We have recently published two ‘sister’ articles, in partnership with Warc, on how behavioural science can be used to help optimise everyday communications.
Behavioural science has helped us better understand human behaviour and, more specifically, how people make decisions. Furthermore, it has defined a number of concepts and frameworks that, as part of a careful design process, can significantly improve the impact of everyday communications such as customer letters, and emails, giving us simple tools for a more systematic approach to effective communication.
The first article How to apply behavioural science to build more effective everyday communications reviews these concepts and outlines a simple four-step process for applying behavioural science to communications:
- Clearly defining the desired behavioural response, and potential behavioural barriers to this;
- Analyse the context in which communication will be received
- Audit the communication through a behavioural lens to better understand what is driving response rates
- Qualitatively and quantitatively test and measure the impact of changes to communication.
We then look at two case studies that show how this four-step approach has been effectively applied to communications. Click here to read the full article.
The second article is a best practise paper called Seven Key Behavioural Science -Based Concepts for Optimising Everyday Communications.
Here we highlight seven relevant behavioural science concepts: Choice Architecture, Salience, Anchoring, Framing, Chunking, Cognitive Ease and Social Norms, describing them in the comms-context and suggesting how they can be used to optimise communications. You can read the full article here.
For an introductory overview of the articles, click here.