The Beauty of Behavior Design with Roger Hurni of Off Madison Ave
Roger Hurni is the Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Off Madison Ave. He brings a unique perspective as a behavior strategist, creative visionary, and branding expert to the clients he serves. Roger knows that unprecedented results are achieved by optimizing the three variables of human behavior. This basis is the foundation he uses to develop behavior-changing results for organizations of all sizes. Currently, Roger serves as a member of the prestigious Walter Cronkite Endowment Board. And he serves on the global board for the Worldcom Public Relations Group, where he was its past Global Chair.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Roger Hurni provides a quick definition of behavior design and how it applies to marketing
Why expertise in behavior design is essential as it relates to marketing
How Roger discovered that his expertise in behavior design would separate him from other marketing agencies
Off Madison Ave’s approach to behavior design
The trick to determining customer motivation
Why behavior design is effective at saving clients money
What you’ll learn in this episode:
What are your top priorities when marketing your product or service? Is it telling everyone about your offering? Is it showing off what you have for everyone to see? Or is it affecting the behavior of the people most likely to be interested and motivating them to buy? If you want to learn more about influencing customer behavior, you’ll love this episode of From Persona to Personal.
Off Madison Ave focuses on changing the behavior of potential customers by using the Fogg Behavior Model, developed by psychologist Dr. BJ Fogg, Founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. According to Roger Hurni of Off Madison Ave, behavior change happens when three elements occur simultaneously: people are motivated to change their behavior, they can act on it, and they are prompted to do it. Roger is one of the few people who scientifically apply behavior design to marketing.
In this episode of From Persona to Personal, we’ve flipped the script, and Roger Hurni, Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Off Madison Ave, is interviewed by Chad Franzen of Rise25 about all things in behavior design and how he uses it in marketing. Roger shares the tricks to determining customer motivation and how it can be effective in making money for your clients and saving them money by preventing unnecessary work. Don’t miss this interesting and informative episode!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
This episode’s sponsor:
Today’s episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave. At Off Madison Ave, we create meaningful moments of brand trust and influence how people interact and engage with brands.
There is a science behind tapping into your audiences’ desires and motivation. After all, if you’re not changing your audiences’ behaviors, you can’t truly unlock all of your brand’s potential.
The proven models and methods of Behavior Design is the strategic foundation for your brands’ success.
Episode Transcript
Roger Hurni 0:06
Hello, everyone. I'm Roger Hurni. I'm the host of this show where I am fortunate enough to speak with top leaders in different industries such as travel and tourism, and food and beverage. And today, I am here with Chad Franzen of Rise25, who has just done hundreds of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, investors and CEOs. We have flipped the script today. And instead of me interviewing him as a guest, he'll actually be interviewing me, Chad, welcome to the show.
Chad Franzen 1:41
Hey, thanks so much, Roger. Great to be here. I look forward to speaking with you. Before we get started, I'll let everybody know that today's episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave. At Off Madison Ave, they create meaningful moments of brand trust and they influence how people interact and engage with brands. There is a science behind tapping into your audience's desires and motivation. After all, if you're not changing your audience's behaviors, you can't truly unlock all of your brand's potential. The proven models and methods of behavior design is the strategic foundation for your brand’s success. If you want to learn more about behavior design, contact Roger at Roger.Hurni@offmadisonave.com. And hey, strangely enough behavior design is going to be our topic today. As we get started with the interview, Roger, how are you?
Roger Hurni 2:26
I'm doing very well, kicking off the week, with a lot of forward looking happiness, that I would say, a lot of good things happening.
Chad Franzen 2:36
Good to hear. Hey, so in terms of behavior design, for those who aren't totally familiar with the concept, can you give me a quick definition of that?
Roger Hurni 2:44
Yeah, it is, in its simplest form, behavior design is is nothing more than a series of models and methods that allow a behavior designer like myself to facilitate human behavior. And it's based on how much motivation someone might have. And there could be a number of factors that affect motivation, you know, like hope rises motivation, and like fear suppresses motivation, what their ability is to perform a specific, specific behavior, and ability is affected by a whole bunch of things like, is there a physical effort or mental effort? Or is there time or money like all these things go into our ability to do any sort of behavior? And now we can adjust that? And of course, then there's this prompt. How do we prompt the behavior to happen in a very, very specific moment. Those three things have to come together all at the same time for any kind of behavior to happen. And today, we're going to be speaking about marketing, but whether or not you decide to go to the gym, right, or take your spouse out to dinner, or meet up with friends, right? Those are all individual behaviors and all them from a behavioral science standpoint, can be broken down into a sufficient amount of motivation, and ability be able to perform that behavior and a prompt that makes that happen.
Chad Franzen 4:02
Why is kind of having a background or knowledge or expertise in behavior design important in terms of marketing specifically?
Roger Hurni 4:10
Well, in behavioral science, people will use those elements all the time to look at behavioral economics or explain personal things that are happening in someone's life, like why they're losing weight or getting in shape, like we see that all the time. There's very, very, very few people that actually apply it in a scientific way to marketing. It's sort of this thing that's in the ether. What we've done is we've looked at those things to really identify the most motivated audiences that will help a client actually see the success that they want. And then we break down the client objectives into these very bite size behaviors and behavior sequencing that over time will lead to significant change. That's very different then if we give people enough information that will in turn change their attitude about something, and then that will change their behavior. And that doesn't work. A great example of how that doesn't work is smoking, right? People have been told for eons that smoking is really bad for you. We've given everybody a ton of information. That's never changed in attitude. It's never changed behavior. And when I've had people question, oh, well, people have stopped smoking, they haven't stopped smoking, because of the information, there was a catalyst to the motivation. And that is what set a whole bunch of smaller behaviors in to be executed, which eventually led to someone quit smoking. But information alone doesn't quit smoking and in marketing, that's where we see a lot of people fail. A lot of brands, a lot of agencies or contemporaries will rely on information and putting information out there to shift behavior.
Chad Franzen 5:59
When did you discover that behavior design was something that would separate you from maybe other marketing agencies or the the information provider type style?
Roger Hurni 6:06
You know, this is, I really appreciate that question. Because it's a, it's a bit of a journey. I got started in my career a very long time ago, we don't talk about when. But as a creative person, I've always told clients my entire career is look, at the end of the day, my job is to change behavior for audiences. Now, as a creative person, I just didn't know how I did that, that people just think it was magic that we've just like created campaigns that persuading people to change behavior. We always refer to other creatives as he or she gets it, meaning you understand how to do that instinctively. But I could never really explain that to anybody, I didn't have the language tools, I didn't have the models to be able to do that. And I was I was fine with that. Because then you're the creative genius guy, right. And while that served me very, very well. It was frustrating when clients wouldn't buy off on stuff that made perfect sense to me. But they couldn't see the forest for the trees. And back around 2015, 2016, I got introduced through a colleague to behavior design, which was created by Dr. BJ Fogg at Stanford University. And he runs the behavior persuasive lab and in full credit, he's been a great mentor and I ended up going through his certification course, to get certified behavior design, because I, I had enough of a working knowledge through my friend, I'm like, Oh, this could be interesting. And it could maybe help me, but I didn't realize how profound of an impact would actually make in my life and my career and my business. And so about 20 minutes into meeting BJ, and us walking through models, it had this epiphany moment where I was like, wow, like, I actually know how I do what I do. And I have a way now of explaining it to clients with how campaigns are created, and how we've shifted behavior of customers, to either increase sales or get brand more brand affinity or make their employees more motivated and happier. And it just provided me this massive amount of background, to be able to logically help people who aren't creative, understand how marketing should actually work, and why campaigns will fail, or why campaigns will succeed, because of behavioral shifts.
Chad Franzen 8:31
You know how you do what you do, give me a process breakdown in terms of how that works? What's your approach to behavior design? And how you how do you do it?
Roger Hurni 8:43
So, you can use behavior design at any point during a campaign cycle or product development cycle. Or internally, operationally, if you're looking to do something with your staff, I have found that I primarily use it on the ends of the spectrum of any of those things. One is in the beginning, when there’s strategic planning and how you can gamify and make certain that any initiative you're taking on is going to be as successful as possible. And I look at it on the back end, where something might not be happening, there's a problem. And how do we triage that? How do we recalibrate what we're doing so that we can start to see success or this has happened, cut bait and move to something that will create success. So the way that process works, if we're talking about strategy upfront, we first look at the motivations of audiences. And it's not a finite thing. It's this constant moving target motivation, right. Chad, I'm gonna use you for an example right? You've got a business partner I know named Jeremy. Jeremy comes in and says, Hey, Chad, I think you really screwed up on something truck driving school, you're highly motivated to go to now because it sounds really great because you know, you've disappointed Jeremy. But then an hour later, Jeremy comes back and says, Oh my God, these like three clients called Chad and they love you. And this is so amazing, you're doing such great work, all of a sudden, your motivation to go to truck driving school is just really dives down, right. As a marketer, I can't time motivation. It ebbs and flows all the time but there's somewhat of a consistency and motivation with an audience's brand affinity towards something that might be very personal to them. Right. So I'm sort of in transit. So in the beginning, it comes down to how do we find and determine who the most motivated audiences are, I worked on a client who thought they were selling tickets to a museum or aquarium specifically. And they thought their audience was families with kids between the ages of four and 12. And they weren't selling as much as they wanted to. And when we examine motivations behind the audiences, it's not that and apologies if this comes across a little sexist, it's not that fathers weren't interested in their kids schedule, they just didn't take care of it. And so when we shifted to moms as being the audience with those kids in that age range, ticket sales increased, because it shifted the media, it shifted the messaging, because moms for the most part were in charge of the kids schedule, right? So we look at motivation first. And then we have a we have a specific behavior, we want you to buy something, or we want you to take care of something, or we want you to share something we look at how hard is that ask? Am I asking something that's too difficult. As a pool company, I'd like you to take care of your pool for the rest of your life. That's a very, very hard behavior. But I could say, hey, what if we just got someone to come in once for a free pool test? Right? That's a very simple behavior. And so we look at someone's ability to perform the behaviors to meet a client's objectives or aspirations. And I separate those two because objectives, objectives are the kinds of things you can see on the bottom line, this spreadsheet sales went up 10%, right? Aspirations or we'd like our clients to be happier with us as a company, right? It was their is there an agency or we'd like our, our customers to engage with us more, you know, when it comes to like, just speaking to our hosts, right at a casino. So you look at motivations, then you examine the ability to perform a very specific behavior or set of behaviors. And then we determine how do we prompt them? Right, we can often take the forms of media or customer relations, how do we push them at the right moment to make that behavior change? That could be the form of a social media influencer, that we actually have them post something, it can be the form of engagement, when you actually walk into store and how the employee greets you. It can be an actual ad or advertising campaign, it runs the gamut. So motivation, and strategic planning, motivation, ability and a prompt. And that's how we can determine the success of a campaign. If we feel like it's going to be successful, we can define human behavior that way. But when something's not happening, we actually work in reverse. We actually start with, did this audience receive the prompt? Yes. Awesome. Are we asking something that is too difficult for them to do? No, we're not. We're asking you this very simple thing. Okay, great. Do we have the right audience? Does this audience have enough sustainable motivation to perform this behavior? In the case example, I gave you the aquarium? No, because dads weren't involved in the kids schedules mom's were, and that shifted everything else. So that's, that's the process, it goes one way when you're up front and planning, it goes the other way, when you're triaging problems.
Chad Franzen 13:46
Is there kind of a trick to determining motivation? How did you come up with dads not not, you know, being as involved in kids schedules as moms?
Roger Hurni 13:55
Yeah, a lot of that just has to do with tried and true research. So it can be a combination of secondary research that we pull, there's media quintiles and Scarborough data, there's prism clusters, there's all this psychographic data out there about who does what, when in terms of buying power, like who shops more in a household, you know, where women shop, 70% of the time men shop 30% of time for groceries, right? All of that data exists. It's just, it's more about not it's not about having the data. It's about accessing the data through a behavioral lens and so what people have done traditionally, they've looked at any of that kind of data and said, Oh, this is what we see as the buying cycle. Let's target that audience. But what they're not examining what is motivating that audience to buy in the first place. And so taking a behavioral approach to that same data can lead us to some different outcomes.
Chad Franzen 14:58
How would you say behavioral behavior design is useful in terms of, you know, deciding to do work or doing work, and maybe not doing work.
Roger Hurni 15:08
Yeah, it's interesting. Thanks for the question. It's interesting that I've had a couple of clients asked for a case study, and they're like, I'd like to give you a case study when we didn't do something, and how that saved how that save the client money. In terms of doing work, in changing mind shifts, we, I was working with a pool company. And when we were speaking with the CEO, I asked him, who's our customer? And he said, Well, everybody who's got a pool can buy from us, right? You can take care of your own pool for the rest of your life, like that's that everyone has, you've got to pull your customer, potential customer. And I said, Hey, that's super interesting. I think you're wrong. Because we are motivated to do pool care, like anything else. And that can ebb and flow. And there's people that are out there who want pools, they just don't want to take care of their pool. And he said, What do you mean? So going back to the behavior models, I said, Okay, well, you have an audience who knows how to take care of the pool, and they're your best customers, they buy from you all the time chlorine on sale this week, and boom, you're gonna get sales. There's a an audience who doesn't have a pool. So clearly, you're not going to go after them. Right. They have no motivation, no ability to take care of the pool, because they don't have a pool. So I don't care. Right? Clearly, that's an easy on instructor. I said, you do have people who are motivated to take care of their pool, but they just don't know how. So highly motivated, but they lack ability. I said, that's your opportunity, because you can convert a small percentage of them. And it will change your business in profound ways. If you show them how to take care of a pool, and sell it telling you to take care of your pool for the rest of your life. If you start with a behavior sequence that says, Okay, come in for free pool care test. And then we're going to show you what you need to do, we'll give you a free pool care plan. And after that, we'll have you come in for another test. And then oh, you can set up an appointment, show how the equipment works. And then at some point down the road, we'll show you how to clean your own filter, you know, you'll get to a point where enough of those smaller behaviors are created, that that person will eventually take care of the pool for the rest of their life. Like that's the real business opportunity, the pitfall, and where you can waste time and treasure is if you go after an audience who has a pool that lacks motivation. And I said, I'm a prime example of that. I used to take care of my own pool, but I have a pool, I'm happy to pay the $100 a month to have someone take care of my pool for me, I don't have the motivation to do it. And you can't motivate anybody to actually do anything that's, that's either there in some, some degree or it's not, you're not going to, you're not going to tell me hey, you can save X amount of dollars per year, because that the money's not motivating me with why I'm doing that. Maybe I just don't like to take care of my pool, maybe I think it's a waste of time, every 15 minutes every once a week, right? I just, I don't want to deal with the chemicals, I have better ways of spending my time trying to get someone to stop performing a behavior that they're very comfortable with, like paying for pool service, and get them to change behavior and take care of it on their own. That's incredibly, incredibly difficult. And I said, Why would you waste hundreds of 1000s of dollars or millions of dollars going after that audience, ignore them. Don't ever have a message that says, hey, dump your pool care company and come to us, right? That's just a waste of time. Educate people, show them how they can take care of the poor for the rest of their life, you'll convert a significant percentage of them. And that will change your business financially in very, very profound ways. And it did for this one company.
Chad Franzen 18:31
So is that so does that just require a different messaging or a different approach all-together?
Roger Hurni 18:36
It really does require different messaging, because it's not saying stuffs on sale. It's saying, here's how we can help. And here's how we can help in very small ways that are really easy. You know, and so that becomes, that becomes part of I say, behavior sequence, because it doesn't, it's not one behavior. Yes, if I get you to try Chobani over Yoplait, because you happen to like yogurt. Yeah, that's a single behavior, because I'm inducing an inducement like $2 off, right? That can happen. But if you're looking for, I tell customers, all the clients all the time, sales are easy. customers for life. That's hard. Yeah, you can get a quick sale, you can make your numbers go up over the quarter. But if you want consistency and getting your numbers up every quarter year over year, all your sales year over year, going up and grabbing that larger audience and building over time. That's hard. And that takes behavior sequencing, not a one time behavior. And you need people perform a lot of behaviors to make that happen over time. And that's where success really can get a groundswell and just like take off.
Chad Franzen 19:48
Hey, Roger, this has been very interesting. I really appreciate your insights. Is there any final thoughts that you have about behavior design as we kind of move forward to your next podcast episode?
Roger Hurni 20:00
Um, oh, you know, I do want to say that you can also use behavior design to not perform a behavior. You know, I mean, I did have a company come to me and said, we want to do X, we want you out was actually a carwash company said, We would like to do a geofence campaign where when someone's at a competitor, we send them a deal and they turn around at that moment and come see us. And when I ran through the behavior models, I showed them that you can't stop someone from performing behavior. When time is demotivating them to perform the behavior, I said, we we wash our cars, literally and figuratively, in between the raindrops. You know, if I'm already at a carwash, you want me to stop what I'm doing turnaround drive a mile or two down the road to perform the exact same behavior. There's just not enough motivation to do that. And when I showed them that, they said, Oh, wow, we shouldn't run this campaign, we should do something different. And and then we sort of shifted, so they, they save money by not going down that road. So in terms of your question on what people should know, recognize that this is human behavior, and it's universal. And it works in both directions. When do we need to change and facilitate new behaviors? And when do we need to have customers stop doing behaviors? And most marketing companies, most clients don't think about the latter as much as the former. And there's an in itself a real opportunity.
Chad Franzen 21:27
Yeah, absolutely. Hey, Roger, thank you so much for allowing me to speak with you today. It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate it.
Roger Hurni 21:34
I appreciate you allowing me to be so verbose on the subject. But it's been a great interview, and I thank you for it.
Chad Franzen 21:41
Okay, thank you so much, Roger. So long, everybody
