Bureau West

There are many cases where we’re called upon to help our clients encourage people to change their behavior to do something they know they should be doing, but aren’t.  This can range from healthy behaviors like eating more vegetables to other areas like putting money in a retirement account on a regular basis.

Studies have uncovered the question-behavior effect, which actually gets people to change their behavior.  Here’s how it works: you ask people a yes-no question about their intended behavior.  For example: “are you going to exercise at least three times a week over the next month?”  In most cases, people answer “yes,” because they realize it’s something they should do.  It fits with their ideal conception of themselves.  And then cognitive dissonance kicks in.  Once they’ve said “yes,” people want to be consistent: studies show they are actually more likely to change their behavior!

How can we utilize this to create more effective marketing?  We need to figure out the right questions to ask to create behavior change.  What is it, related to your product or service, that people think they should be doing?  In focus groups, we utilize projective techniques to uncover the gap between participants’ current selves and their ideal selves.  This can provide the raw material for the creative team to develop great advertising.

Let’s design research to understand your prospects’ current and ideal selves.  Call me at 760-469-9266 or email info at bureauwest.com. 

Sources: Bureau West research; “Using the question-behavior effect to change multiple health behaviors: An exploratory randomized controlled trial,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, March 2019; “Science Says This Is the Best Way to Motivate Other People to Change Their Behavior,” Inc., May, 2018

We’ve all experienced situations where we try to ask deep probing questions about customers’ relationship with our brand, and they look at us blankly with a response like “what do you mean?  I needed X, Brand Y’s product was good, so I bought it.  End of story.”

It can be good to remember that our customers’ lives don’t necessarily revolve around our brand… but there’s still more to it than the transaction described above!  How can we get a deeper understanding of the customer relationship?  I recently borrowed from an exercise used in life coaching to ask research participants about the values that are most important to them, and then asked about ways in which the brand helps them achieve those values.

Here’s how I presented the exercise:

Different things are important to different people.  Following is a list of needs.  You might say all of them are desirable or important… but if you had to choose just five, which five would you say are the MOST important to you personally?

The list included 15 different values, such as the following:

• Security: certainty, predictability
• ­Compensation: money and/or benefits
• ­Achievement: mastery of a task
• Variety: diversity of activities, people, and tasks
• ­Affiliation: connect with people

I followed up with questions about how the company we were researching might help them realize those important values.  After answering the question about which values were important, participants seemed to be in a more thoughtful state of mind and went much deeper with ways the brand helps them achieve the values than they had in prior research.

Find out what’s important to your customers.  Call me at 760-469-9266 or email info at bureauwest.com.

I’ve recently been involved in several research studies in which participants provided both in-the-moment input (e.g., using a mobile app) and retrospective input (in a focus group or interview).  Looking at the differences between what people experience and what they remember can be extremely valuable, and is a great example of the peak-end rule in behavioral economics.

The peak-end rule states that people don’t remember all parts of an experience equally.  Rather, their strongest memories are of two parts of the experience: the most intense moment and the end of the experience.  I saw this in my recent research studies: people who had a high point or a great interaction during their experience tended to remember the whole experience as positive and minimized the negatives they experienced.  And the reverse was also true: people who experienced a significant negative tended to forget about the small positives they experienced.

This has important implications for companies.  It may not be enough to just try to ensure everything goes smoothly in a customer interaction: there’s always a chance that not everything will be perfect.  But small negatives can be outweighed by a great interaction.  For example, a long wait online may be forgotten if the cashier is particularly pleasant.

We can find those opportunities to create great memories by comparing what customers experience with what they remember.  Then we examine the positive memories and look for ways to create more memories like them.

Let’s design research to compare your customers’ experiences with their memories.  Call me at 760-469-9266 or email info at bureauwest.com.

Sources: Bureau West research; “Choices, Values, and Frames” by Daniel Kahneman  and Amos Tversky, 2000