In order to successfully sell a brand or product in the social web driven world we now live in, marketers must understand and design for the psychology behind simple human behaviour. By identifying how and what influences individuals in different situations, marketers can accordingly adjust their proposition to provide relevant experiences and offers to consumers, which will trigger purchases at opportune times. Successfully understanding human behaviour additionally allows marketers to use technology to heuristically adapt in real time to influence consumer behaviour, resulting in reduced costs and improved lifetime value of consumers.
In order to trigger behaviour that marries benefits for business and consumers, it is important to first understand a bit about human nature. Simply put, as humans, we are fundamentally lazy. We work hard to take the shortest path or route to our destination, and everything we do revolves around optimisation of our scarcest resource – time. However, laziness actually goes hand-in-hand with purpose – our quest for ease has led to some of the greatest inventions ever made. To that end, successful products and services today are accordingly designed to make things easy, such as Amazon’s 1Click and Facebook’s Connect.
Secondly, humans are social beings. In the digital world, we have massive opportunities to connect with a wide influential group of people and we love to share experiences that validate our beliefs and standing with our peers online. We crave looking good in front of others, so for example, when donating online to a charity, people will be more inclined to give if they can see how much their friends have donated. Meanwhile, tools such as Pinterest allow people a very simple way through content curation to visually represent the persona they want to portray in front of their peer and interest groups. Similarly, online retailer Etsy has implemented a simple tool whereby users login via Facebook to access relevant recommendations and surprising gifts their friends would like, enabling the user a quick and simple way to appear thoughtful and knowledgeable. This process is both satisfying for consumers and profitable for Etsy.
Lastly, humans are also creatures of habit. Marketeers now need to design service tools to help form habits that are valuable to consumers and brands in equal proportions. There are all sorts of simple techniques for achieving this, such as using cues and primers within the design, but ultimately, what’s needed is a tool that makes it simple for users to look good and complete desired behaviour, reinforced over time to create the routine.
It’s evident, then, that in order to be successful, digital services, tools and products need to tap into the themes of ease, social and habit. Now that we have established what users want from a service or product, let’s look into how marketers can utilise this knowledge to encourage deeper engagement that actually triggers purchases, by adopting behavioural changing techniques.
Inspired by the theories of Stanford Professor BJ Fogg, I believe there are three ways to change people’s behaviour. The first is to create an ‘epiphany’ moment, in which a consumer realises that they need to do something. This is a technique commonly used by advertisers: for example emotive adverts asking audiences to ‘Donate £5 to Help the Homeless.’ Because they tap into emotions, epiphanies are incredibly difficult to design for, particularly when looking to create that ‘aha’ moment that will eventually result in a long term behaviour change.
Another way to change somebody’s behaviour is by changing their environment or context. By making small changes to somebody’s natural environment or context, the person’s behaviour will follow suit and change to fit the context of that environment. Let’s take the giving blood example. By setting up regular blood donation stalls in somebody’s office, they will be more inclined to give blood. The concept behind this is that by creating an easy, seamless experience for the consumer, behaviour is encouraged simply by environment, convenience and the social element of peers also doing it.
The final way to change somebody’s behaviour is by making small steps to encourage people to change their behaviour. By encouraging somebody to incrementally do things, making small changes to their normal routine and rewarding them for doing so, customers are more likely to make long-term changes in a series of small, manageable steps.
When considering behaviour, it is also important to note that it is much easier to alter someone’s ability to do something, than to focus on changing their motivation. For example, if a person is already motivated to act in a certain way, making the action itself accessible and easy for the person will result in the person undertaking action as desired. But if the person doesn’t have the motivation to act in the first place, simply making the action easier won’t have much of an effect.
If marketers identify what consumers want, i.e., social, easy, heuristic and habitual services and encourage behavioural change accordingly, they will undoubtedly see a return on investment. The technology exists to track user preference and trigger behavioural change – indeed only recently, Waitrose announced that it was employing a behavioural tracking platform to do just that. The most sophisticated marketers will thus be looking to employ these software platforms to identify motivated consumers, offer them the experiences and services that they want – while simultaneously encouraging small changes in behaviour and a person’s ability to increase sales and engagement.
