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You may recall a widespread marketing campaign that was run by Ask.com. It was aimed at changing online search behaviour. It worked in so far as demonstrating how risky such behavioural change campaigns can be.

The campaign appealed to the public to join the Information Revolution. Posters read Stop the information monopoly and Should one company really control the web's information? An Information Revolution microsite read rather cringingly, The Internet needs you! Fight the mind control! Don't worry you don't all have to take to the streets (you can if you want to, but we won't pay your bail - and we're happy with sofa-bound revolutionaries as well!) Explicit reference wasn't made to Google, but it was pretty clear who the target was.

The idea of information control on the Internet might have been an interesting one, but to most people, the real purpose of the campaign was clear: stop using Google and come to Ask instead. The campaign didn't go down well with the public. At the time, William Davies, a sociologist and policy analyst, summed up the criticism well in a posting for news and opinion website The Register. 'Trying to mobilise people to do something which isn't convenient and won't directly benefit them is hard at the best of times,' he wrote. 'When you're trying to do so in order to prop up your bottom line, you deserve the utmost failure.'

As this campaign showed, changing consumer behaviour is one of the most difficult and alluring of marketing challenges. But it is nothing new. As Jim Hawker, co-founder and director of PR agency Threepipe, says: 'PR has ultimately always been about influencing and changing behaviour. That manifests itself in myriad ways, whether that's motivating people to purchase, recommend or defend a brand,' he says. 'I don't think that has ever changed.'

But recent research from the academic world has injected some new ideas into the field - ideas that have been used in government campaigns to improve public health or reduce anti-social behaviour. And lessons from such campaigns may now be filtering out into the private sector, enabling more companies to tap into the consumer brain.

Academic findings

Mindspace, for example, was a recent report put together by a group of academics and researchers, which explored how public policy can influence public behaviour.

Its main thesis is that there are two ways of thinking about behaviour: the conscious model, which assumes that people take on board information and then make a 'rational' decision (and which has commonly been the basis of traditional campaigns); and the seemingly inconsistent behaviours that make people behave automatically or 'irrationally', depending on the context in which they act. As this more subconscious behaviour has received far less attention from researchers and policymakers in recent years, it has also appeared as a whole new way to effectively influence people in the choices they make.

Paul Dolan, professor in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, and one of the authors of Mindspace, says the research is the basis of several ongoing studies into alternative ways of influencing behaviour - from incentivising people to attend chlamydia screening by offering cash vouchers, to getting people to pay tax on time by demonstrating that it only takes one person to pay late to cause public services to suffer.

Another good example is with pensions. The research shows that our behaviours are influenced by 'default' settings - so we 'go with the flow' of pre-set options (see info at the bottom of the page). So instead of having to proactively sign up to an employer's pension scheme, from 2012 it will become the default setting. 'A lot of money has been spent trying to persuade individuals to take up pensions,' says Kate Waters, strategic planner at Blue Rubicon. 'But with a bit of help from behavioural economics and behavioural theory frameworks, you can think of lots of ways to help that happen more easily. By changing the default and automatically signing people up to a company's pension scheme, people will much more likely accept than opt out. Then you've got people saving for a pension for relatively little effort or cost.'

Waters only joined Blue Rubicon recently, but brought with her considerable experience of behaviour change campaigns from previous agencies. She worked, for instance, on the British Heart Foundation's memorable fatty cigarette campaign of 2002. She then went on to do a lot of work with the Department of Health. 'I wrote the marketing strategy for tobacco control for 2008-2010 and also worked on sexual health and teenage pregnancy issues,' she explains.

At the heart of those kinds of campaign, claims Waters, was the desire to change people's behaviours. 'What I've ended up doing is drawing on a lot of the techniques and knowledge from the academic world to try and understand how campaigns can shape people's behaviours.'

It makes sense that many public sector campaigns would be particularly effective in that they appeal to people to engage in behaviours that are essentially good for them - from giving up smoking to wearing a seatbelt. How far this translates to campaigns where the incentive to change isn't so strong is perhaps where behavioural change campaigns get more tricky. Malcolm Gooderham, managing director and founder at TLG communications, also thinks that only the most integrated, joined-up communications will have any effect on behaviours. 'You think of some of the campaigns that have been successful in the public sector, and you've probably seen them on the radio, TV, posters, billboards etc. They had the funding and were able to use as many channels as are available,' he says.

A broadening trend

That broader and private sector marketing teams are incorporating new lessons in behavioural change, however, is indicated by a couple of recent campaigns. British Gas, for instance, ran a Green Streets campaign, aimed at fast-tracking the development and sale of its energy saving technologies and services. More generally, the company also wanted to improve its green credentials. Instead of just pushing out a message, the campaign involved a year-long social experiment recruiting 64 households across eight UK streets to compete to lower energy consumption and carbon emissions. 'The Green Streets campaign was a perfect example of a private sector company taking a behavioural-change issue that is important to society generally - ie, climate change - and also gaining a commercial benefit too,' says Waters.

The Industry Trust also used behavioural lessons to tackle the tricky issue of reducing piracy in the film industry. The educational campaign that initially ran from 2004 highlighted the illegality of film piracy, with the aim of stigmatising the illegal downloading of films and file-sharing. 'The education campaigns were addressed squarely at an audience who were involved in piracy, and highlighted the threat posed by copyright infringement,' says Liz Bales, director general of the Industry Trust. Bales says the campaign hit problems because there was a great deal of animosity towards the film industry at the time - with a lot of negativity around its dictatorial stance, its focus on its own financial loss, and its seeming distance from the ordinary consumer. There was also a great danger in highlighting piracy - an inherent risk in all such behaviour change campaigns - that it would actually encourage the wrong behaviour.

'The figures are that around seven million youngsters are involved in file sharing in the UK on an annual basis, but if you run with that figure you might make it seem like quite normal behaviour. You're almost giving people permission to do it,' she says.

The Trust decided instead to shift the emphasis of the campaign to reinforcing and rewarding positive behaviour that protects copyright. 'When you look at the campaign it's not overtly anti-piracy,' says Bales. 'It appeals to people in different ways - if you see a trailer in the cinema it's meant to give you a bit of warmth, respect and feedback for having bought a ticket. For those engaged in infringement, it gives them a better, more tangible reason to do the right thing - rather than having something that's more dictatorial in tone.'

The campaign's key message, You make the movies, was used in cinema trailers, on DVD i-dents, on a dedicated microsite, and in a targeted digital campaign, which enabled the Trust to connect directly with the core audience of males aged 16-34. Regional media was also used to tell community stories, demonstrating how piracy affects the livelihoods of local people. 'It's easy to knock a Hollywood studio or conglomerate,' says Bales. 'But it's harder to knock the scriptwriter down the road who is struggling to make a living, just like you.'

Bales admits that such a campaign is not without its challenges. 'Behavioural change campaigns are not a short sharp shock - they're a longer term form of communication,' she says. It's also difficult to influence the public when there are no really serious consequences of bad behaviour. If you're caught illegally downloading a film, for instance, you won't get an immediate penalty. 'You have to craft your communications with the consumer in a way that is more embracing rather than saying If you do this, there will be the repercussions.' The Industry Trust had the further challenge of representing a whole range of stakeholders - including more than 30 commercial entities working in around four different sectors. 'We had to develop a strategy that would give our membership the confidence that if we were to spend three to five years spending around £2 million a year on a behavioural change campaign, then we would get traction but it would take time,' she says.

The role of social media

If it takes a long time to influence behaviour, it can also be difficult to demonstrate success. 'How do you effectively measure behavioural change in a meaningful way?' asks Hawker. He thinks, however, that social media channels might help, in that they allow more effective monitoring of discussions enabling companies to more clearly see a cause and effect from their work. Social media also adds another dimension to behavioural change campaigns generally, offering companies an additional channel for direct interaction with the consumer. Threepipe, for instance, used social media in a teenage anti-bullying campaign for Vodafone. Hawker says it was particularly successful in terms of engaging thousands of teenagers online and creating exclusive content that went viral.

'By passing on the content, the teenagers themselves were becoming ambassadors for the campaign and where PR is extremely powerful is in creating and seeding peer-to-peer recommendation,' he says.

Social media could be important in unlocking the success of behavioural change campaigns because of its ability to get people talking. Indeed, the Mindspace report claims 'we are strongly influenced by what others do'. Bales agrees that peer influence can be critical. 'If you look at things like smoking or obesity campaigns, and you successfully convey that there is threat to you as an individual - then that person will pass on the message to their peer group,' she says. 'I think that's the key to behaviour change.'

Hawker equates traditional and social media to fireworks and bonfires respectively. 'Fireworks can be planned and predicted and although they're sometimes volatile, if lit in the right way they will generate the expected results. Bonfires take much longer to build and may grow in a way you cannot anticipate,' he says. The negative online feedback that Ask's campaign received is, perhaps, a good example of that.

TLG's Gooderham thinks that the most powerful solution is to observe grass roots behaviour before acting. 'Decipher what drives behaviour and then work with it rather than trying to push a message or behaviour onto people,' he says.

In a sense, the academic research is trying to do just that - understand behaviour before trying to influence it. And it seems that many companies are beginning to use that message to change their own marketing behaviours.

Mindspace: The influences on human behaviour

• Messenger: we are heavily influenced by who communicates information
• Incentives: our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts, such as strongly
• avoiding losses
• Norms: we are strongly influenced by what others do
• Defaults: we 'go with the flow' of pre-set options
• Salience: our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us
• Priming: our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues
• Affect: our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions
• Commitments: we seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts
• Ego: we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves

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