Have you ever had to work out how to position a product or service? One of the toughest questions to answer is what hot button to push. Do you promote positive results? Or do you compound customer concerns about the status quo? The trade-off between move towards and move away framing is not easy to solve. Let’s start with move away.
The Pavlok device is designed to help you overcome bad habits like biting your nails, smoking and over eating. The battery powered wearable is the new, new thing when it comes to aversion therapy. The way it works is to give you negative feedback in an attempt to change your habits. The device can vibrate or give you a ‘snap’. The snap is anything up to a 500 volt electric shock, painful but not life threatening. Pavlock can shock you every time it detects you move your hand to your face. It can also force you to get up out of bed at a particular time.
The nerd in me loves the idea of Pavlok as a gadget. But the child inside me is terrified of the thing. And the adult in me suspects if I tried to use this thing the problem would be committing to wear it for any sustained period. The marketer in me is even more concerned.
Analysing Pavlok’s video content and homepage copy shows the marketing is biased to move away framing. This makes me suspect the company is missing a team member who really understands marketing. One clue is the second word on the home page is ‘shop’! Soon after is a picture of the device and a list of product features including activity | sleep tracking, haptic feedback, low energy Bluetooth 4.0, snap circuit and hand detection. These are not benefits for consumers. This type of copy only appeals to the small vanguard of buyers who are attracted to new gadgets because they are new. When the site finally does get around to why you might buy it the real negativity kicks in. Three of the customer value promises are directly negative move away claims: ‘quit smoking’, ‘kill sugar cravings’ and ‘stop negative thoughts’. The other three are indirectly negative for people who might want to use the device: ‘become a morning person’, ‘stay accountable’ and ‘eliminate distractions’. The worst piece of copy is really bad - ‘ A year from now, you’ll wish you started today’. This programs the reader not to buy! See the pic below.
Would you give yourself electric shocks to change a habit?
Choosing to buy a device designed to give you an electric shock is not a low involvement purchase. The devices are neither expensive nor cheap. A Pavlok costs around $US150-$200 to buy or $US29 per month to rent. But the emotional barrier to purchase is huge. If the company is going to succeed it needs to attract evangelical followers. These are the customers who will champion their successes in changing their lives. The problem is move away motivation is not attractive.
Move away is very powerful in the short term. We have evolved to move away from pain and danger immediately. We get stressed and take action. Once the urgency has passed we need to be able to relax. Pavlok won’t work if you can’t keep wearing it. It’s hard for us to sustain activities motivated by distress and it can be very unhealthy.
According to a Healthline article chronic stress can reduce emotional control and lower your libido. There are links with cancer, liver cirrhosis, lung disease, heart attacks, hypertension, fatal accidents, mental illness and suicide. Stress can damage your immune system, cause you to become overweight and prematurely age your appearance. Pavlok is unlikely to cause any of these conditions alone. However using the device will not lower your stress until you can actually change your bad habits.
As a marketer with a psych background I think move away tends to work for impulse products. Pavlok is not an impulse product. I predict some people will buy the thing and just like their gym membership and their last New Year’s resolution they won’t last. Then they will either forget about it or tell their friends it didn’t work. The alternative to this is to frame the product in a more positive light.
Woebot is an AI-enabled chat-based tool to deliver a suite of clinically-validated therapy programs. Woebot can help with anxiety, depression and substance abuse. The software downloads to your phone so you can check in from time to time to talk about how you are feeling. Woebot asks you questions like a live therapist and then suggests things you can do.
Often the exercises are based around self-diagnosing perceptual distortions and helping consider things from a more positive perspective. Woebot is not good at quality. It can’t really assess if you are doing better just from the content of your responses. And when it gives you activities it can’t determine how well you have performed them. It does ask you how you feel and can adjust to what works for you over time. I tried out the Woebot for a few months because I was intrigued to see if it could help improve performance for someone who was not anxious or depressed. Woebot certainly helped me to feel better and I learned a bit more about how to use Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The key difference between Woebot and Pavlok is the chatbot works by helping you feel better every time you log in.
CBT is more based around move towards strategies. Move towards works better than move away in the longer term. The idea is to promote ‘eustress’. Eustress is the opposite of distress. Eustress is good for our health and makes it easy for us to keep coming back. The implications are critical for retention and referral.
Many companies have a marketing orientation focused on getting rival customers to churn. The normal approach in banking for example is to try to entice mortgage customers away from rivals with a honeymoon deal. This creates a potential conflict between the bank and their existing customers. Long term customers are not rewarded for their loyalty. Instead they are excluded from getting the same offer as a new-to-bank customer. The bank will say it cares about its customers. In practice its actions imply profiteering from inertia. The bank bets current customers won’t switch. The irony of this hard to ignore. If the bank’s own customers won’t leave to go elsewhere, why is it different for another bank’s customers? The move towards | away motivations on this are designed wrong.
The more you think about it, the more you realise the bank executives are missing a huge profit pool. The longer the bank has a customer the lower risk of default they become. A new customer must be a higher systematic risk because they are a less-known quantity. When a long-term customer realises they are excluded from the deal a new customer can get they experience a move away motivation to churn. It’s like an electric shock for being loyal. The only conclusion the customer can reasonably come to is the bank is betting it will be too much of a hassle to take their business elsewhere.
Instead of investing in churn banks should invest in retention. Imagine a customer getting an unexpected bonus from their bank on the 5th anniversary of their mortgage commencement. Not a token gesture. Something serious. Perhaps a value equivalent to the cost to the bank to acquire a new mortgage client. This would create a nice move towards to stay with the bank. Move towards motivations work better in the longer term. More importantly this strategy would also be remarkable. Building remarkable into your customer strategy saves you costs to attract new customers. It’s also why move towards works better than move away for everything except impulse purchases.
Robert Dew is a Founding Partner at CapFeather Global with more than 2o years of corporate consulting and university lecturing in Innovation, Customer Strategy and Customer Experience. His PhD related to improving creativity in strong corporate governance environments. He has also done 60+ start-ups.