The Marketers Guide To Customer Behaviour [2025]
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It’s the ONLY behavioural model you’ll ever need.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s to come:
Section by section within this post:
Framework Overview
The model we’re going through today is:
The Fogg Behaviour Model.
Developed by: BJ Fogg in 2009, founder and director of the Stanford Behaviour Design Lab.
Benefits of the FBM
Using this model will enable you to create and design digital ecosystems which can influence people’s behaviours.
Doing so can improve website and campaign performance.
FBM is a universal concept which will transcend the teachings of this post across website design and campaign architecture.
What is the FBM?
It’s a model used to analyse and design human behaviour and is accepted as one of the most effective and trusted models within the field.
It details the three conditions required for human behaviour to occur and is illustrated by a simple formula:
B = MAT
Behaviour = motivation, ability and trigger
The model provides a systematic way for digital experts to conceptualise foundational behavioural change factors.
Occurrence of human behaviour
For a target behaviour to occur, a person must have sufficient motivation and ability alongside an appropriate trigger.
All three factors must occur within a person at the exact same time for them to carry out the behaviour.
In fact: Any action a person takes can be reduced to these three elements.
If any element is missing, the behaviour won’t happen.
Module 1: Application
Applying FBM to online (eCommerce example).
Trigger being a notification of new products released from a clothing store.
In order for a person to purchase a new product, they need to have sufficient ability and motivation to do so.
Ability could include access to the internet on a secure device and having the money to make the purchase.
Motivation could include an upcoming social event or wanting to update the wardrobe.
If any one of the 3 components were missing the person wouldn’t have completed an online purchase.
Any behaviour you want a user to take on your website needs these three elements to occur (MAT).
Visual representation of the FBM
The model is plotted with an action line.
We’ll go through this in more detail in the following sections.
Further examples of the model in practice
Scenario 1: Signing up for a newsletter via email
Ability to carry out this action is simple.
Motivation can vary which would determine if the action would be taken.
Scenario 2: Filling out a multistep online form application
Ability can vary depending on how much time a person has.
Motivation can also vary depending on a person’s need for the service.
Scenario 3: Making a product purchase on an eCommerce website
Ability: How many clicks does a user need to perform before finalising the purchase? 1-click shopping websites simplify the user’s ability to make the purchase and the easier it is to buy products the increased likelihood of a purchase occurring. Therefore, increased simplicity directly impacts behaviours.
Motivation here can vary for each person depending on their need for the product.
Module 2: Motivation
Within the FBM there are three core motivators.
Motivator 1: Pleasure/pain (sensation)
Both powerful motivators, which is a person’s desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Usually an in the moment quick response from people can be expected within this motivation as one’s desire to seek pleasure or avoid pain is acted upon quite quickly.
Although powerful, due to the nature of it, designing for this motivator may not be ideal, especially pain.
Motivator 2: Hope/fear (anticipation)
This motivator is characterised by anticipation of either hope (something good happening) and fear (something bad happening).
This can be utilised when designing digital products by understanding the hope a person has when joining a dating website for instance, buying supplements that will improve their health or being motivated by fear when downloading or updating virus software.
In saying so, if done well, designing for this motivator can be empowering for the user.
Motivator 3: Social acceptance/rejection
The fundamental human desire to be socially accepted and not rejected, in which people behave in certain ways to create a sense of identity. This is very common across social media platforms in which users post content in order to be accepted by their tribe.
This motivator influences what people wear, the products they purchase, the gym they attend or even the music they listen to.
Which motivator to design for?
When designing for a motivator type, understanding your audience and their motivations across the marketing funnel should assist in the appropriate application of the motivation type being designed for.
In any instance, the higher an individual’s motivation, the increased chance of the desired behaviour occurring. Granted they right trigger is being used and they have sufficient ability to do so.
You can see if a person is high in motivation but low in ability, no matter how much you motivate them or how strong the trigger is, they won’t be able to complete the task.
Module 3: Ability
Designing for ability can move users across the action threshold.
Increasing user ability can occur in two ways:
Teaching and training people to improve: With regards to web design this is not ideal as you don’t want to be teaching people how to use your website, navigation should occur naturally without thought or effort.
Users don’t have the desire to want to learn how to use your website, the more seamless you can make your user’s experience the more competitive you’ll be.
In summary, great user experience is invisible, meaning users are using and interacting with your website without thinking.
Simplicity: As you design for and increase simplicity, you increase ability and reduce the perceived difficulty associated with the behaviour you want the user to complete.
This is a major factor, in fact BJ Fogg states persuasive design is more successful when the focus is on simplifying the behaviour instead of trying to increase motivation.
As you increase the simplicity of your primary and secondary web goals, the easier they appear to complete which increases conversion rates.
You can see below as you increase ability by making an action easier to do, the likelihood of the behaviour occurring increases, as long as you have the right trigger and have encouraged sufficient motivation, the user will most likely fall on the successful side of the action line.
The six parts to simplicity
Time: How much time does the target behaviour take to complete? The more time, the less simple
Money: If the target behaviour has a financial barrier and the user doesn’t have the money, the task isn’t simple. The inverse is also true, wealthy people will outsource mundane tasks to simplify their lives
Physical effort: Behaviours which require higher levels of physical effort may increase difficulty and reduce simplicity
Brain cycles: How much mental effort is required to complete the target behaviour? If the task makes people think too hard, in most cases it will reduce a person’s ability
Social deviance: If the target behaviour requires someone to break the rules, simplicity reduces
Non-routine: A user completing a routine behaviour is simple for them to do as they’ve done it many times before. If a target behaviour requires a user to break their routine, it may increase perceived difficulty
Which simplicity factor to focus on?
Identifying the profile of your target audience will assist with this. Are they time poor, not wealthy, do they not have the ability to think too much to complete the target behaviour?
Understanding what is the scarcest resource at the time a behaviour is triggered for your audience will enable you to focus on what to optimise for.
Module 4: Trigger
A trigger or call to action is a prompt which indicates a user to take action, this could include a button or hyperlink on your website.
The key here is to ensure you’re using the correct copy in your CTAs.
The three triggers and their purpose:
Spark: Motivates behaviour
Facilitator: Simplifies behaviour
Signal: A reminder
Sparks
These are great for when your users are low in motivation and high in ability, incorporating a motivation within the CTA (hope for instance) will amplify the effectiveness of this as well.
Taking the example of newsletter signups. The user’s ability to sign up for your newsletter is high, all they have to do is enter their email address, but their motivation may be low, therefore being hyper specific highlighting the value of your newsletter within your CTA text would be ideal. As a result of increasing value, you’ll increase motivation.
Facilitators
This trigger is the opposite of sparks, it’s to be used when users are high in motivation but low in ability.
The users want to engage in your service or purchase your product but one or more of the six parts of simplicity are not being satisfied, preventing them from completing the target behaviour.
The key to overcome this is to ensure the CTAs on your website highlight how easy it is for users to complete the target behaviour.
Sparks vs Facilitators
Make sure you use these correctly, don’t use sparks if the users are already high in motivation/low in ability and don’t use facilitators if the users are low in motivation/high in ability.
Doing so can prevent users from completing the target behaviour.
Continuing with the newsletter example, if the CTA read “It’s really easy to sign up, all you need is an email” this will not help users overcome their barrier to completing the target behaviour, they already know it’s easy, what they need to know is the value of signing up to your newsletter, for example: “Get the top 3 strategies we used to grow our business by 377% in 11 weeks”.
Signals
The final trigger type being signals, they are excellent to use when users have both the motivation and ability to perform the target behaviour.
Here we aren’t intending to motivate or simplify, we are reminding users of the action to be taken.
A straightforward button or link will do the job.
An example in our everyday lives would be a traffic light changing from red to green, it doesn’t motivate us to drive our cars, it’s a reminder for us to start driving our cars.
Module 5: Broader application
This universal model transcends the elements of digital marketing and is to be ideally used as a foundational pillar to all your efforts in which human behaviour is a factor to be considered.
It’s application is beyond web design and marketing campaign architecture, it can be used as a guide when determining and planning for things including but not limited to:
- Branding
- Sales and pricing
- General web copy
- Website architecture
- Product and business modelling
External to digital marketing, we can understand how MAT is working in unison to create target behaviour in our everyday lives, whether it be traffic lights or purchasing things at the store.
Next steps
Apply this knowledge to your target market and audience.
Understanding who they are and how to apply the model to them is key.
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