Many of you may have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, in which Gladwell examined why some fads take off and others do not. The basic concept is that an incremental change, done timely, in front of the right target audience can be absolutely revolutionary. Instead of a tipping point, an author whose blog I read recently proposed an alternative, trigger point. No, we’re not talking about a massage therapy or a gun in your back, but what Jonah Berger, author of Contagious, describes as those things that motivate us to change behaviors.

Marty Baker observes that, “One of great revelations of behavioral economics is the study of how people actually behave rather than how we think they should behave. A classic example is shrouded in a term that might make your eyes glaze over  — the theory of relative positioning.   What makes people happiest is increasing their income and wealth relative to other people. We have the same income of $70,000 per year. If my income increases by $10,000 and yours increases by $8,000, this will make me happier than if both our incomes increased by $10,000.   We don’t just want to keep up with the Joneses; we want to do better than the Joneses.”

Baker writes of Contagious that it is an exploration of what makes things popular. Berger tackles questions like:

• Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others?
• Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And
• What makes online content go viral?

Berger wrote, “Psychologist Gráinne Fitzsimons and I conducted a related study on how to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables. Promoting healthy eating habits is tough. Most people realize they should eat more fruits and vegetables. Most people will even say that they mean to eat more fruits and vegetables. But somehow when the time comes to put fruits and vegetables into shopping carts or onto dinner plates, people forget. We thought we’d use triggers to help them remember. “

Baker describes Berger’s work with a colleague who asked participants to provide feedback on a public-health slogan targeting college student.  Just to make sure they remembered the slogan, they were shown it more than twenty times, printed in different colors and fonts.

“One group of students saw the slogan “Live the healthy way, eat five fruits and veggies a day.” Another group saw “Each and every dining-hall tray needs five fruits and veggies a day.” Both slogans encouraged people to eat fruits and vegetables, but the tray slogan did so using a trigger.

The students lived on campus, and many of them ate in dining halls that used trays. So Berger and Fitzsimons wanted to see if they could trigger healthy eating behavior by using the dining room tray to remind students of the slogan.

“Our students didn’t care for the tray slogan. They called it “corny” and rated it as less than half as attractive as the more generic “live healthy” slogan. Further, when asked whether the slogan would influence their own fruit and vegetable consumption, the students who had been shown the “tray” slogan were significantly more likely to say no.”

Berger adds, “But when it came to actual behavior, the effects were striking. Students who had been shown the more generic “live healthy” slogan didn’t change their eating habits. But students who had seen the “tray” slogan and used trays in their cafeterias markedly changed their behavior. The tray reminded them of the slogan and they ate 25 percent more fruits and vegetables as a result. The trigger worked. “

What resonated with me is that the creative solution was creating the right trigger and not the “right slogan.”  A more rigorious test  might have been to see if the more creative slogan and the trigger would have yielded even better results.

How might one apply this in a different environment? Are you too focused on your words rather than understanding what motivates your target buyer? Your boss? Someone who works for or beside you?