When law enforcement are investigating a suspect for a crime, they start with what they have – what was done and who might have done it – and build up their case from there. Much of the missing information is summed up in a well-known phrase: means, motive and opportunity.
In other words, how did they do it, why did they do it, and when/where did they have a chance to do it?
Whether in a business or a non-profit organisation, in marketing, UX, product design or even HR, we are generally in the business of changing behaviour. There is a way that people currently act and a way that we want them to act instead. A few examples include…
- Buying your product or service over a competitor’s
- Engaging in a marketing campaign mechanic
- Spending as long or as short a time in a restaurant as possible
- Doing something that helps rather than harms the environment
- Continuing employment at your company
And usually we have someone in mind whose behaviour we want to change – our target audience.
This puts us in the position of doing what detectives do, but in reverse. Instead of solving a crime, we’re trying to make one happen. Detectives start with the fact of the crime, and we start with the “crime” we want to become fact. Detectives try to discover the conditions of the crime – the means, motive and opportunity – while our job is to create those conditions so that the behaviour occurs.
This makes “means, motive and opportunity” a helpful heuristic for remembering what needs to be considered in any strategy for changing behaviour. It’s helpful because, for one reason or other, people tend to get so excited about some that they forget the others.
Motive
In theory, this element gets the most attention, since it’s a focus of marketing. Many traditional mainstays of advertising are geared towards making people want a product or service, or making them realise that they want it – unique selling points (USPs) and reasons to believe (RTBs). And a lot of branding has been about the emotional side of motivation – ideas like Lovemarks, brand love, emotional connections, etc.
A lot of that emphasis can go out the window, however, when interactive marketing ideas are being developed. Grand campaign ideas often hinge on things like user-generated content (UGC), installation of apps, complicated entry forms, etc., with little thought as to what would motivate someone to go to such lengths. A lot of the problems come from a dangerous combination of magical and wishful thinking – simply imagining an audience doing these things seems to satisfy a creative team’s criteria for validation.
The knee-jerk reaction to this challenge is to increase the motivation by upping the monetary value of a prize, but the value of that prize to any individual is mentally divided by their perceived chances of winning it. Think about other forms of motivation – peer dynamics or scalable virtual rewards, for example, or negative motivation (fear of consequences of not doing it). Or start thinking about how to take some of the mental, physical, monetary or time effort out of the crime you want them to commit.
Which brings us to…
Means
Even if someone is motivated to commit your “crime”, they have to be capable of doing so. The simplest example of this is affordability of a product or service, but money is just one kind of capacity of many that enable someone to do something. Others include…
Knowledge – Do they already know how to do this crime, or will they have to (make the effort to) learn?
Social/Familial – Does your crime require having certain kinds of friends or family members?
Technical – Do they need access to a particular kind of device (phone, car, etc.) to commit your crime?
Linguistic – Does your crime require understanding of a particular language or terminology?
Means can be binary – they can or they can’t. But means can also be on a continuum of effort required to do what you want people to do. Simply put, the more effort required, the stronger the motive required to drive action; and if you haven’t got much of a motive, you need to make your crime as easy as possible to commit.
Interestingly, a lot of the effectiveness of branding is actually less about motive and more about means. Rather than “driving brand love” and making people prefer one brand over competitors, much branding is effective because it reduces the effort required to recall one brand over others. This is especially true of competitive fast-moving consumer good (FMCG) markets, where two dozen brands may be competing for eyeballs on a supermarket aisle.
And the consumer doesn’t have time to give them all equal consideration, which brings us nicely to…
Opportunity
When and where do you want people to commit your crime? For purchase of products and services, this might be a question of distribution and availability. For an interactive marketing idea, you might need to think about channel and device. For product design, you might be thinking about the times and locations where someone would have the time to use your offering.
Whatever your crime, time and location (geographical or digital) are key, and they’re related to means and motive. Your audience needs to be able to commit your crime in a time and place when and where they want to commit your crime. Even more than that, they have to want to commit your crime more than anything else they could do at that time and place.
Many mistakes with opportunity could be prevented with some basic thought and a user-journey chart sketched out. What are the times and places you expect people to do this thing? What else is vying for their attention and their motivation at those times? What are the factors that make it easier or harder for them to do it at those times and places?
Questioning your suspects
If you don’t think you can get your target audience to commit your crime, there’s still another possibility worth considering – other target audiences. Like a detective frustrated by a suspect’s solid alibi, start asking the question: “Who else has motive, means and opportunity?”
Who else has a need or fear addressed by your service? Who else has the money to buy your product? Who else uses this channel? Who else could we consider if we opened up the possibilities of other motives, other means, other times and other places?
Easily remembered, easily forgotten
Means, motive and opportunity. It’s just common sense, of course, but in the excitement of ideation and innovation, it’s easy for wishful and magical thinking to take over. Get into a habit of taking a step back and interrogating every action you want someone else to take: “Do they want to do it? Are they able to do it? When and where will they do it?” It’ll save a lot of wasted budget and effort down the track.