Behavioural Science Insights

Turn customer insights into improvements

I love to share the lessons we learned. The Behavioural Design Sprint we did on ourselves is an excellent illustration of how outside-in thinking helped us turn our understanding of our customers into a dramatic improvement of our offering.

In the brief case study below, I will walk you through the key psychological insights, and how these insights inspired us to re-designed our processes to serve our customer’s needs better.

I will use the SUE | Influence Framework terminology to describe the most significant insights into how our customers think, feel, and behave. You can learn everything about the framework in the article “The SUE Influence Framework Explained“.

The Behavioural Insights

The opportunity

Based on the insights I described above, we realized we had to update our offering for the first time in 10 years. The new offering needs to provide a better answer the following behavioural opportunities:

• Piggy-bag on Comforts: How can we provide behavioural design value without interfering with our clients processes?
• Take away Anxieties: How can we lower the barrier to hire Behavioural Design Expertise? How can we provide value without deep effort or time investment from our client and their team?
• Solve Pains: How can we help our clients with understanding their customers, prototyping, testing their ideas, and add the magic layer of behavioural science onto their communication and marketing?
• Experience Gains: How can we get our clients to experience breakthroughs and success as quick as possible?
• Achieve Jobs-to-be-Done: How can we assist our clients into translating a deep understanding of their target audience into fast and clear improvements of their products, services, marketing, or policies?

The Key Behavioural Insight is that we learned that we needed to find ways to provide behavioural intelligence and value inside our customer’s projects and their way of working.

The solution

We came up with four simple new products. All of them aim to leverage Behavioural Design at the right time, at the right place inside the processes of our customers:

1. Behavioural Insights: Get a SUE Behavioural Design Expert to conduct in-depth interviews with your customers, prospects, or employees. Get the best interviewers to find the killer psychological insights into how your market things, feels and behaves. Get help when needed, or get monthly Behavioural insights updates on threats, opportunities, and low hanging fruit on what your customer needs and how you can help them
2. Behavioural Design Scan: Get a SUE Behavioural Design expert do a scan of your customer journey, communication, and competitors and get a hands-on-advice on how to make your communication much more compelling and persuasive
3. Prototype and test and refine your strategy: Get a SUE Behavioural Design expert to prototype, test and validate your strategy, campaigns, and innovations, and learn fast what works and how to get people excited.
4. Successful Implementation: Get a SUE Behavioural Design Expert to optimize and supercharge your marketing communication, using behavioural science as their tool.

Conclusion: Design for the problem

If we hadn’t done our interviews with our customers, we would never have understood that the biggest opportunity for SUE was to find a way to lower the barrier for getting Behavioural Design expertise. Understanding that the biggest barrier is that our customers have internal processes that can’t be overruled easily, was the key to rethinking how we can provide value without interfering with these processes.

We’re constantly learning, improving, and adapting, and we still have a long journey ahead of us. But I’m convinced it’s going to be a fun journey.

Tom De Bruyne

Behavioural Design Domains

The other day someone asked me for a proper definition of Behavioural Design. This is the best one I could come up with:

Behavioural Design is a structured method for turning deep human understanding into experiments for behavioural change. 

You can apply this method to basically every domain involving humans: customer behaviour, citizen behaviour, company behaviour, employee behaviour, market behaviour, family behaviour, etc…

If there’s one thing that 2021 taught us, it would be the total underappreciated importance of  understanding behavioural change. Governments around the globe have been struggling to find the right interventions to motivate their citizens into collective action to beat the virus. So many well-intended measures to ban COVID are being met with deep hostility or sheer indifference.

The behavioural design challenge of triggering collective action to beat the virus is the biggest behavioural design challenge of the year. But there are many more fascinating areas that could benefit greatly from Behavioural Design Thinking. Here is our list of 8 domains where behavioural designers can make a profound mark in 2022. In random order:

Challenge 1: Redesign Policy-Making and policy implementation.

The goal of policy-making is to influence the behaviour of stakeholders in society, from companies to citizens. However, the problem with many policies is that they are based on a poor understanding of how people actually behave. Quite often, bad policies are born out of moral judgements (e.g. ‘unemployed people are lazy’, or ‘deregulate companies and leave everything to the job creators’, or ‘you are guilty unless you can prove otherwise’ ).

Behavioural Design could both help in the design process of policies, as well as in the implementation phase. In the design phase, behavioural designers could advise policy-makers which interventions they should choose. More importantly, they can reveal both the intended and unintended consequences of each intervention and the perverse incentives that are often invisible to the policy-maker. In the implementation phase, behavioural designers could set up multiple pilots to determine which combination of interventions yields the highest results.

Challenge 2: Redesign Housing

We’re in the midst of a housing crisis. Abundant access to cheap capital, combined with high demand and tight rules for building, sparked a perfect storm on the housing market. Add to this the growing need for migrant workers and the resistance in many communities to build houses for them.

One of the biggest solutions is to think outside of the box: How can we re-think the way we build communities? How can we design flexible housing concepts that offer not only a roof and a bed, but also a sense of belonging and community? We urgently need to re-think the idea of home and inspire people to embrace these new ideas.

Challenge 3: Redesign Marketing and Sales

I think there are two major opportunities for behavioural designers in marketing and sales. The first one is to challenge the “customer-centric” mantra and replace it with “human-centred” thinking. Companies that aim to innovate in a customer-centric way could greatly benefit from Behavioural Design Thinking for having a far more granular understanding of the goals, barriers and problems of the user.

The second opportunity is to improve digital marketing. Digital marketing is obsessed with tactics and not with psychology. A better understanding of how the psychology of influence works could dramatically improve the quality of digital marketing.

Challenge 4: Productivity and Creativity

The Behavioural Design Method is a highly structured creative process to facilitate the seamless transition from insight to strategy to execution. By integrating research, strategizing, prototyping and testing in a step-by-step process, we are able to make meaningful processes at speeds that most teams are unfamiliar with. The Behavioural Design Sprint yields a 10x faster and 10x better result than a regular innovation process, where research, strategy, concepting and execution are seperate processes. Furthermore, the Behavioural Design Sprint contains rules and tactics that are deliberately designed to yield the highest levels of creative output from of a group.

Challenge 5: Redesign Finance

Regulators put more and more pressure on financial companies to use behavioural science for helping their clients make better financial decisions. Behavioural Science applied to finance is hot. Both our saving and our investing behaviours are deeply flawed and biased. And, by simply looking at the crypto ads at sports events, exploiting our irrational desires for easy money is a great business model. The business model of banks are also under attack by new digital disruptors. This fuels a lot their appetite for behavioural intelligence on how to attract and retain customer. 

Challenge 6: Redesign Healthcare:

Healthcare is booming. Parallel with radical innovation in biotech; we are also witnessing a boom in preventive healthcare. Helping people build exercise habits, healthy eating habits, losing weight habits, mindfulness habits, and the list of smart apps and services that promise salvation are endless. The holy grail of design and innovation in healthcare is to figure out how to help people overcome bad habits. And the number one behavioural challenge is to help them stick to the new routine. 

Challenge 7: Redesign Sustainability & Climate Action

We have been writing a lot about this topic lately. We all want to live on a healthy, sustainable, green planet. We all feel we need to do something, but we collectively don’t change our behaviour for the simple reason that we look around and don’t see other people changing theirs. This is what behavioural scientists call a coordination problem. There are many opportunities for behavioural designers to develop ways to nudge people into positive green choices. And to frame the sustainable option is the most attractive one. Our favorite example is the Beyond Burger. It doesn’t say: “We are a vegetarian hamburger”. It says: “We have created the juiciest burger ever. It’s beyond meat. Oh and by the way: It’s plant-based”.  

Challenge 8. Redesign Personal Wellbeing and Happiness 

We suck at doing the things that actually make us happy. We think we will get happiness from buying stuff, fulfilling our dreams and desires, and achieving success. But the science of happiness reveals something different. We increase our overall happiness levels from things like learning and experimenting, from having deep and meaningful relationships, from being surrounded by people who challenge us to become better, and from getting genuinely good at something. Happiness is mainly the effect of behaviour and context. We get happier by pursuing our curiosity. We get happier from surrounding ourselves with the right people. The science of happiness holds many promises for Behavioural Designers to set up experiments to explore and re-ignite their curiosity.

Summary

Tom De Bruyne

Wealth and status signaling

It’s always interesting to start our search for insights by looking at the behaviour of “extreme users“. Extreme users are people on both ends of the spectrum: One exciting category is people with modest incomes who became financially independent at age 32. An opposite group of extreme users are the investment bankers, with huge salaries who personally went bankrupt only two months after losing their jobs.

There’s only a slight correlation between how much you earn and how wealthy you can become.

Being rich is not the same as being wealthy.

Five behaviours that differentiate wealthy people from others. 

1. Spend less on stuff.

3. They understand compound interest. 

Albert Einstein once called compound interest the Eighth Wonder of the World. It’s pretty hard for people to understand the magic of compound interest. Still, the simple idea is that if you wait long enough, the accumulated interest on your interest grows exponentially. If you put 100 dollars per month on your investment account at an average of 5% interest and do this for five years, you will have invested 6000 dollars, but the compound interest would be 7573 dollars on top of that 6000 dollars.

That’s why having money in your savings account is such a terrible idea. Inflation decreases the value of that money over time, while low-interest rates don’t get the compounding effects to kick in. The most intelligent strategy is to maintain a savings account for unnecessary expenses and put everything you don’t need today in a long term investment fund.

4. They understand the power of default options.

Most people – like me – hate to think about money or get to deal with cash. Smart people set rules that would directly transfer the money they have left at the end of the month into their investment fund. This way, they don’t need to spend the mental energy to do the right thing. If the money’s there, it will be invested. If you had spent more money on other things, your investment contribution would be lower for a month.

5. They are hyper-rational in times of stress.

Being hyper-rational means, you will have to learn to get comfortable with loss. Morgan Housel from ‘The Psychology of Money” wrote:

The S&P 500 increased 119-fold in the 50 years ending 2018. All you had to do was sit back and let your money compound. But of course, successful investing looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.

“Hold stocks for the long run,” you’ll hear. It’s good advice. But do you know how hard it is to maintain a long-term outlook when stocks are collapsing? Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, doubt, uncertainty, and regret – all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real-time.

The market is performing lower than a previous all-time high peak most of the time. In that period, you are losing money. But if you wait long enough, you will have outlived enough market peaks to make a great return. All you need to do is to keep your nerves and stay patient.

One of the worst ideas is to look at the performance daily through all these new apps. They will make you nervous, and you’ll be inclined to act and make terrible financial decisions.

Tom De Bruyne

Cover visual by Executium on Unsplash