Over the past month I’ve been focusing on changing consumer behaviour, I started with a general model by B J Fogg on the fundamentals of behaviour change- motivation, ability, and trigger.
Its a great model- easy to understand and through some worked examples easy to use in your business, easy to use to simplify what you do, easy to diagnose problems in your business and easy to communicate.
Its a clear winning when you are trying to influence new behaviour.
But this model doesn’t have everything, as there a couple of forces at play when you are changing current behaviour.
When you are looking to change your behaviour there are push and pull forces in action.
Push. The current your are trying to solve is a push factor for your to consider changing behaviour
Pull. The new potential solution to your problem, the new behaviour, acts as a pull for you to change.
These are the two forces supporting behaviour change.
But there are also forces inhibiting the change.
Allegiance. The current behaviour may still have some value, especially if there are still some motivations that are solved by the current behaviour.
Anxiety. Changing anything will prompt you to feel anxious. What happens if the new behaviour doesn’t work, or makes the situation worse. Anxiety can prompt inertia and restrain the forces for change.
So as you are observing your customers, researching their behaviours, consider what are both the push and pull factors in favour of your identified behaviour change, but also what are the allegiance and anxiety factors.
If you are asking customers to consider changing from one brand to another, for example, Anxiety could be created by how a person’s friends or family may react to the new brand. Depending on the consumer segment you may need social proof (75% of consumer prefer X) to overcome anxiety. And this is where you can build these concepts into your 4Ps.