Making desirable behaviour easy

So in the business of persuading people about a grudge purchase (wanna see more? check it out at www.simply.co.za) … I spend a lot of time musing about behaviour, triggers and how to make it easy for the right customers to engage and buy our product.

This week, at an internal strategy meeting we watched Dan Ariely at work. I’ve watched it before, but it was a great reminder of his depth of understanding about people and the way they work – and his lovely subtle humour. Watch it here if you haven’t yet, honestly he’s worth every second of watching.

 

Then in my inbox yesterday, landed a reminder about “Nudge” thinking … I’ve signed up for a couple of DailyBits email courses – I love them. They’re not a replacement for reading the full books, but they’re a great reminder of the essence of what I need to remember from these books. So the 2 that I’m currently “re-reading” are Nudge and Hooked.
Both Ariely and Nudge spoke about organ donations and the value in making it a default option to opt-in rather than opt-out. So again I was reminded about the power of defaults. If you want a certain kind of behaviour, aim to make it the default.

That said, don’t hide anything behind small print – it’s important, especially in the work we do, to make sure that people are aware of the longer term implications of a purchase. Lots of competitors try to hide these in an attempt to just get a sale – and get people over the line, but our focus on transparency and open relationships with clients, we want to make sure people know what they’ve signed up for. It’s not an easy balance – making something very complex into a simple offering, without hiding the important bits. That’s our challenge at Simply 🙂