Brand compliance isn’t a box to tick; it’s a set of important controls that protect your organisation from avoidable risk.
But, when those controls meet busy people and tight deadlines, the right behaviour is the difference between good policies and good practice.
Applied behavioural science: the missing link in your compliance messaging?
Your digital brand assets – think logos, imagery, video content etc – move through a lifecycle: create, review, approve, publish, archive. In a perfect world, every step of this process leaves an audit trail, and every employee always complies with the right way to create, review, approve, publish and archive their content.
As great as that sounds, we know this is not always what happens. So, what is the best way to help people follow our carefully thought-out processes more consistently?
Behavioural science is all about understanding how people think, make decisions and act. If your team isn’t following your compliance guidance, filtering it through the lens of behavioural science may help.
Think of Behavioural Science as a user manual for crafting compelling communications.
Here are 7 tips to get you started:
01.
Start with the “why”
People comply more reliably when they fully understand the purpose.
Behavioural science can help you frame your compliance messages to give people that additional context. By helping people see how following compliance processes prevents real problems (like reputational damage, or hefty fines), you’ll make them feel like part of the solution. The underlying message is: There’s a big risk if we ignore this, it’s worth the effort to get it right.
02.
Make it easy
Complex instructions get postponed.
Less is more when it comes to your compliance messages. Behavioural science tells us that if information isn’t salient (i.e. attention-grabbing) and easy to digest, people will ignore it or “leave it for later” when they imagine they may have less cognitive load. Keep the jargon to the minimum, use plain language and, mostly importantly, frontload the action. Tell people what, specifically, you would like them to do and by when.
03.
Use social proof – carefully
Show that compliance is normal…
For example, tell them that “9 of 10 employees archive their out-of-date content correctly.” But beware – don’t lie to people. Use accurate, current data, avoid shaming, and localise by team or region. People tend to mirror what others are doing when they see it as the norm.
04.
Be timely and contextual
Reminders work best close to the time the action is actually needed, rather than long before.
Place prompts in the tools people already use, or as a calendar nudge, close to the time it needs to be done. Then, use a simple escalation ladder for approaching deadlines.
05.
Reduce friction and reward progress
Make the compliant path the easy path.
Think pre-approved templates, default disclaimers, auto-filled metadata, and single-sign-on to the DAM. Recognise teams with high “first pass approval” rather than offering incentives that could distort behaviour.
06.
Set smart defaults
People are happy to accept defaults.
Default to the latest approved logo, apply draft watermarks automatically, and require a rights tag before an asset can be exported for production use.
07.
Finally, make sure you measure what matters.
Behavioural design reduces risk, but it doesn’t eliminate it.
A/B test subject lines and prompt timing, and track completion rates, first-pass approvals, time to approve, and incidents of unapproved use to measure the impact of your interventions. Then, keep what works and retire the rest.
