The stats are out: more than 80% of have given up on our new years resolutions by the end of February. It makes sense – we have been told that it takes 21 days to form a habit. However, evidence suggests that establishing ‘bigger’ more complex habits take much more time. When you are changing say, your health, you are adopting not only one new behaviour (say, switching crisps for salted popcorn) you are changing a whole ecosystem of behaviours (applying a whole new set of principles to your eating, like Whole30, Macros or WW Points, carving out time in your diary for exercise and meditation).
Then there’s the need to plan in advance for roadblocks; all it takes is a Valentine’s Day break, or the first flush of spring to find yourself in a bar with an empty bottle of Prosecco wondering what happened.
Yet that doesn’t mean that the initial desire to achieve is gone. In fact, digging more deeply into the emotions around resolutions, research also shows that unrealised goals are the source of people’s biggest regrets. So far, so uninspiring eh?
However, if you’re a strategist, there’s an exciting opportunity right here: mean something to people by using behavioural interventions that help them turn their January goals into regular habits in their everyday lives. How can we support implementation intentions so they can foresee barriers and decide on coping strategies before they encounter them? How can we encourage them to create hassle-free habits?
If you’re a B2C brand -whether you’re in financial services, FMCG or retail, your role is no longer – to recall an old quote by Unilever’s Keith Weed – ‘just’ to market to people; it’s to matter to them. Especially in face of growing direct to consumer brands that are developing deep 1-to-1 relationships with customers, and also the growth of unbranded services. Yes, fine, not everyone is going to buy every product via Brandless.com – but no one wants to have their product be interchangeable. If price is the sole determinant of whether people buy you or a competitor, that’s bad news for the business and perhaps even the category.
There are many ways to mean more to potential customers – one timely approach is to identify points at which people are likely to fail (like now) and be there when they do. This might look like a bank sending a notification to a customer informing them they are spending more than usual and reminding them of their savings goal in a tangible way (“Save an extra £30 next payday to get back on track for that summer holiday budget”). Or a supermarket identifying when someone has stopped buying an item on an online shopping list, and offering them that same item, but from a cheaper range. Yes, they may be spending less overall, but at least they are spending with you.
But we can also use marketing to provide the framework for customers’ successes. Nike was amongst the first sports brands to engage in grassroots fitness activities such as Run Club, building a community as well as providing a way to help its customers apply the ‘Just do it’ brand value to their everyday lives, and many other brands have followed suit.
Ultimately modern marketing – whether we are thinking about ads, content, website experience or ‘offline experience’ is an exercise in empathy. Understanding of the rhythms of a consumer’s life, and building that into the customer journey, so we can be there to deliver useful interventions to help them create the behaviours that will propel their lives forward. Then we can genuinely earn the rights as brands to sell.