Three key lessons learned from campaigns in Hounslow

Three key lessons learned from campaigns in Hounslow

Lesson 1: Reaching Segments • Overall, reaching the target segments was not as straight forward as hoped. For example: – It was largely impossible to distinguish different target segments at schools (other than through the choice of school itself), directly marketing a particular project to a limited group of parents or children was seen as exclusionary – The walk and cycle referral scheme for health centre visitors was intended to be promoted by GP’s and other health professionals (‘trusted voices’) direct to their patients. Despite high level buy-in the amount of proactive promotion by health care staff varied significantly. Where it was enthusiastically promoted all patients received the same promotion, not just the target segments – For employees, designing varied campaigns that appealed to each sub-segment made logical sense under the methodology, but in practice it did serve to reduce cohesiveness of our campaign (as there was no common look and feel). This may have been avoided through more investment in marketing (perhaps using external designers)

Lesson 2: SEGMENT Vs One Size Fits all Campaigns • Undertaking this project raised questions for us regarding the cost: benefit of ‘bespoke vs one size fits all’ campaigns: – The value from spending additional resource on developing (and implementing) a number of smaller niche campaigns compared to just one population wide campaign remains unproven. We put a lot of trust in the findings from the survey (in particular around propensity to change) and therefore developed niche campaigns targeted at small sub-sects at the expense of the majority. We are not sure this has proven to be successful (in terms of modal shift) but once again this may relate more to the size and duration of the intervention rather than the approach per se. – We feel there may be a cut-off point around the size of the intended intervention (in ££) where segmentation may/may not be appropriate. This raises as many questions about the value of poorly resourced campaigns as segmentation however. – ‘Shortcuts’ to segmentation – e. g. using geo-demographic tools to inform campaigns rather than primary data capture may offer a ‘halfway house’ for smartening up small/medium value interventions – It is possible that smaller municipalities (which we would classify ourselves as) will struggle to find enough residents who are in the target segments to warrant the investment needed to achieve notable behaviour change.

Lesson 3: Data and Information • The rich contextual data did influence the way we thought about campaigns and the needs of our target audience/s: – The data analysis from Jillian provided us with a lot of new and insightful information about the different segments within Hounslow and what may be levers for behaviour change. In particular it forced us to consider alternative viewpoints towards travel behaviour held by those we were trying to influence allowing us, in part, to avoid the trap of designing campaigns that ultimately target people similar to the designers of the campaigns…. – Using the propensity to change data provided a useful sense check on the likely behaviour change which can be achieved assuming 5 or 10% modal shift, which can help determine whether it achieves required cost: benefit

Next Steps for Hounslow • Explore how we can re-market the more successful campaigns to reach more of the target group and achieve a better result. • Explore more external commissioning to experienced marketing companies to further improve quality of the marketing and delivery • Consolidate interventions into fewer, larger campaigns • Explore other life change moments which we can provide interventions to