The Behaviour Business. Richard Chataway

my role was delivering public information campaigns designed to encourage people to quit.

      Smoking is in many ways the quintessential, irrational behaviour. Spock would never touch a cigarette. The legacy of consistent government campaigning for over 40 years means virtually all smokers know it is bad for them. Most want to quit. But lack of willpower, plus the chemically addictive and habit-forming nature of smoking, means they find it hard to do so. Focusing on rational drivers of behaviour – simply providing the logical reasons for quitting – was not going to achieve our campaign objective to reduce overall adult smoking rates to 21% or less by 2010.

      All of our work was couched in terms of behaviour. Everything we did was assessed on the basis of whether it was likely to influence people to quit smoking, and stay that way. The metrics for policy and campaigns were mostly in terms of smoking-related behaviour – overall smoking rates, people attending NHS Stop Smoking Services, and calling our helpline or visiting our website.

      Much of the evidence of efficacy was based on flawed data – on what smokers were telling us, which was not necessarily an accurate reflection of what was driving their behaviour, as we will see in part five. The principles we were applying were from social marketing, or how to use established marketing techniques to change behaviour for good. Much of the theory that informed this was based on psychology, and understanding the irrationalities of human behaviour.

      To build a new departmental tobacco marketing strategy, our team worked with an external strategist, the leading ad planner Kate Waters, now director of client strategy and planning at the UK broadcaster, ITV.

      As Waters put it when I interviewed her in early 2019 at Now, the advertising agency she co-founded: “I did a psychology degree and I never imagined that it would be particularly relevant or useful – in fact I think I managed to forget most of it – until about ten years later when I was working on a brief from the British Heart Foundation, where I had a hunch that psychology might be useful. It was an amazing brief which was essentially ‘the government wants to get more people to stop smoking, and think we should scare people into doing so, but they are concerned that the NHS as a brand is too nice and caring and sharing to do that.’ So they asked the British Heart Foundation to think about what we could do to add another voice to the debate around tobacco control.

      “The ad that resulted is what became known as the fatty cigarette campaign, which I think was probably the most disgusting ad – and I mean that quite literally, as in to elicit disgust – that TV had seen for some time. Possibly ever.

      “Smokers have a very deep relationship with the act of smoking, but interestingly they have a slightly more ambivalent relationship with the cigarette itself, and we wanted to turn the venom on the cigarette. We wanted to get to the point where smokers had a ‘Pavlovian’ response so whenever they saw a cigarette they couldn’t help but think of the gunk collecting in their arteries.”

Several years later, this was still the most recalled campaign amongst smokers. More than 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