Using Behavioral Insights to Market a Workplace Safety Program: Evidence From a Multi-Armed Experiment

Area of Science:

• Behavioral economics
• Marketing science
• Public health interventions

Background:

• The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) offers safety consultation services.
• Existing marketing strategies may not fully leverage behavioral insights to maximize service demand.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the effectiveness of behaviorally informed marketing strategies for increasing demand for OSHA's safety consultation services.
• To compare various behavioral messages, formats, and delivery modes against a control group and existing informational materials.
• To predict the scalable impact of the most successful marketing strategy.

Main Methods:

• A multi-armed randomized experiment with a partial factorial design involving 19 study arms.
• A large sample size of 97,182 establishments.
• Mixed-effects ANOVA and Best Linear Unbiased Predictions (BLUPs) for analysis and prediction.

Main Results:

• Overall marketing via brochures effectively doubled service request rates.
• Behaviorally informed marketing materials showed no significant improvement over the existing informational brochure.
• The study identified conditions for efficient factorial design in program variant evaluation.

Conclusions:

• While brochures were effective, behaviorally informed approaches did not yield superior results in this context.
• The findings suggest that optimizing existing, effective methods may be as crucial as developing novel behavioral strategies.
• Factorial designs are efficient for comparing multiple intervention variants in large-scale studies.