Mark Twain famously said, “There is no such thing as a new idea.” Borrowing from this wisdom, compliance officers can benefit by learning from other fields, particularly marketing, a master of influencing behavior. After all, both professions aim to achieve behavior change.
Recent studies in behavioral science, as explored in Nancy Harhut‘s book “Using Behavioral Science in Marketing,” offer valuable insights for crafting effective compliance messages:
Emotional Connection
The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action, while reason leads to conclusions. Therefore, Injecting emotions into your compliance messages by using imagery, loss aversion, scarcity, reciprocity, social proof, and storytelling will drive people to act.
“Your compliance messages need both Rational and Emotional components”
Information Gap Theory
Behavioural scientists have found that if there’s a gap between what people already know and what they still want to know, they will take action to close that gap. Compliance officers can use people’s hardwired urge to find answers as a powerful tool to prompt engagement by using 5 Ws and 1 H, superlatives, questions, quizzes, and challenging statements.
Automatic compliance triggers
Behavioural scientists have shown that people are more likely to comply with a request if it is accompanied by a reason. Compliance officers, therefore, should include the reason why people should respond to their messages, even if they think it is obvious.
Availability Bias
Our brain is selective in where it affords its attention. When making decisions, instinctively or rationally, we only tend to consider the most “available” evidence, rather than the most comprehensive or empirically sound evidence. Compliance officers need to get their message in front of people as often as possible through micro learning, Just-in-time training etc.
Authority Principle
Behavioural scientists know that people are conditioned to respect and respond to authority. As a result, tapping into the Authority Principle is an easy way for compliance officers to prompt automatic action.
Compliance officers should therefore move away from activities that merely check the box and focus on innovative ways to promote compliant behaviour. By adopting insights from behavioural science, compliance officers can craft messages that resonate with people and drive the desired behaviour changes within their organizations.