The real reasons people don’t do the thing
Every brand seems to be wrestling with AI, personalisation and rising decision fatigue. So we turned to our favourite co-conspirator Emily Barnes from Carta Strategy for a grounded take on what really shapes human behaviour when life gets complicated.
For decades, marketing in finance has been shaped around homo economicus, a mythical creature beloved by stakeholders who makes perfect decisions, reads every disclosure, compares every option and always picks the rational choice.
Frankly, that sounds like someone we’d prefer to avoid at a party.
In the real world, people aren’t optimisation robots. They’re complicated and messy. We’re busy juggling pets with mystery ailments, school drop-off, inbox avalanches, interest rate anxiety and whatever fresh chaos the day serves up for us.
This is why behaviour change in financial services is so complex. We’re not influencing tidy rationality, we’re navigating identity, emotion, timing, cognitive load and a hundred competing priorities to reach, inform and influence our customer. Yikes.
The marketing funnel is a lie
The marketing funnel assumes that consumers flow neatly from initial awareness of a product through to purchase and loyalty. If only human behaviour were that linear!
The truth? People might genuinely want to do the thing… right up until they get an unexpected Teams call or they’re suddenly driven to alphabetise their spice rack. It’s not apathy or laziness that gets in the way, but the messy reality of modern life.
A model for creating behaviour change
If behaviour change had a cheat code, COM-B would be it.
It’s a refreshingly simple model. For any behaviour to occur, three things need to be true: capability, opportunity, and motivation. Think of it like a three-legged stool. If one leg is wobbly, nothing stands up.
1. Capability: Can they actually do the thing?
Capability is about skills, knowledge, confidence and cognitive load – our mental and physical capacity to follow through. In finance, this might look like:
Not understanding a key term that isn’t defined for us (we’re looking at you, franking credits).
Feeling overwhelmed by a dense, 10-page form.
Being unsure which product tier is right for them.
2. Opportunity: Does their environment support the thing?
Opportunity is where context, timing, systems and social cues come into play. Opportunity problems show up as:
User journeys full of dead-ends and nonsensical loops.
Poor timing.
Processes that fight people instead of helping them.
Solving opportunity-related problems often has a huge impact on behaviour because it removes friction, instead of trying to inspire people to push through it.
3. Motivation: Do they want to do the thing right now?
Ah, motivation. It disappears the moment something easier, louder or more urgent enters our field of vision. In financial services, motivation can be difficult to harness if the behaviour we’re trying to drive is linked to:
Long-term benefits that feel abstract.
Anxiety about making the wrong choice.
General “I’ll deal with this later” energy.
Before you try to shift behaviour, check these five behaviour blockers
If you’re about to push out campaigns, comms or creative, we recommend sanity-check your idea against these five behaviour blockers.
1. Is the behaviour you’re encouraging genuinely simple?
Simplicity isn’t about fewer steps. It’s about fewer thinking steps.
If the action you want your customer to take requires effort, juggling, paperwork, multiple log-ins or a small act of time-travel (“just find your last three payslips and upload them here…”), people won’t do it.
2. Is the next step obvious?
Ambiguity kills action. When people aren’t 100% sure what to do next, they default to doing nothing. Clear beats clever every time:
Tell your reader exactly what to do.
Show them where to click.
Reduce optionality or make comparisons easy.
3. Does the moment make sense?
Timing is one of the most underrated behaviour-change levers.
People take action when the prompt syncs with something already happening in their life, like a renewal, a milestone, a problem or a need. If your message arrives at the wrong moment (end of quarter, school holidays, interest rate chaos), it doesn’t matter how compelling it is.
Right behaviour + wrong timing = nothing happens.
4. Does it align with how they see themselves?
Identity friction is real. People avoid behaviours that clash with how they want to be seen or how they see themselves. Whether that’s “I’m not a finance person,” “I hate admin,” or “I’m someone who is loyal to my bank.”
If your behaviour requires someone to push against their sense of self, the resistance will be invisible but strong. Design your ask to support their identity, not challenge it.
5. What else is your ask competing with?
Even important actions get displaced by immediate ones. Most of us spend all day juggling a to-do list that never seems to get shorter. If your desired behaviour doesn’t outrank the competing “stuff” in their day or inbox, it’s not happening no matter how motivated they are.
You can’t inform someone into action
If we want people to act, whether that’s recycling at a festival or moving their super, we need to design for the world our customers live in, not the one our strategy deck or stakeholders wish they lived in.
Create the right cues, timing and pathways, and magically, mysteriously, beautifully… people will start doing the thing.