Frontline Perspectives

Sometimes results have little to do with your message or who’s listening.

If you’ve ever worked with me, or even read my last few posts (When not losing is better than winning and Need to be Creative?), you’ve probably picked up that I measure the value of our work on one scale: behavior modification.

For me, above all, effective marketing changes human behavior. It is that simple — and that unbelievably hard.

(As an aside, my wife would argue that effective marriage changes human behavior, namely mine, but that’s another blog for another day.)

It should come as no surprise that one of my favorite business books of 2010 is Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Dan and Chip Heath.

While the Heath brothers’ whole argument is compelling, I want to highlight one tenet as something to focus on for 2011, a tenet they call “Shape the Path.”

Switch argues that if you want to effect real change, you have to focus not only on your audience but also on their environment. With examples like a college experiment that showed how environmental differences could compel a group of “non-charitable” students to donate more canned goods than a group of “charitable” students (both groups were told where to donate, but the “non-charitable” students were also given a map), Switch reminds us that shaping a path to the behavior you want often trumps how persuasive your message is or how predisposed your audience is to hearing it.

The practical marketing lessons to draw from this insight are many. From making response mechanisms as effortless as possible to making usability a prime objective of a website redesign, we should always strive to better shape our audience’s path to doing business with us.