‘Be concrete, focus on now and don’t try to change’: The final three ways to think like a behavioural scientist

A marketer’s job is to change behaviour but few marketers know how the apparatus of the brain works. This blind spot would be unthinkable in other industries. A heart surgeon has to know how the heart works, a car mechanic must know how the car works, and so this column is all about how people work.

Without insight into how people make decisions marketers are guessing their way through marketing, so in these my final commandments in how to think like a behavioural scientist (see the first nine here), we’re going to focus on the most primitive and powerful concepts.

We’re going to explore how real something feels to the brain, and how you can ‘reduce psychological distance’ to get people to act.

10. Be very concrete

Can you draw what you are saying? It’s more important than you may think.

One component of what we dub ‘psychological distance’ is the concrete / abstract dimension where marketers have the choice to focus on the very tangible or not.

We all remember Trump’s ‘build the wall’ slogan but few will recall the immigration rhetoric of his opponents. Many people will engage in a conversation about improving air quality in their local area who wouldn’t entertain a conversation about CO2 emissions in general.

We recently explored with a bank how best to get customers to sign up to an air miles generating credit card. Giving a 40,000 air mile sign up bonus wasn’t appealing, but saying ‘the equivalent of a return flight to Bali’ was. When you can picture it, it reduces the psychological distance between you and your goal – and you act.

‘Priming, altruism and unintended consequences’: Another three ways to think like a behavioural scientistYou can’t draw 40,000 Avios but you can draw a plane ticket to Bali. Audit your marketing materials for concreteness and see how often you see things you can’t draw – it can be surprising how non-brain friendly a lot of marketing is.

Thinking like a behavioural scientist allows us to communicate in ways that drive engagement and memorability – and it all starts with a little bit of concrete.

11. Focus on the now

Another component of ‘psychological distance’ is time. We are creatures that are wired to be very sensitive towards the present as to the primal brain tomorrow may never come. In fact, your brain processes your future self in the same part that processes other people.

This explains why ‘buy now pay later’ is so popular – my dominant present self gets the reward and my less real future self gets the pain. Perfect! It explains why we don’t make enough sustainable decisions and why we don’t put enough into our pensions, the gain is now and the pain is later.

But insights like these also allow us to be more creative with how we increase the performance of the more rational parts of business, like call centres.

Can behavioural science help us save the planet?The call centre business is not an easy one. It’s a monotonous and tiring job and staff motivation is key to sales and impact. Whilst it’s not always possible to incentivise agents more, when we think like behavioural scientists we can make it mean more.

Commission often lacks potency because it comes in the future, so we trialled making future saving goals very real in the present. We 3D printed objects like houses and cars matched to agents saving goals, to make it real what their extra efforts are for. Bridging this future time gap led to a significant increase in staff motivation and sales conversion.

By seeing that our futures are our blind spots, we can think up much more intelligent and imaginative ways to drive performance.

12. Don’t change behaviour

The last in our 12 principles on how to change behaviour had to be when not to change behaviour.

In India, many germs and diseases are spread by children not washing their hands with soap before they eat. Particularly in the chaos of the school yard, kids were happy to rinse their hands under a running tap, but the soap was a step too far.

So, we performed an inversion. And rather than getting kids to pump soap on their hands, we made their chalk sticks out of soap. When kids run their hands under the tap now they already had the soap on – the outcome achieved with no behaviour change at all.

All of us are architects of our decisions every single day, and the most effective way we can change behaviour is to simply design the context so the behaviour happens naturally.

It’s a lot easier to go with the grain of human nature than to fight it. So, whenever you can, see if you achieve your outcomes without having to get people to step out their way.

Conclusion

In an industry full to the brim with tools and technology it has never been more important to be clear about your behaviour change approach. Marketing is not about how much AI or media space you have, it’s about changing customer behaviour. We are smarter marketers when we keep our eyes on the ends rather than the means.

If you can answer the question ‘this will change behaviour because …’. then you’ll be thinking like a behavioural scientist and that will make the twenty minutes spent reading this column time well spent.