The 75 year old sociological theory that is at the heart of creative for paid social
The 75 year old sociological theory that is at the heart of creative for paid social
Why Kurt Lewin's Force Field Analysis is one of the most important part of the growth pros handbook.
Getting consumers to break their habits is one of the hardest things you can do.
Why? If left to our own devices, humans will repeat the same behaviours over and over again. We are creatures of habit. We want ease and comfort. We would prefer not to make choices.
A mantra of ‘if we build it they’ll come’ persists in many circles today. But as the other saying goes, first time founders focus on product, second time focus on distribution.
The truth is in the desert of Silicon Valley lie the corpses of thousands of products, all superior to their competitors, which were killed by their marketing.
Customer, customer, customer
We all know by now that creative is king. But to make great creative, it isn’t enough to understand platform trends, be entertaining, and be social-first. Although you must be all of those things as well. You must also have a deep understanding of your customer.
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) theory can be a vast minefield for the uninitiated. It is too often filled with the sort of corporate doublespeak that seems purposefully designed to confuse you.
But in the middle of it all, if you look hard enough, there are some concepts which have helped me and others take companies from 0 to 100.
Driving and restraining forces
"to bring about any change, the balance between the forces which maintain the social self-regulation at a given level has to be upset"
JTBD is the idea that in every customer interaction, you are hiring a product rather than simply buying it. And conversely, if you no longer think it’s good, you’ll fire it.
One aspect, and the one I’ve found most useful for advertising, is what Clayton Christensen named the Forces of Progress1. This idea bridged JTBD theory with something much older. This is in fact a riff on sociologist Kurt Lewin’s 1948 work in Resolving Social Conflicts2 on Force Field Analysis.
In it, Lewin describes an idea called force field analysis. In which he states society experiences:
Driving forces, which are positive force for change
Restraining forces, which are obstacles for change
These two forces push alongside us all of the time. It’s from this that Christensen applies it to customer journeys as the Forces of Progress.
In every customer journey you have two competing forces: what Lewin would describe as driving and restraining. The positive, forward motion forces of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ and the negative, backward motion forces of ‘anxiety’ and ‘habit’.
Whether you’re buying chewing gum, a holiday home, or enterprise security software for your FTSE 100, you go through these forces.
Forces of Progress
Understanding these four elements in your customer journey are essential in acquiring customers.
Push and pull are the easy parts. Every day, we walk around with new desires, and ideas of how things could improve. And there is an almost infinite number of pulls of solutions to them.
Understanding habit and anxiety is essential in understanding how to really understand the pain your customer experiences, and how you can convert them.
It’s a brilliant marketing framework. It’s also a great product lens. And had I have asked the right questions before, it can also reveal a lot about product-market fit.
Sidebar: examining Wine List’s PMF challenge using Forces of Progress
At Wine List, my last startup where we wanted to fix wine education, we mapped this out at the time.
Push: “I wish I knew more about wine” or maybe “I wish I could appear more impressive on a date / with my in-laws when ordering wine” or “I wish whenever I splurged on some nice wine, I didn’t so often find it boring”
Pull (or at least what we tried building): “This is the new way to learn about wine. Learn all about grapes, regions, how to sound smart etc.”
So far, so good. You can see how a product could develop, and how marketing could follow.
The problem was in the the bottom two.
See, the strongest forces are habit and anxiety. We all wish we could be better, funnier, have the nicer car, sound smarter in the meeting, eat healthier and work out more. But most of us won’t ever change that behaviour.
Thinking about that Wine List customer:
Habit: “I usually only spend 30 seconds choosing a bottle of wine in a supermarket and a minute in a restaurant”
Anxiety: “I don’t want to become a wine bore. Surely it takes a long time to learn all that knowledge. Isn’t a lot of it all bullshit anyway?”
Now when considering that habit and anxiety together, you start to see the problem we had. There were significant factors up against us.
Ultimately we failed to find product-market fit3 and the reason lay somewhere in this customer problem.
Practical guide to forces of progress in paid social ads
Getting on top of this is vital in being able to acquire customers. So too is the wider JTBD theory and it’s well worth getting stuck in to the whole thing (see further reading).
But for paid social specifically, habits and anxieties are brilliant.
A few months ago, I wrote about the one question we asked at Thriva that led to over £100k of revenue. That question was a Forces of Progress question.
So how do we actually use all this in ads?
Step one: ask the right questions
JTBD interviews can be the most valuable return on 30 minutes of time you’ve got
The full JTBD interview process has a lot to it.
Getting good at them takes a lot of work, and a lot of trudging through seemingly pointless repetition. But being good is a great leg up in growing businesses today.
Getting brilliant at interviewing is the growth equivalent of being a 10x engineer.
This is not a post on how to run those interviews. But at high-level, you need to be digging into questions on habits and anxieties.
“What almost stopped you from buying {your product/service}” (Anxiety)
“What are the red flags you’ve had with us so far?” (anxiety)
“Why did you stop using the last solution?” (anxiety around the overall problem)
“What problems have you had trying to fix this problem so far?” (anxiety)
“When you found out about us, what questions did you google?” (anxiety)
“How have you been solving this problem to date?” (habit)
“When did you start experiencing the problem?” (habit)
"What’s stopped you from buying our competitor before now?”
Questions like this will produce all types of answers.
You’re looking for people to dig deep. If they have something that immediately springs to head, maybe that’s useful, but more than likely if it’s that obvious it might not be deep enough. Keep digging.
Step two: answer each anxiety and habit
With all of those problems on paper, start identifying how you really answer those questions. What is there in the product that solves for them.
Now cross reference that with your JTBD archive and see what customers have said about those specific things in the past. Got a direct quote that answers the question? Brilliant. Make a note of it. If not list out the features you’ve got that solve those problems.
Some of these might still be problems in your product. If so, these are things to consider for your product roadmap.
Others might be things that simple marketing tricks can help fix.
Once you’ve answered all of these. Group them together over your interviews. You’ll start to have an ordered list of anxieties and habits and, (hopefully), ways in which your product solves them.
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Step three: create ads around the most commonly felt problems
I like to start all ad ideas like they were pieces of creator-driven content.
Imagine you’ve got a direct quote like, “I was worried that your DTC protein crisps wouldn’t taste very good.” All the while, you know that it’s one of the things people love the most.
Well I’d start by putting that call and response in the middle of a creator script.
What’s a good way of solving for that? Social proof is a great way. Maybe the creator content includes blind tasting in the public, voxpop style (like we did recently for client Mother Root).
Maybe the content takes the form of two people having a discussion about the flavour of them or a recommendation.
Maybe it’s the founder telling a story about how all other protein crisps taste bad and they wanted to really solve the challenge of taste.
Whatever it is I often find a narrative script the best way of solving for that.
Off the back of the narrative creator-script, you’ll like have more hooky ideas as well. Maybe you’ve got a Trustpilot review where someone raves about flavour. Maybe you’ve seen someone comment on a FB group recommending your product. Screen shot those and get them into your creative library.
It’s natural to think these are only good retargeting ads. But the way the platforms work today, you’ll be hitting people multiple times with prospecting ads too. Put these ads across your funnel.
As you develop winners, make sure to continue these insights through the funnel. Messages that win here on social, can now inform your next landing page test. The results of that landing page test can inform your basket abandonment email flows and your CRO. And the results of those experiments can inform how your product team thinks about onboarding with these anxieties in mind.
Summary
In our experience, the ads that stem from the customer interviews we run are the ads which produce the very highest chance of success. When was the last time you spoke to a customer? Inside those interviews lie the answers to most of your social problems. Interested in one of our JTBD workshops? Book a 15 min discovery call.
In the meantime, go book a customer interview today. Find the latest 10 people who signed up, and get in touch. See what you can discover.
Bites of the week
If you want to read more on Jobs to be Done at a high level – then check out Intercom’s guide4. For my money, it’s better written than any other resource, and curated to the most practical level of abstraction.
Competing Against Luck. Clayton Christensen, 2016
Resolving Social Conflicts. Kurt Lewin, 1948
Seven lessons learnt failing my first startup, Early Stage Growth.