Behavioral Change Workshop Part I
Introduction
We are all in the behavioral change business. There isn’t a single marketing campaign that doesn’t require the audience to change their behavior in some way. This workshop will show you how to breakdown behavior from complex theories in psychology to simple frameworks marketers can follow.
Breakdown of Behavior – A Basic Level of Understanding
First off, the simplest way to breakdown behavior is as follows:
Thoughts → Feelings → Actions
Before moving on, think about whether actions or attitudes come first.
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The answer is that actions always comes before attitudes. Advertisers have found in recent years (5-10 years) that instead of appealing to the consumers’ thoughts and feelings through emotional ads, it is more effective to make them take actions and wait for the thoughts & feelings to align with this action. Case Study 1 illustrates this concept in action. Case Study 2 will demonstrate in more detail why human minds unconsciously make our thoughts & feelings align with the actions taken.
Case Study 1 – The Pencil Experiment (Strack, et al in 1988)
The participants were split up into two groups. Group 1 was told to hold a pencil in their mouths with their teeth. Group 2 was told to hold a pencil in their mouths with their lips. They all had the task of rating the humor in certain cartoons.
Before moving on, take a guess at which group gave the cartoons higher humor ratings and why that might be.
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The ones holding the pencils with their teeth forced a smile to form; as a result, they thought the cartoons were funnier than the group holding the pencils with their lips, which forced a frown to form. The fake smile gave participants real feelings of happiness. In other words, the action forced the participants to align their thoughts & feelings.
The principle of actions over attitudes is in essence cognitive dissonance, which is when humans unconsciously align their thoughts & feelings towards the actions taken. We want the first two to conform with the action taken and have no control over this; we will always automatically do so. Knowing this, we can design marketing tactics to take advantage of this intrinsic human characteristic. If you disturb the alignment of thoughts-feelings-actions, then you can influence behavior.
Case Study 2 – Illustrating Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger, Riecken & Schachter 1957)
You might think you understand what cognitive dissonance is, but it might not be as straightforward as you think. I had to reread this study multiple times before truly grasping its message.
The test subjects were first asked to do an incredibly boring task (e.g. some were given a board with 48 square pegs and were told to turn each peg one after the other by a quarter clockwise for 30 minutes non-stop), then they were asked (for a small monetary reward) to stay behind and introduce the experiment to the next group of participants. They were asked to tell the newcomers that this will be an incredibly interesting experiment. Half of the subjects were given $1 to lie about how interesting the tasks were and the other half were paid $20. Afterwards, the subjects were interviewed on how interesting or fun they found their original task (e.g. turning pegs).
Which half do you think reported the original task as more fun?
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If you thought that those paid $20 would more easily change their opinions than those paid $1, then you’d be a part of the majority and also wrong. In reality, the ones who received $1 rated the original task as significantly more fun and interesting, whereas the $20 group did not.
This occurred since the $20 group had less justification to change their opinions because they were paid a larger sum and felt less internal conflict. That is, they lied but they were paid $20 so there was less dissonance. Those who received only $1 felt more dissonance and justified their lie by changing their opinion of the boring task to match the lie they told others. Did you get that?
Breakdown of Behavior – An Intermediate Level of Understanding
Now that you have a basic understanding of the psychology behind behavioral change, let’s break it down into a framework used to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing tactics. As you read through this section, keep in mind that the main purpose of this framework is to help you create insights by changing the way you think about an issue.
What do you think are the components that go into the decision to take an action?
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The behavioral propensity concept breaks down these very components.
Behavioral Propensity = Motivation + Ease
Motivation
Individual Incentives – What’s in it for them? Will they be rewarded and to what extent?
Social Norms – What will others think of them if they undertake that behavior?
Ease
Capacity – Do they have the resources, competency, and skills to do the behavior?
Opportunity – Does the environment allow the behavior to happen?
These four components help you understand how susceptible the behavior is to change or influence. It is used in what’s called the Behavioral Propensity Chart:
For example, take the following two scenarios:
Michael recently started his own beer brand. He wants to get friends and family who already love his beer to recommend it to others.
Mason has created cereal that are shaped as and eaten as chips. It’s supposed to appeal to those who need breakfast on-the-go. He wants to get those people to start eating his cereal chips.
Where would Michael and Mason’s scenarios go on the behavioral propensity chart? If you'd like, mentally plot them somewhere before reading the answer below.
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Michael’s scenario would be in the top right region, as his friends & family who love beer have strong internal & social incentives, and the ease for this behavior is high b/c it takes no effort to give verbal recommendations. Mason’s scenario would be in the bottom right region because while it is easy & convenient for his target consumers to do so, there is little motivation to do this since the social norms component is very low. It would be weird if people saw you eating “chips” for breakfast, so the initial conversions would be incredibly difficult.
Why does this help? → It shows us whether or not we’re changing the right behavior. To illustrate what I mean when I said that it shifts our thinking to better identify the best tactics, let’s dive deeper into Michael’s beer business.
Let's take what we’ve discussion so far and apply the framework to the following four options:
Get friends and family who already love his beer to recommend it to others.
Ask family and friends who don’t like beer to try it.
Ask existing beer drinkers to try his beer.
Ask friends and family who love his beer to purchase more of it.
The right way to plot these is as follows:
This shows that option number 1 will be the easiest behavior to influence, but is that the behavior that Michael should focus on?
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Stopping here would be fine if Michael only wanted to sell 10,000 cases of beer, but it’s another story if he wants to sell a million cases of beer. Here’s where sizing a behavior comes into play.
And so, the answer is no. This was just the first phase of the analysis. Next we’ll dig deeper into the issue by sizing each option. The five key questions to ask now are:
How many people am I influencing?
How many people are they influencing? How influential will that group be?
(DMU → various types of influencers)
What is the frequency of the behavior?
What is the likely penetration? How many people are likely to change?
What is the importance of that behavior in meeting my goal? Is having people talk positively about my brand as important as generating a sale?
Once we take these questions into consideration, the chart starts to look like this:
Now we can see that while option 1 is the easiest to influence, option 3 will influence the most number of people. The decision Michael should take is to create marketing tactics that focus on exposing existing beer drinkers to his beer.
This example is a true story of how an Australian advertising mogul helped his friend start his own beer brand. Michael ended up conducting mass sampling at strategic venues where the beer was distributed, which helped him gain traction and translated into a successful beer brand. He took option 3 and increased its “Ease” by placing his product in front of beer shoppers.
Bringing It All Together
Let’s talk about a real life application of these principles in the world of marketing. Hopefully, this case study will help you better understand how the aforementioned principles work alongside one another.
Case Study 3 – Donation Models for Charities (Ferrier, Ward & Palermo 2012)
Deakin University and the charity called Save the Children wanted to test different donation models for charities.
If I asked you to think about the basic ways to appeal to donors what would you come up with?
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The two most basic techniques are:
Rational messages – statistics showing how important the charity is, the lives that are at risk, how many people have died, how many degrees the Earth has warmed and so on.
Emotive messages – evocative images of the cause (scenes of devastation, or flies in the eyes of starving African children) or the effect (scenes of happy, smiling people) of the charity.
A third technique was emerging at the time and Save the Children decided to test out its impact. It asks the donor not only for money, but also to actually do something for the charity. E.g. Movember asks people to raise and donate money, but also asks men to grow a moustache during the month of November to show their commitment to the cause.
They arranged four groups who received different treatments and looked at how much each cohort donated towards their cause. The differences were as follows:
Received a rational message (facts and figures)
Received an emotional message (smiling happy kids, with an inspiring soundtrack)
Asked to create an advertising campaign for the charity
Asked to solve unrelated puzzles (the control group)
When asked for money, the groups averaged out to the following:
Group 1 – $2.39
Group 2 – $3.69
Group 3 – $4.03
Group 4 – $2.58
Why did the third group give more money than others? Here’s where the principles we’ve discussed earlier comes into play. First, they had a ‘sense of ownership’ of the charity, which made them feel more engaged with the message. Second, ‘cognitive dissonance’ kicked in. The positive action of creating an ad was aligned to thoughts and feelings. Third, people felt a sense of ‘autonomy’; that is, they were invited to interact with a message on their own terms rather than it being forced on them. This circumnavigates resistance to the message and makes it more likely that they will give.
The Benjamin Franklin Effect
In another post, we'll discuss why the “Benjamin Franklin Effect” is a useful principle to know. We will talk about how this disrupted the advertising industry.