desired behaviour, nudges are unlikely to cause widespread objection or unrest among citizens.
As we will explore throughout this book, these are also significant benefits to business. If nudging behaviour is easier, cheaper and reflects sentiment towards the business and brand, then, by definition, it is a more profitable approach than the alternatives. That is, a shove (forcing people into a particular action, such as removing a product from sale) or what Sunstein calls a ‘sludge’ (making it harder for people to achieve a desired outcome, such as making it difficult to unsubscribe from a service).
Behavioural government
In 2009, the Cabinet Office produced a report with The Institute for Government called ‘MINDSPACE’, which sought to guide policy-makers on how to use these principles. Sunstein became a key advisor to the Obama administration, and Thaler was integral to the establishment of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – the new ‘nudge unit’ strategy team created under David Cameron’s government in 2010, led by David Halpern (one of the authors of ‘MINDSPACE’).
A number of the founding personnel and principles for the BIT were from the Behaviour Change Unit previously established at the COI, the centralised government marketing department where I was working as a communications planner at the time.24 Using these insights from behavioural economics, social marketing and social psychology, the COI had also produced a report in 2009 on best practice communications and behaviour change. With my colleague, Guy Dominy, we designed a training program for government communicators based on principles from this and ‘MINDSPACE’ – drawing on examples from the tobacco campaign, in particular, to illustrate how a focus on nonconscious influences can successfully drive behaviour change.
From here, the BIT has grown to have a presence in five countries globally, and the model has been adopted in a widespread fashion elsewhere, with the creation of numerous ‘nudge units’. This growth has been driven by a scientific application of the findings of behavioural science.
In government, where accountability is paramount, this evidence-based approached has proven revolutionary. As Halpern puts it: “This is just a glimpse of an exciting and important future: where policy and practice is based on hard evidence, not just instinct or history, and where public money can go further and outcomes continually improved.”25
Guided by successes such as the reduction in smoking prevalence, governments have moved from a narrow application of the insights from behavioural science in (social) marketing to a much broader, scientific, outcome-based application. There is much that business can learn from this approach.
Nudging through technology: My QuitBuddy
In 2012, I moved to Australia to take up a role as strategy director at the media agency (UM) for the Australian Federal Government.
As in the UK, smoking was the single biggest preventable cause of death in Australia. And despite a long heritage of effective behaviour change campaigns giving Australia one of the lowest smoking rates in the developed world, smokers continued to smoke despite being aware of the risks. It was clear, as in the UK, that focusing on the desired behavioural outcome (getting people to quit and stay quit) would be more effective at reducing smoking rates than simply giving rational reasons to give up – giving them the how, rather than telling them why. It would also be considerably more efficient (i.e. cheaper) than an expensive advertising campaign – an example of what Thaler calls “making it easy”, his three-word summary of Nudge.
When I joined, my new colleagues at UM had talked to our government clients about using then-new mobile app technology to help people quit. Bringing insights into effective ways of nudging behaviour – such as the importance of social proof (i.e. seeing that others had successfully quit using the app) and saliency (i.e. providing bespoke information to each user) – we built an app with development partners The Project Factory called My QuitBuddy.
The first version was built in a mere eight weeks and was very much based on an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach,26 with fairly limited functionality. It included motivational messages of support, a game that smokers could use to distract themselves when experiencing cravings, the ability to record motivational messages from loved ones and provided up-to-date data each time a smoker opened the app on how much money they had saved, toxic tar they had avoided and so on.
After launch,
