Marketing is Behavior Design

A career in marketing comes with a weird cognitive dissonance.

The way humans make purchasing decisions is incredibly complex. Logically, we understand how emotions, psychological factors, and situational contexts influence our buying behavior.

But once we put on our marketer hats we’re expected to boil everything down into simple cause-and-effect. We put out a call to action and the recipient either acts or they don’t. And when they don’t, it means our marketing has failed.

But did it really fail? Or is that just not how humans work?

If we look to the science behind human behavior, we can start to get some answers.

Behavior design is a concept developed by BJ Fogg - author and founder of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab. Fogg’s focus is on how we can design our own behaviors - as detailed in his 2019 book Tiny Habits - but the concepts are just as useful when it comes to how we can influence others.

The core idea behind behavior design is simple:

A behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a trigger converge.

Let’s break that down.

Motivation - How much do you want a behavior to happen? Motivation comes in many flavors - like the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, or seeking social acceptance.

Ability - How easy is it to accomplish the behavior? Do you have the mental ability? The physical ability? How about the time and money? Does it clash with your routine? The simpler a behavior is, the more likely it is to happen.

Trigger - Without a trigger, a behavior won’t happen. It can be simple and external (like seeing an ad) or complex and internal (like experiencing an emotion).

The relationship between motivation and ability is key.

You might not have much in the way of ability to lift heavy objects, but when a loved one is stuck under a car your motivation could be high enough to make it happen.

Likewise, your motivation to spend an hour scrolling through social media is probably low, but your phone makes it so simple that you do it anyway.

Behavior design provides a valuable lens for planning and analyzing your marketing. Rather than being restricted to a simple pass/fail conversion mindset, you can begin to view (and communicate about) your efforts with the same nuance that goes into human behavior.

Every action you take should aim to increase your customer’s motivation, enhance their ability, or trigger a behavior from a customer that already has the necessary motivation and ability.

And that’s where most of today’s marketing discourse goes off the rails. There’s an expectation that every marketing activity should integrate motivation, ability, and trigger into one piece that leads to a conversion - otherwise, it’s a failure.

In rare occasions a purchasing decision is simple enough that you could bundle the three together. If you’re selling t-shirts on Instagram you might get away with a single ad that convinces a customer they need your product, links them to your store, and prompts them to purchase. But for most purchases, it’s better to think of each category as individual efforts.

Marketing that increases motivation extends beyond just brand building. The motivation to make a purchase starts with the realization you have a problem that needs to be solved. From that point, there are hundreds of psychological buttons that can be pushed to motivate customers to see your product as the solution. This is why feelings like the “fear of missing out” are so powerful.

The capacity of a marketing team to enhance a customer’s ability to make a purchase is often overlooked. Sure, we usually have our eye on the usability of our website. But what about your pricing or the sales process? What roadblocks do potential customers face when it comes to buying from you?

Ability is also context dependent. A trigger that’s effective in one context may not be in another. An ad that might lead you to requesting a demo if you saw it sitting in your office probably won’t work when you’re standing in line for lunch. This is why frequency can be such an important piece of digital ads.

Your potential triggers are something that you’ve probably put a lot of focus into. But triggers go beyond the final conversion. Some of the most powerful triggers lead to behavior chains - small behaviors that start a customer on their buying journey.

Think of the last thing you bought that you put some thought into, then make a note of all the steps in your buying journey. Include everything you can remember that influenced your decision.