Ekant Veer
Professor of Marketing
Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury
Ekant Veer is a multi-award winning Professor of Marketing at Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury having been named in the Top 40 under 40 Business School Professors worldwide; an Ako Aotearoa Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award winner; UC’s Teaching Medal awardee and six times winner of a UCSA lecturer of the year award. His research focuses on behavioural change and what drives people to make the choices they do. Primarily, he works on health promotion, social marketing, transformative consumer research and generally all areas where marketing can be used to benefit society, rather than harm it. He has been published in numerous academic journals but is also passionate about seeing academic work translated into real-world impact. In the rare spare time he has he spends his time with his wife and children, exploring back country New Zealand, singing poorly and occasionally spending time photographing our cosmos.
How to change behaviour and the tools we use to make it happen
Behaviour change isn’t simple. If it was, we would all be healthier, wealthier, happier and safer. In reality, behaviour change doesn’t follow logical patterns and many successful behavioural change programs over the years have drawn more on consumers’ attachment to illogical reasoning than bombarding people with a robust cache of facts as to why we should act/think/believe differently. In this short talk Ekant will provide an overview of the current struggles in behaviour change, some common misconceptions, and draw on previous examples of success from an outsider’s perspective to enable us all to apply effective behaviour change strategies to our own work. Time will be set aside for specific questions.