2230 people were tracked over a 19-year period and were asked to record their life satisfaction. All at some point during the study got married.

Results showed that despite average happiness peaking in the years surrounding their marriage, it eventually returned to the baseline.

Create unexpected secrets (Lyubomirsky, 2010).

As soon as your once-new product or service ceases to draw attention, it'll fail to be appreciated. What bundles, new variety or joyful hidden details can you build in and communicate to offset this?

Highlight new possibilities.

What ways can your product change customers' lives to set them on a new positive hedonic path? For example, a healthy snackbox subscription could add in recipe cards, unlocking a second-order effect of healthy food-pairing.

Reduce pain with certainty.

‍We revert to the mean faster for negative experiences when they're short and predictable. Banks offering loans shouldn’t just draw on the habitual pain of repayment but also seek to build a positive sense of closure around the joyous certainty of the final repayment. 

90 people were asked to solve 50 puzzles in either 10 or 40 minutes. A time-saving notification stating that “This question isn’t worth any points. Press A to skip” would pop up for half the puzzles.

Results showed that the time-scarce group ironically were more likely to miss the time-saving notifications due to their heightened focus on task completion.

‍Time Scarcity increases conversion under a few conditions

Make sure your use of it is on-brand, authentic and not overly-aggressive to avoid harming long-term trust and loyalty.

A big clock with red flashing text may boost sales in the short-term but risks damaging brand perceptions in the longer term and will lead to Reactance in the more behaviorally-aware and in more mature markets with stronger competition. 

Use time windows for excitement.

Particularly for experiments with new ideas or for seasonal Limited Editions. Starbucks’ Unicorn Frappucino was on sale for 5 days only. It sold out in just 3 and generated 160,000 Instagram posts. 

Develop novel ways of saving people time.

‍People who spend money on time-saving purchases report greater life satisfaction (Whillans et al, 2017). 

Amazon and Sainsbury’s are exploring no-queue, no-till shopping. Just scan on the app and leave. How can you free up even a few minutes of our most precious commodity?

City Planners of Garden Grove, California installed Active Radar Speed Signs at 5 locations to provide real-time feedback on the speed of 58,000 drivers. LEDs would also flash if drivers exceeded speed limits by more than 5MPH.

After installation of the feedback systems, average speed dropped 22% from 44 to 34mph.

First, determine the behavior to change. Measure, capture and store the relevant data. 

Communicate it back to the individual in a relevant, context-sensitive way that ultimately provokes an emotional reaction.

Provide clear consequences for action or inaction. It’s critical to get the right balance between not being too subtle and not being too intrusive or authoritarian (which we filter out).

Lastly, allow for opportunities to immediately rectify the behavior - which should also be tracked - completing the loop and eventually changing the behavior pattern.  Remember to reward compliance as much as you penalize inaction to increase effectiveness.

47 subjects were given around 20 small, manual tasks to complete, one at a time. Experimenters randomly interrupted completion of half of these tasks. After, subjects were asked to recall as many tasks as possible.

There was a 90% higher recall of incomplete and interrupted tasks than those completed.

Make important task completion frictionless. If customers leave your site without finishing their order, make it effortlessly easy to get that completion feeling, such as allowing for completion with a single click, tap or swipe. 

Focus on completion’s emotional release. Providing reward incentives for task completion actually demotivates consumers. Instead, remind them not just of the product they’ve not yet bought, but of the feelings that this ‘purchase task’ will unlock. 

Make known campaigns incomplete and interactive. Greater familiarity with an advert increases consumer ability to complete an interrupted ad message. Active participation also boosts ad memory (Heller, 1956). So if your popular campaign’s reaching its end, consider a special second follow-up version that allows for active participation in completing the ad message. 

300 customers at a car wash were split into two groups and given one of two different loyalty cards for a free wash upon completion: either one with space for 8 stamps or one for 10 (with 2 spaces pre-stamped).

Despite both cards requiring the same amount of effort, completion of the non-pre-stamped 8 card over a 9-month period was only 19% whereas the pre-stamped 10-card was 34%.

Get them started. Endow progress with a fraction of points, stars or a brand-specific measure. Make sure you endow enough to motivate use, aiming for between 10-25% of the total effort required for the first reward.  As well as helping with initial effort, make the reward itself substantial and meaningful to assist habit-forming.

Never endow at the end. The closer we are to a goal, the more we value our own internal efforts to complete it. Doing so on their behalf will devalue existing effort, perceived reward value and reduce loyalty strength.

Make it seamless. In Christmas 2013, 1 in 8 Americans got a Starbucks Gift Card. On redemption they were automatically endowed with progress in the form of loyalty stars, creating 1.5m new loyalty members as a result. How can you seamlessly channel gift customers through to your loyalty scheme?

58 households in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had their fruit and veg shopping monitored for 8 weeks. Half were offered a 50% discount reward on all fruit and veg purchased and half were not.

Results showed that the reward increased healthy food purchasing behavior from 6.4 to 16.7 servings of fruit and veg  on average per week per household.

Rewards come in two types: Extrinsic and Intrinsic. 

‍Extrinsic rewards are economic: pay, discounts, working conditions, gold stars, healthcare, promotions etc. 

Intrinsic rewards are emotional, coming from a sense of achievement through skill and hard work, unplanned verbal praise from authority figures, and peer recognition.

Too much extrinsic will lessen internal motivation as it’s seen as controlling, especially if they’re later removed (Murayama et al., 2010). Ensure that they’re significant enough to motivate against task boredom (Hidi, 2015) and are in line with the market needs of employees / customers.

Focus on rewarding intrinsically - seen as a superior reward (Deci et al., 1999) - with greater levels of trust, choice and freedom to make one’s own decisions. You’ll be rewarded with a more motivated, loyal following as a result.

Whilst we all like to think we make rational, optimal decisions, sometimes, our impulses get the better of us.

In an attempt to preserve our cognitive capacity, we make what’s called fast, reactionary “System 1” judgements. 



These might not be very good at all for us.

Let me explain.

Consider you’re stressed out after a long day, and launch your favourite social media app to unwind. You see someone sharing a wild conspiracy theory that you know to be untrue.

You’re angry, and quickly write out a frustrated comment that criticises this person, using strong language that would offend.

At this point, hitting “send” would cause a lot of damage you can’t come back from.

This is where our slower “System 2” thinking becomes vital.

Here, reflective thought is the order of the day. It’s more cognitively-expensive to think about what the deeper implications of hitting “send” would be. However, now would be a good time to do so.

Social media apps are increasingly providing us opportunities to do just this. Banks could do the same. “Are you sure you want to withdraw all your savings?”

Providing users a “cooling off period” for impactful moments now can allow for better decisions that help us more in our future.

Whilst we all like to think we make rational, optimal decisions, sometimes, our impulses get the better of us.

In an attempt to preserve our cognitive capacity, we make what’s called fast, reactionary “System 1” judgements. 



These might not be very good at all for us.

Let me explain.

Consider you’re stressed out after a long day, and launch your favourite social media app to unwind. You see someone sharing a wild conspiracy theory that you know to be untrue.

You’re angry, and quickly write out a frustrated comment that criticises this person, using strong language that would offend.

At this point, hitting “send” would cause a lot of damage you can’t come back from.

This is where our slower “System 2” thinking becomes vital.

Here, reflective thought is the order of the day. It’s more cognitively-expensive to think about what the deeper implications of hitting “send” would be. However, now would be a good time to do so.

Social media apps are increasingly providing us opportunities to do just this. Banks could do the same. “Are you sure you want to withdraw all your savings?”

Providing users a “cooling off period” for impactful moments now can allow for better decisions that help us more in our future.

2,064 male students from 9 schools in Chicago were enrolled in a two-year-long program that encouraged system-two slow thinking on how to manage situations of conflict.

Participation in the program reduced total arrests by 35% and violent crime arrests by 50%.

Add a little friction. ‍

We constantly weigh up effort vs rewards, so seeing one long sign-up form can lead us to make a fast system-one decision not to do so.

A process that’s Chunked, features reflective Goal Primes and clearly shows the product benefits will work better. 

Provide warnings for damaging decisions.

Instagram have launched "comment warning", live-analysing a comment and notifying of potential offense, without removing the Autonomy to post. This allows for reflection and avoids Reactance.

Build in reflective periods for big decisions.

Knee-jerk, short-term decisions can harm our longer-term goals. E.g., financial firms can help us make smarter decisions about withdrawing all our savings by building in a reflective delay, especially when such decisions conflict with our prior Commitments and goals.

‍

172 people were told of a fundraiser called Sheila who needed to sell 100 candy bars for her sports team and told she had to sell either 1 or 21 more bars to meet her quota. They were then asked how likely they were to buy a candy from her.

Those in the almost-complete task state were far more likely to help than when there were many left.

Visualize to motivate.

‍Showing quantifiable task progress  with a visual and numerical indicator will increase completion speed (Cheema & Bagchi, 2011).  

How can you heighten desire to close in on the reward?

Note that effort levels will fall after the current reward has been attained, so reframe progress around the next goal.

Be ahead of the curve. 

‍Endow Progress and put more weight on task completion at the start than when close to the goal. 

Place easier tasks at start and middle, saving harder or bigger ones for just before reward.

Reframe task size.

‍Motivation to complete a task is directly proportionate to its size. So, for viewers new to Breaking Bad, instead of Netflix initially highlighting all 5 seasons, reframe the task as a single season with a sense of completion.

Once season 1 is watched, reframe season 2 as a natural extension of 1 but distinct from 3-5.

87 students were told that two men won in lotteries: Mr A won $50 in one lottery and $25 in another. Mr B only entered one lottery and won $75. The students were then asked who they believed to be happier.

Results showed that students believed the segregated Mr A to be happier with his winnings.

Segregate the good.

‍Two small gains trump one large one. Be it team victories, feature announcements, product packaging or loyalty benefits, where can you break up the good into smaller, bite-size pieces?

Highlight silver linings.

‍Separate a small gain from a larger perceived ‘loss’ to reduce consumer pain. For example, instead of offering a temporary price reduction, offer a special rebate equal to the proposed discount.

Don't separate too small. We have a low-end threshold below which we experience no joy (Morewedge et al., 2007). Breaking a cookie into crumbs results in almost zero joy. Banks offering current account holders low monthly 'loyalty rewards' would do well to reframe them into larger, more meaningful chunks, or not do it at all. After all, no one wants to be reminded of the meaninglessness of their loyalty.