Four ways to unlock goal achievement for yourself and your business
This is about how people can be more successful achieving their own goals, and how smart marketers and product managers can help them do so and grow their businesses in the process.
Goals are really cool. One of my favorite stories about goal setting involves the rapper Drake, who at 23 committed to making $25 million by the age of 25. After reaching that goal on time, he upped his commitment again to $250 million.
A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a successful venture capitalist in San Francisco about different kinds of businesses that can achieve social good while also delivering growth and profit to investors. One thing that came up was how a product’s potential market size can shrink if it depends on selling a goal that is “too lofty” for mass consumption. For example, different energy consumers care about saving energy and helping the environment to very different degrees, and a number of startups have failed to make much money because they have ignored that truth. Or for someone thinking about businesses that help families, it’s important to note that some parents are much more focused on the development of their children than others might be. And while small markets aren’t necessarily bad (and some can be very impactful and profitable), larger markets are usually better for both investors and society.
Here are four ways to unlock goal achievement and to think about ways to maximize a business opportunity that hinges on people meeting their goals.
1. Seizing the right moment is critical
Timing is everything when it comes to setting goals. Not all moments in life are created equal, and this turns out to be the case for goal achievement as well. Wharton professor Katherine Milkman explains:
“There are moments in our lives that feel like the start of a new era, the start of a new cycle. Like the beginning of a new week, the beginning of a new month, the beginning of a new year. Following a holiday or following a birthday. And following those kinds of fresh start moments, people actually are more motivated to follow through on their goals. So we see that people search more for the term ‘diet’ on Google, we see that people go to the gym more frequently following those fresh start moments, and we also see that they create more goals. Both health and health-irrelevant goals on a goal-setting website.” — Professor Katherine Milkman, The Wharton School
Inflection points can be commonplace, like birthdays or the beginnings of seasons. Or they can be more substantial, such as when someone moves into a new home and is ready to make life changes (which is why there is a healthy market for new mover data purchases by marketers looking to sell everything from dentists to cable companies). One clever company that has taken advantage of inflection points is my former employer, Opower, which is using software that helps utilities seize on moments of particular relevance to energy consumers when a behavior change can be effected and a positive difference can be made in a customer relationship.
Even more substantial than a birthday or a new home, major events in a country can also create an inflection point and open up the opportunity to pursue new goals. This was the case in Japan with the rise of decluttering guru Marie Kondo. When her first book was published in 2010, sales were “fine”.
Then the 2011 earthquake and tsunami happened. Kondo’s editor, Tomohiro Takahashi…explained with great tact the catastrophe’s effect on book sales. “The Japanese people suddenly had to ask themselves what was important in their lives. What was the true value of sentimental items? What was the meaning of the items they’d lost? What was the meaning of life?” Sales exploded in the quake’s aftermath.
It is perhaps not surprising that a decluttering phenom would emerge from Japan, a country with companies and organizations well known for rigorous approaches to continuous improvement and planning.
2. People who plan are more likely to act
Experts in behavioral economics recommend writing a concrete plan if people want to follow through with their goals. In a recent experiment performed by behavioral researchers, individuals who were prompted to privately write down a “flu shot plan” specifying the date and time they would visit a clinic actually went on to get shots at a 13 percent higher rate people were also reminded about clinics but were not prompted to form a plan. A similar experiment showed the efficacy of written plans in improving the turnout for colonoscopies. One study indicated that people are 42% more likely to achieve their goals simply if they write those goals down.
Commitment makes people more likely to act, and it also leads to people being more positively inclined toward the action they committed to doing and more likely to talk about it. The desire to remain consistent with stated commitments is strong, and one that smart marketers take advantage of in thoughtful ways. One example of the power of recorded commitments involved the redesign of the Obama campaign’s donation form, which increased donation conversions 5% by simply asking for a firm commitment to a specific dollar amount at the beginning of the process, well before all the forms were filled out.
So for individuals and the marketers they are trying to reach, written commitments and plans can be powerful tools for achieving goals. But those plans might not be effective if the goals they’re written for are too much of a stretch or not well aligned with the things the person really cares about.
3. Attainability and relevance is everything
We are more likely to achieve goals if we feel they are attainable in the first place. This comes down to a sense of agency. Agency is all about defining who you are based on your individual wants and your ability to fulfill those wants. It turns out that our sense of self is more determined by the things that we do as individuals than by the relationships we have with other people. And in fact, when people have a sense that they are facing attainable goals and that they have control over those goals, their self-esteem goes up. On the other hand, an experience of failure can discourage a person from trying again. This is especially tough to manage when folks feel stretched too thin at work or home.
Weight Watchers is a company that has understood the importance of goal attainability and put it into action with their customers. When someone first joins Weight Watchers, they are encouraged to focus on losing an initial 10 percent of their starting weight. This is described as a “mini goal” and is explicitly used to help “reduce the anxiety you might feel when thinking about the total amount of weight you’d like to lose”. Once the initial goal is achieved, subsequent ones are set.
Of course, different people have different goals, and while some goals may be very worthy they may not be important to a particular person and therefore will not tap into their emotions to any meaningful degree. Here’s what Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has to say about this:
“If you look at life satisfaction and what makes people satisfied with their lives, most of which, we know, it has a lot to do with people’s goals. When we ask people how important money is to them when they are 18 and we look at their income at age 45, we find that the people that said at age 18 that money didn’t matter to them very much, at age 45 money doesn’t matter to them very much. So the correlation between their income and their satisfaction with life is really very low. The people who said that money is very important to them, those who made a lot of money are really quite satisfied with their lives and those who didn’t make a lot of money are really quite miserable.”
The social network somebody is plugged into will exacerbate these effects, either positively or negatively. Tapping into peers is another powerful way to increase the likelihood goals will be achieved.
4. Social networks enable goal achievement
It’s not surprising that who you spend time with affects your future actions.
Social proof is a motivator rooted in conformity. Research has shown us that when people have no idea what to do, they try to do what everyone else around them is doing. We are all driven by our social group’s norms…for bad or for good. As an example of the former, scientific analysis has revealed that the men who are most violent at twenty-two or twenty-three are the ones who not only had received reinforcement for talk of deviant behavior much earlier in their lives, but also had a friend or friends with whom they had coercive interactions when they were younger. On the other hand, having the right peers can really help someone meet their goals. For example, peer mentorship has been proven in scientific research to make people more effective at keeping their commitments.
Product managers and marketers are tapping into this force by enlisting the power of social networks to amplify one person’s commitment into multiple commitments from multiple friends. One company that understands this well is Kickstarter, the platform on which Pebble raised more than $13 million in a matter of days this week.
“The Pebble Time project will show that the real power and utility of our platform is not in money, it’s in community and distribution.” — Yancey Strickler, CEO of Kickstarter
Likewise, rapidly growing fitness startup Fitmob understands that by tapping into groups of friends to make shared commitments to Fitmob classes, it can grow its business, amplify its brand, and increase customer retention.
This all impacts the opportunity size for a mission-driven business
If you are working on building a mission-driven business, here are some questions that you might ask yourself as you take all this information about goals into account:
Inflection points: What are the inflection points when your product or service will have the most salience to your targeted customers? When will they be most prone to thinking about commitments that align with what you are offering, and how frequently will that occur? What are the implications for market size, customer acquisition, and upsell? If you alter the offering and the goal alignment slightly, can it affect this in a meaningful way?
Plans and commitments: Have you designed your products and your marketing to garner written or recorded plans and commitments from your customers? If you are reluctant to do so, what does that say about the strength of your product/market fit? If you are not reluctant to do so but haven’t yet, what kind of latent upside exists in your business?
Attainability and relevance: If you are asking customers to modify their behavior by using your product, is the ask easily attainable? Are you certain that the goal you are helping them achieve is actually what is most important to them? What have you done to take your own biases out of this equation?
Social networks and social proof: If your company is mission-driven, then are you adequately tapping into your customers’ social networks to reinforce and increase your customers’ public commitments on an individual basis while broadening your own customer acquisition in parallel?
Goals are really cool. And understanding how people think about achieving the goals that matter to them is really important.
