Our specialist behavioral insights and strategies team has developed a behavioral communications model, called SMARTER™.
Based on the latest science, it brings together seven of the most effective methods by which communications can influence behavior. The model acts as both a framework for analyzing audience behavior and a toolbox from which to influence it.
SMARTER™ combines deep academic expertise with extensive practical experience to help clients create communications that reflect the ways in which people really do behave and make decisions, rather than on how we think they should behave and make decisions. Influencing people isn’t luck or magic – it is science.
Our behavioral scientists help clients apply the science of human behavior to the art of communications.
Experiments
How do you know whether your communications will change behavior? Most communication strategies are based on intuition, but behavioral science uses the latest evidence for how people think and behave to create effective and persuasive messages.
Our team have a bespoke experiment platform for testing the effect of different messages on real behaviors of interest. By combining the gold standard of experimental design with online simulation tools we are able to deliver an evidence-based understanding of what communications are most effective at changing behavior.
Habits+
As part of I-ACT, H+K’s portfolio of services supporting clients through and post-COVID-19, our behavioral science team developed an extension of SMARTER™ that specifically focuses on habits.
Habits+ is an evidence-based approach to starting, sustaining and stopping consumer and employee habits post-COVID. Habits+ applies the latest evidence, data and insights from psychology and related behavioral sciences. It identifies eight ways to change habits, many of which are commonly overlooked, and which are practical to apply into employee or consumer campaigns and initiatives.
We have used behavioural science to identify eight sets of techniques to start, sustain and stop habits:
H+K offer hands-on support using these techniques, either as a stand-alone initiative or as part of your existing campaigns to influence your employees’ or consumers’ behaviour.
When implementing Habits+ we conduct detailed audience research, identifying the best opportunities to engage, and then develop bespoke behaviour change campaigns, deployed with continual testing to learn and improve as the impact of the pandemic evolves.
We can also consult, applying the evidence from the science of habits to make recommendations for you to implement directly. We provide training so your teams can more routinely incorporate behaviour change techniques into campaigns.