Introduction Can something that goes against human nature become a habit for people all over the world? Can seemingly difficult consumer behaviors be broken down into simple fragments? Why does a seemingly smaller positioning lead to a larger market? This section covers what everyone is most looking forward to: how to make consumer behavior easy to occur, that is, 'easy to do.' Without further ado, let's dive in.
1 Behavior Decomposition Many marketers hope to "achieve everything in one go," hoping that a single advertisement or promotional activity can solve all consumer problems and immediately make consumers open their wallets. As the saying goes, "Wine must be sipped one mouthful at a time, and the road must be walked step by step; taking too big a step can easily cause problems." In most cases, this is a thankless task, especially for high-value, high-involvement, and high-attention products.
We know that consumer behavior is complex. From the consumer response perspective, there are four response hierarchy models: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (also known as the AIDA principle). From the purchase decision process, there are five stages: Problem Recognition, Information Search, Evaluation of Alternatives, Purchase Decision, and Post-Purchase Behavior.
Therefore, in most cases, pushing your consumers to a higher purchase stage is the most efficient method.
Over a decade ago, Old Ye (Ye Maozhong) said to me, "Old Miao, you write excellent advertorials; that's really impressive!" At that time, I was young and arrogant, thinking, "Old Ye, you can see that my advertorials are good; that's even more impressive!" Indeed, at first glance, the advertorials I wrote back then were no different from ordinary ones, but the results were completely different. If an ordinary advertorial could bring in 50 customer consultation calls, my advertorial of the same length would bring in at least 200 calls.
The trick was simple: ordinary health product advertorials all wrote about pathology, promises, typical cases, expert endorsements, and so on—in short, all kinds of benefits. The goal was to arouse customers' purchase desire and make them pay immediately after reading. But I wasn't that greedy. My goal was to get customers to call or visit the pharmacy, which was much easier. I just needed to describe more scenes of other customers calling or visiting the pharmacy, and through these behaviors, the final problem was solved. Naturally, the phone lines were flooded.
This is consumer behavior decomposition. In many cases, you don't need to make customers pay immediately; you just need to push them to a higher stage in the purchase decision process.
Let's go back and admire Old Ye, because he did something even more impressive in decomposing consumer behavior—the advertising planning for Heilan Home.
At that time, men's clothing advertisements were basically about "showing personality" and "expressing sentiment," such as "Taking the Road Less Traveled," "Simplicity is Not Simple," and "Be Tough on Yourself." They hoped to gain consumer recognition through brand personality, which is the aforementioned approach of obtaining value from consumers' attitudes toward the product, making customers feel it's "worth buying."
However, Heilan Home's advertising creativity truly "didn't take the ordinary road." The slogan, as you know, is "Men's Wardrobe" and "Men Visit Heilan Home Twice a Year." In the eyes of some creative advertisers, this was absolutely tacky. If there were a top ten tacky ads contest back then, this slogan would win without a doubt.
But what puzzled those "creative" advertisers was that the creatively charged slogans like "Taking the Road Less Traveled," "Be Tough on Yourself," and "Simplicity is Not Simple" have all faded away, while the tacky "Men Visit Heilan Home Twice a Year" is still being broadcast tirelessly and seems likely to continue. Meanwhile, Heilan Home has grown into a company with annual sales of nearly 20 billion yuan (advertising success is one aspect; Heilan Home's success in positioning is also worth learning from).
If marketers are familiar with consumer behavior decomposition, they can see that Heilan Home's "tacky" advertisement contains a very clever strategy. This ad does not show consumers how the product is or how the brand is; it tries to influence consumer behavior: come to my store twice a year, whether you buy or not, just browse. This is much easier than urging consumers to spend money.
But once they enter the store, the terminal display, store management, and sales guidance are not idle. If you pass by, you must leave some money behind. Are you buying or not? No force. Most people go in empty-handed and come out with bags full. So some people complain: "No wonder they only let you go twice a year; you can't afford to go more often!"
This is the power of consumer behavior decomposition.
2 Correct Incentives Let's look at a classic case from advertising master Claude Hopkins.
It's necessary to introduce Master Hopkins first. Hopkins was the person Ogilvy called "the one who changed his life." He brought science, especially consumer behavior science, into advertising and invented many marketing methods, including sampling, test marketing, intensified distribution, and coupon promotions, which are widely used today. His book "Scientific Advertising" is one of the foundational works of modern marketing and advertising, and Ogilvy commented, "Anyone who cannot read this book seven times should not go into advertising."
We know that it's hard for people to go against their nature, and it's even harder to develop a habit that goes against nature. If everyone in the world were to develop such a habit, it would be unimaginable. In fact, this unimaginable phenomenon was indeed created by Master Hopkins—that is, brushing teeth.
Because it's so common, we might not realize that brushing teeth is actually quite unpleasant. A plastic stick with plastic bristles at one end, coated with sticky gel, stuck in the mouth and poked around—just thinking about it is unpleasant.
So although people have the need to clean their teeth, brushing didn't become a universal habit until Hopkins stepped in.
In addition to claiming that brushing makes teeth strong and beautiful and reduces dental disease, Hopkins also did a little trick: he added substances like mint and citric acid to the toothpaste.
These substances brought a cooling and clean sensation to the brusher's mouth. This small stimulus became a small incentive for each brushing. Once you forgot to brush, this "reward" was gone, and the brusher would lose the cooling and clean sensation, thus thinking about the brushing behavior. After that, all toothpaste began to add stimulating substances, and the habit of brushing quickly spread among Americans and beyond.
This is truly a great innovation. Through repeated stimulation of small incentives, a behavior that goes against nature became a daily habit for most people, greatly improving global health and hygiene standards.
This method of immediate incentives is widely applied to behaviors that require change, such as weight loss, fitness, quitting smoking, and quitting drinking, and of course, it is also used in marketing.
Video game designers are well-versed in this. The satisfaction from constant incentives (leveling up) can immerse you in repetitive and boring games like monster fighting or Tetris, making you unable to stop.
In the amateur market, Taekwondo is the best-promoted martial art because you can level up quickly. A kindergarten child can go from the lowest "white belt" to "white-yellow belt" after just a few days of practice. Old Miao's son, Xiao Miao, couldn't even throw a straight punch properly when he got his white-yellow belt, but he was still very happy and showed off for days. Truly, incentives start from childhood.
3 Action Plans or Prompts Let's return to the "fear experiment" mentioned at the beginning. Why did adding seemingly useless maps and time limits increase the number of people getting tetanus shots so much?
The answer is: the former gave the participants a recommended behavior, but when time and place were added, the recommendation became an action plan. An action plan makes behavior easy to occur. Without an action plan, after the initial impulse passes, the recipient easily turns the recommendation into popular science knowledge, slogans, or ideas.
During holidays, Chinese parents often worry about their playful children's homework. "Hurry up and do your homework, or you won't finish it," "If you finish your homework, I'll take you to XX amusement park," "Your classmate so-and-so has already finished," "If you don't do it well, I won't buy you anything." In short, various threats and bribes, but with little effect. However, experienced parents often use this method—make a schedule: what time to get up, what time to eat, what time to study English, what time to play, turning it into a detailed action plan.
Turning the behavior you want your child to exhibit into a reasonable action plan for them to follow, combined with frequent and reasonable incentives, makes things go much more smoothly.
Marketers must know that people are lazy, and consumers even more so. When faced with a pile of choices, they rarely take the initiative. You must give them a plan, or at least an action prompt, and guide them accordingly, so that consumer behavior becomes easy to occur.
Nutrition Express is a revolutionary product. Through horizontal innovation, it combines milk and juice, offering great taste and the dual nutrition of milk and juice.
When Old Miao first saw the Nutrition Express advertisement, he was stunned: "Drink one in the morning, energetic all morning." Based on my understanding of many domestic business owners, this slogan would not pass with over 90% of them. "Too small" would be the immediate reaction of most people. "With such a good product, why only target morning drinking?" They would prefer something like "Healthy Life, I Choose Nutrition Express" or "Dual Nutrition, Double Health"—bigger, broader appeals.
This is precisely where Zong Qinghou is smarter than the average business owner. It is the prompt "Drink one in the morning" that gives Nutrition Express an accurate consumption scenario, forming a consumption plan, making the behavior "easy to do," and thus promoting the product's success. Nutrition Express's single product sales have long exceeded 10 billion, while those advocating "dual nutrition," "healthy and delicious," or "high-quality life" mostly don't survive long.
4 Use the "Decoy Effect" to Give Consumers a Convenient Choice
At a vegetable stall, there are two piles of vegetables.
Buyer: "How much is this per jin?" Seller: "1 yuan."
Buyer: "And that?" Seller: "1.5 yuan."
Buyer: "Why?" Seller: "That one is better."
So most people bought the 1.5 yuan ones. Later, they found the seller quickly split the 1 yuan pile into two, and soon the 1.5 yuan ones were all sold out.
This is a joke similar to "selling crutches," using the contrast principle to make consumers make a convenient choice, making it easier for them to make a purchase decision.
Jokes are not credible; let's look at a real marketing case.
When Williams-Sonoma first introduced a home bread maker (priced at $275), most consumers were not interested.
What on earth is a home bread maker? Do we really need to bake bread at home? Is it convenient to use? Is it dangerous for children? Does it consume a lot of electricity? Does the bread taste good? In short, when faced with something new, people always have many questions.
Sure enough, the bread maker quickly delivered a very poor performance. In desperation, Williams-Sonoma sought help from a marketing research company.
The professional company quickly proposed a seemingly "offbeat" remedy: launch a new model of bread maker that is not only larger but also priced about half higher than the existing model.
This was met with skepticism: if a more practical and cost-effective bread maker wasn't selling, why invest in launching a bigger and more expensive one? Were the marketing research company's people out of their minds? However, Williams-Sonoma's decision-makers wisely (or helplessly) adopted it.
After the large bread maker was launched, it indeed had no buyers, but surprisingly, sales of the original bread maker began to rise. What was going on? The research company's rationale when proposing the plan was: when consumers decide whether to buy something new, they have many concerns, and these concerns have no comparison, making it difficult to decide. Now with two models, since one is clearly larger and much more expensive, people don't have to decide in a vacuum. They would say, "Well, I may not know much about bread makers, but if I'm going to buy one, I'd rather spend less and get the smaller one." So the original bread maker began to sell well.
By offering an unreasonable option, you make your target option seem more reasonable. In marketing, this is called the 'decoy effect.' Pick-up artists call it the "wingman." The bread maker case above is a famous example of using the decoy effect to design marketing choices.
Currently, the decoy effect is widely applied in marketing.
Many companies always design a product that is extremely expensive and looks luxurious, with almost no sales, just to make their other products seem less expensive. Supermarkets do bundle promotions: some products have gifts, some don't; the ones without gifts are decoys for those with gifts. A scarf costs 50 yuan, a sweater costs 300 yuan, and scarf + sweater costs 300 yuan; then the 300 yuan sweater is the decoy.
Marketers should be diligent in visiting the market, observing, and thinking. If designed well, you can turn competitors into your decoys; but if careless or unaware, you might become someone else's decoy, acting as a "wingman" without knowing it. Isn't that unfair? (Interested business owners can visit the terminal and see if your products, placed alongside others, are acting as a "wingman")
Of course, there are other ways to make consumer behavior "easy to do," such as using demonstration effects to make consumers feel it's "easy"; appealing to emotions so consumers act on impulse; or shaping the environment to simplify consumer behavior. Mindful marketers can summarize and explore these in practice and theoretical learning. If you're willing to share with Old Miao, I'd be very grateful.
5 Summary The only standard for measuring whether a marketing action is effective is whether it promotes a change in consumer behavior. To shift consumers in the direction you envision, you must make the advocated consumer behavior 'worth doing' and 'easy to do.'
The methods for "worth doing" and "easy to do" revolve around the relationships among "product, consumer, and environment." This article introduced three tools for making consumer behavior 'worth doing': 'substitute experience,' 'virtual ownership,' and 'value conversion.'
Given that current marketing practices focus on "worth doing" while neglecting "easy to do," Old Miao highlighted four methods for making consumer behavior 'easy to do': behavior decomposition, correct incentives, designing action plans or prompts, and using the decoy effect.
Emphasizing again: the essence of marketing is to change consumer behavior. As long as you identify the key links in the two dimensions of 'worth doing' and 'easy to do' and concentrate more marketing resources, the consumer behavior you envision will emerge at an unexpected speed, and all marketing problems will be solved.
Source: Old Miao Tears Apart Marketing
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