It's not every day that family planning in the third world comes to the rescue of big business, but the Behaviour Change ladder has its routes in work done by Phyllis Tilson Piotrow and published in her paper "Health Communication - Lessons from Family Planning and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Center for Communication Programmes, 1997,".
In its original form, each step was further broken down into three of four specific actions or examples, but the top level model works well for any industry or endeavour.
Take FMCG maketing. First the custmoer needs to know we exist - by marketing or seeing the product or word-of-mouth. The they need to apporve, or have a favourable opinion of it. They must think its a good product and see its saliency to their needs - again a role for marketing or word-of-mouth, or maybe demonstrations and trials. Next comes Intention, they need to decide that they are going to buy the product - at this point we need to make the purchase as easy as possible. Then they put into practice - they buy. But we don't want things to end there. We want the customer to become an advocate of the product and to tell their friends about it, grow word-of-mouth and start the whole cycle again in lots of other people.
The ladder works just as well with software change issues - like say a company re-organisation. Employees need to be aware of the change, we then want them to view it favourably, we then want them to commit to the change, to help make it happen. Once it's happened they need to be happy to operate in their new role, and finally we want them to advocate the benefits of the change to other employees.
For a good overview of this model , and others from the public service sector visit the Communications Initiative, and in particular this summary presentation
