Theory of planned behavior
Why people's intentions don't become actions unless they believe it works, others do it, and they can do it, plus how to use this in marketing.
In this issue
Hi there.
Everyone’s doing squats. Nobody’s doing… whatever the brain equivalent is. We tried a memory test yesterday and pulled a mental muscle.
But it’s a fair question: if you can train a bicep, why not attention? Marketing runs on focus, and ours has been suspiciously wobbly. Smartphones didn’t help. AI definitely won’t.
Reps start today. Mentally.
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
We’ve been meaning to start running since March. The shoes arrived. They’re still in the box.
You might call it laziness. Partly, at least. But there’s a different model to this demeanor. And marketers keep ignoring it.
Psychologists call it the Theory of Planned Behavior. Ajzen, who worked on proving this bias late last century, says three inputs decide whether intention turns into action:
- Attitude: do we believe the behavior pays off.
- Subjective norms: do people we respect do it too.
- Perceived behavioral control: do we believe we can actually pull it off.
Score well on all three and intention forms. Intention plus control then predicts behavior.
Researchers reviewed 185 studies and found the model explained 39% of variance in intention and 27% in behavior. Which explains the meal-kit box we swore would fix our diet.
Great attitude, friends doing it, zero belief we’d cook on a Tuesday.
Prospects sit in the same gap. They want it. They don’t buy. To fix this, you’ll need to fix all three inputs, not just the one your copy is comfortable with.
Three ways to leverage Theory of Planned Behavior
Sell the arithmetic
You’re tempted to sell the aspiration.
But attitude comes from beliefs about what a behavior actually produces. Vague virtue doesn’t move anyone.
Oddbox,a UK wonky-veg subscription, does the sums for the buyer.
Its site says a medium box, weekly for three months, rescues 85kg of fruit and veg. Roughly 200 meals’ worth.
Not “help fight food waste.” A number, a unit, a timeframe.
Beliefs beat adjectives. Specificity is what makes an attitude worth acting on.
Our take: rewrite one benefit line as arithmetic the buyer can picture.
Autonomy converts because a choice we made ourselves is harder to abandon than one we accepted.
Show the norm
Subjective norms are what we assume people like us are doing.
Telling households to save energy does little. Showing them the neighbors does more.
Opower, now part of Oracle, mailed reports comparing each home with similar nearby ones.
Across twelve utilities, consumption fell 2.0% on average, and the savings outlasted the mailings.
They did it without discounts or guilt tripping their customers. They just sent a bar chart with the neighbors on it.
What you can do: in onboarding, show what comparable customers did. Same plan, same industry, same size.
Kill the doubt
Perceived behavioral control is the belief we can pull it off. It’s the objection nobody types into your chat widget. Sofas fail this test constantly.
Wrong stairs, tight doorway, hour four of assembly.
Swyft ships sofas as boxes one adult can shift, clicking together without tools.
Its site leads with 24-hour delivery and 100-day returns. The doorway and the regret, both handled. That de-risks the decision more than the price of the product itself.
The lesson: Free shipping doesn’t fix self-doubt. A rehearsal does. Find the step where buyers doubt themselves, then remove the doubt, not the cost.
So. Much. AI news. How do you know what’s worth your attention?
There’s always something new with AI, but not everything deserves your attention.
Good thing The Deep View only focuses on AI developments that could actually impact your work and decisions.
It shares must-know updates into a fun, 5-minute read and has helped 500,000+ professionals stay informed without drowning in the constant flood of updates.
Even readers from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and a16z start their day with these insights.
META: …just gave a billion people a buyer’s agent, Muse. And Muse doesn’t answer questions, it does the work: opens a browser, fills forms, negotiates, then checks out with Stripe’s Link. It’s the first agent covered by Link’s purchase protections, using one-time-use cards. Cha-ching?
OPENAI: Climbing the charts? ChatGPT.com is now the ninth-biggest website in the US, up 48% year over year to 1.09 billion monthly visits. Bing fell 50% over the same stretch, while DuckDuckGo lost 16%. It’s a battlefield out there.
GOOGLE: Compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act has, in Google’s words, caused the worst drop in search quality in its 29-year history. European results now push comparison sites up top and strip real-time pricing from hotel, flight, and restaurant carousels. Big ouch.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Australia wants to force Meta, Google, and TikTok to let users switch off recommendation algorithms, with substantial penalties for platforms that don’t comply. It’s only a proposal for now, but we already foresee an issue if a chronological feed becomes the only option. And that is, high-frequency posts, aka spam.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Self Determination Theory.
The “Planning, trying, doing” Crew.
Get the next psychology effect in your inbox.
Receive cutting-edge, science-driven marketing insights and tips every Thursday, for free.
