The Behaviour Change Department: Your legacy is defined by changing consumer behaviour

You might have heard about the top five regrets of the dying – and, if not, look it up – but have you ever thought about the top regrets of the retiring?

Think towards the end of your career in marketing. What will you be most proud of and what might you regret?

I recently had the opportunity to speak to a room full of retiring senior marketers and NEDs, and I asked them about the legacy they were most proud of leaving.

Many remembered the impact that they had on mentees, some focused on iconic brand campaigns, others felt proud of innovations that had changed people’s day-to-day lives, and others quoted board influence as their ultimate achievement.

Central to all of them was the behaviours they had changed, and the impact made. They didn’t change how a board thought, they changed what they chose. They didn’t innovate on random products, they changed lifestyles. They didn’t remember one good month of growth, they spoke about changing category perceptions.

The Behaviour Change Department: Marketers need to reframe their influence to grow their powerSeeing marketing through the retiree’s point of view was clarifying. None of us are remembered for our PowerPoint skills, we are remembered for our impact. Put simply, in our power to change behaviour.

For such a vital skill it’s surprising it isn’t formally taught to marketers.

Marketers are trained in many things: creative storytelling, media planning, balance sheet reading, brand building. But we never get directly taught how to actually change behaviour.

When we think of ourselves as agents of behaviour change we start to see our opportunities differently. With a radical focus on getting people to act, we don’t forget the critical step of having a behaviour change strategy.

If you are doing any piece of work where you are trying to influence people’s actions, and you don’t have a behaviour change strategy, you are as good as guessing.

Lesson 2: Power is having a behaviour change strategy

In January, IAG Loyalty ran a promotion encouraging members to boost their Avios balance by purchasing additional Avios.

The ask had to work particularly hard to get people to part with their money during a month notorious for post-holiday belt tightening.

We tested four different messaging approaches, each grounded in behavioural science. Without looking ahead, see if you can guess which one got the most people spending.

1. The Control Condition: This was the baseline message, simply stating the offer: “Multiply Avios by up to four times.”
2. The Present Bias Condition: Humans tend to value immediate rewards over future ones. So, we framed the message around instant gratification: “The fastest way to your dream flights—boost your balance instantly.”
3. The Contextual Priming Condition: Our environment heavily influences our decisions. To leverage this, we appealed to seasonal emotions: “Turn winter days into summer getaways. Escape the winter blues.”
4. The Concreteness Condition: People process specific examples faster than abstract concepts. Here, we made the offer tangible: “Transform 25,000 Avios into 100,000 Avios.”

In this case, concreteness was the key to unlocking action. By making the offer specific and tangible, we turned an abstract concept into something people could immediately grasp – and act upon.

Right now at an industry level there is a shocking lack of discourse in the marketing process about ‘how is this going to change behaviour’. So much is said on tech and the aesthetics of the work, perhaps less than 1% goes to behaviour change.

Georgina Hall, marketing transformation manager at IAG Loyalty who ran the campaign, puts it best: “The results were striking. While all the messages performed, the concreteness condition outperformed the control by 17%, leading to an additional billion Avios purchased. Just a few carefully chosen words – grounded in behaviour change strategies generated a massive impact.”

As marketers we get to choose where we concentrate our attention. When we focus on our outcomes, and make behaviour change our toolkit, we get better results.

No marketer worth their salt wants to create noise that doesn’t create change. By adopting behaviour change outcomes as our radical focus, we can stop our legacy slipping away from us. We can be the generation of marketers that reclaims the full power of our industry, one that shys away from inward facing jargon and focuses on creating enduring impact.

So next time you’re in a meeting and you spot everyone else focusing on everything but the behaviour change strategy, be brave, jump in … and start that conversation.

You might even start to leave a legacy.