Make Big Behavioral Change in Your Market
Experience says To start small
Want To Make Big Behavioral Change in Your Market ? Experience Says To Start Small.
When you construct the MoM ( Market Opportunity Map ) , you will identify a number of opportunities where if you interfere in you will be able impact of the outcome of the journey. These opportunities would be in form creating behavioral change in one of the key players in the patient journey , which if achieved successfully may have a consequence on other players behaviors and change the outcome of the journey towards your strategy goals .
Making lasting changes is hard , even if you just want to change your own behavior . The statistics are depressing. Some studies show that 95% of all diets fail and only 8% of people keep their new year's resolutions. Making lasting changes in our behavior is a battle it's difficult and most of us don't succeed at it for very long.
If it’s more than often you fail to change your own behavior towards a better one , then how it looks like to try to change other people’s behaviors ?
I have been working for the last 19 years trying to change some healthcare professional’s behaviors which I believe it would benefit them & their patients. I launched more than 60 campaigns to do so, I worked with the most reputable consultancy firms and worked crossed different product life cycle stages.
I worked with my team & many stakeholders each time to put plans that answer this question,
What does it take to change some behaviors in the market in order to improve the treatment outcome & utilizing the valuable treatment option that we are responsible of ?
Right at the heart of these plans is being able to choose how we want physician to behave and actually follow through on that.
Most of us think when it comes to creating new behavior, it's a matter of developing compelling messages, campaigns and promotional activities that highlight the positive of this new behavior and showing the downturns of the current behavior. That’s important but not enough to create change.
We more than often, don’t see the change that we aspire and here we might start to suspect inwardly that maybe we didn’t have the right messages on place or sometimes we blame the effectiveness of our treatment that it didn’t deliver what it promises.
One of the key ideas I'd like you to get is that changing behavior is a skill. It's something that you can learn to do. You can get better at creating new habits.
There are 3 principles that successful change makers used across different domains, like politics, military and cultural changes . They are used in achieving a significant change in the long run and they are applied to our case too:
The first principle, Start Small
Most of us start off too big. We decided it's time to exercise and we try and go from not working out at all to being in, to being at the gym for an hour every day, we know what happens. We may start off, okay, but we run out of gas or maybe we never get off the ground at all.
This happens exactly the same when you ask your customers to do a big change that will be a big leap between their current behavior and your desired behavior . If you are asking them for too much , to do and big change in their behavior it would look ambitious and sounds very well in front your company executives in the closed board rooms where you present your plans , but your customers will not do this big change to reach to your desired behavior .
What your customers will be able to do, is that they will procrastinate and avoid things that either feel overwhelming or that feel ambiguous.
So by starting very small, focus at one small behavior that will facilitate the adoption of your treatment even on small scale, you will be able to make them get going.
One of the counterintuitive things about motivation is that it often follows action. We always think it's the other way around. We think that we get motivated and then we take an action. But this works in reverse as well.
There are times that we can't think our way into right action. We have to act our way into right thinking. So, by inviting your customers to start prescribing your treatment option in the patient profiles who will benefit the most from its unique added value, even if those patients are limited, you will be able to create some momentum. You will be able to increase their motivation and their consistency. Which will make them open to expand later in larger patient’s profiles.
This what I mean by start small . First start by asking for small change in behavior and focus on ensuring this small change is constantly done by your customer. You'll be amazed at what a series of small steps taken every day can accomplish.
