Prevention, Promotion and Penalty Kicks

Do You Play to Win—or to Not Lose?

On Friday I got talking to a bunch of smart cookies at #ProductSF who were curious and excited by an insight I showed during my ignite talk Building Better Products with Behavioral Economics (Great conference by the way Josh & Ty). Afterward @joshelman asked me to say more and share what I’ve learned with a broader audience. I’ve been looking for an excuse to try Medium anyway, so let’s see how this goes.

A little bit about me and more later if necessary. I’m a Product Manager at Mint where I get the chance to help millions of people make more with their money every day. Helping people at this scale makes me really happy. Because of Mint’s reach, I’ve learned a lot by trying things and every once in a while I stumble upon something really useful that I’d like to be able to share.

It was just about a year ago when I stumbled upon a podcast from the Harvard Business Review on my drive in to work and was introduced to the concept of Prevention vs. Promotion. During the podcast, a story about Boeing got me thinking about how we could incentivize salespeople elsewhere in the organization. Later in the story, when I heard about the research with a German soccer team from the book Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence. I was convinced this was a powerful concept.

What I took away was that once you can identify a person’s motivational language, you can help them understand your point of view, even if it’s a different dominant motivation than your own (Prevention vs. Promotion).

So that’s where penalty kicks come in: Coaches in a highly regarded semi-professional soccer league were told to prep their players for high-pressure penalty kicks with one of two statements: “You are going to shoot five penalties. Your goal is to score at least three times.” Or, “You are going to shoot five penalties. Your obligation is to not miss more than twice.” Players did significantly better when the instructions were framed to match their dominant motivational focus.

In fact, players scored nearly 1 point more out of 5 tries when the instructions were framed to match their dominant motivational focus. Is that a big deal? Yes. World Cup Finals were decided by 1 goal or less 3 times out of the last 5 final matches.

OK, so back to Mint and your Money. How can we use motivational focus to drive more engagement with Mint so people get a better grasp on their finances?

At the time I heard the podcast, this sort of thing was the topic du jour at Mint. Intuit had even hired its very own Behavioral Economist to work with us, and for my own education I was able to pick up some tips from Dan Ariely, BJ Fogg and Nir Eyal via in-depth bootcamps, a few 1-on-1's and some nights spent with Dan’s Coursera.

We had another PM on the team plus a designer and we spent most of our days learning about Behavioral Economics, then applying what we learned to tests. The goal was to make discoveries that made Mint more valuable no matter how big or small, but the hope was to find the spark of something big. Discover something meaningful. And I was full of it by this point. Behavioral Psychology that is.

It can be a bit much. We played with hot states, cold states, loss aversion, framing, defaults, priming, mental accounting, rules of thumb, signaling, oh and choice overload (see what I did there?). It was fun (and still is) but I didn’t have a strong feeling one way or another until I heard that podcast.

I felt like every idea the team had was a good one, but Prevention vs. Promotion just clicked with me. Our hypothesis was simple: even though a person’s dominant focus could be either prevention or promotion, when it came to money the majority of users who sought out Mint and set their accounts up were going to have a prevention focus. At least when it came to their money.

We found a few places to apply it right away, but none with such obvious results as what product designers call a lifecycle email we targeted at lapsed customers.

We designed a pretty standard email based on a template we normally use at Mint with a single, strong call to action. And then I started emailing lapsed users with broken accounts in batches of about 3,000 users per batch. I tried a bunch of different subject lines that fit the bill — either prevention, promotion or neutral. In the end it came down to:

Account Alert: Don’t miss a transaction, update your Mint account today.

vs

Get your full financial picture from Mint — fix your broken account today.

The prevention-focused “alert” won, hands down. Not only did users open it twice as often, but they were also much more likely to click the call to action in the message, login and attempt to fix their account. It netted a 3x difference between our best performing Prevention and Promotion messages.

Since then we’ve managed to sprinkle Prevention messaging within Mint to a strong effect, which makes me happy. Anytime we can help users take smart action with their money I’m pleased. But this brought up a number of questions for the pseudo-scientist in me and the rest of the team:

• Wasn’t this success just an example of loss aversion?
• Is there some labor illusion here, too, because the user setup their Mint account in the first place and wants to keep its status intact?
• Where does Promotion fit into Mint if at all? Perhaps something more aspirational like Goals or Retirement?

These are all good questions, and I have others, but what I would really like to know is once I can determine your dominant motivational focus by asking you a few questions or looking at your spending behavior and budgeting style, then can I customize your entire flow around either Prevention or Promotion and create a superior experience? Can we find an experience that suits your style and get to better outcomes for everyone, better than just our Prevention results alone for instance?

Something like this would be the ultimate proof point. But we’re not quite able to do that yet, not to the degree I would like to anyway. I’ll first need to find a way to do that without asking you 436 questions. In the meantime we’ll apply what we’ve learned and when in doubt simply try both first, then roll with the winner.

I hope to share more things like this soon. In the mean time, let me know if I can help or what you’d like to hear about. Behaviors are something I’m particularly fascinated with and I believe Product Managers and Designers will learn more if we’re able to be share our discoveries like this (nice recap on #productsf by @adamsigel by the way). Where have you seen Prevention or Promotion succeed (or fail) in your own work? Did you get some new ideas Today? How will you put them to use? ‘Til next time.