Understanding the Fogg Behavior Model in marketing

I've long subscribed to the notion that impactful marketing springs fundamentally from a deeper understanding of human behaviours. Too often, marketers fixate on flashy technology or chasing trends, while forgetting the simple reality - we are driving real-world human actions.

Yet, when I started integrating methods from behavioural science - particularly the Fogg Behavior Model - it became abundantly clear just how powerful a deeper psychological approach could be in driving measurable marketing results at scale.

In my career, I've learned how crucial it is to break planned outcomes down into clear, small, and manageable behaviours first. There’s a ‘minimum viable chain’ of behaviours that someone needs to go through before they can become a fully-realised customer or fan of a brand. Break down those behaviours into a sequence, and you’ve got a recipe for a chain of targeted campaigns that soak audiences towards your goal.

This focus has consistently resulted in greater and sustainable success for campaigns I've directed. Allow me to explore how you, too, can effectively leverage this behavioural framework in your marketing strategy.

The BJ Fogg Behavior Model

If you're not already familiar with behaviour scientist BJ Fogg, he developed an influential framework at the Stanford Behavior Design Lab known as the "Fogg Behavior Model." Put simply, this model illustrates how all human behaviour requires three elements to occur simultaneously:

1. Motivation (Do people genuinely want to do the behaviour?)

2. Ability (How easy or hard is it for them to complete the action?)

3. Prompt (A clear trigger or cue prompting the desired action.)

Picture these three elements converging at a single moment in time. Only when motivation, ability, and prompt intersect above a certain threshold does behaviour reliably take place.

Let’s take a simple example we can all relate to. When your petrol light turns on in your car, you’ve got a prompt to fill up your petrol - and you’re probably motivated to fill up - but until you arrive at a petrol station, you don’t have any ability to fill up your car. Only when you arrive at a petrol station does the ability also emerge. With all three behavioural elements present, the behaviour will now occur.

In marketing, the prompt is often your message. And you’d be wise to focus on targeting people who are already motivated. You better be sure that it’s extremely easy for those people to act on your message, with a simple, functional purchase process, or the behaviour you want isn’t going to fire. If something you want to happen isn’t happening, by applying the model, you can quickly identify why certain marketing initiatives thrive while others fail.

Motivation - Amplify Emotional Resonance and Value

Motivation seems intuitive - people act because they're driven by internal forces, right? In practice, however, marketers often undervalue just how fluid motivation can be. It's easy to assume your customer segment is motivated, but great marketers meticulously consider how target audiences' motivations fluctuate across situations and time.

Understanding these psychological motivators - the "levers" of human desire, fear, hope, pain, pleasure, and even social acceptance - helps us profoundly shape how we position products and speak to our audience.

For instance, my team had significant success with music and film marketing initiatives, not by blasting messages broadly but by carefully sequencing campaigns that tapped into fans' emotional desire for connection with the art or artist. We drove higher engagement and conversion by aligning each message closely to users' intrinsic motivations, rather than simply relying upon generic, mass-market content.

It’s also important to prioritise finding people who are already motivated. It’s one thing to tap into motivations carefully, and another to instil motivation where it isn’t already there. Unless you’re really saturating a market already like Coca Cola, you’re best focusing efforts and targeting on people who are already motivated to buy your product, whether they know it yet or not. 

Ability - Simplifying the Path to Action

When thinking of "ability," remember this simple principle: ease is everything. Serious results come when businesses systematically remove friction from their marketing funnel, simplifying actions at every step. An individual may be highly motivated, yet if the slightest barrier emerges - slow load times, unclear call-to-action, cumbersome checkout process - the conversion instantly plummets.

Consider Amazon's "one-click purchase." Their extraordinary conversion rates largely stem from drastically reducing friction in the purchasing process. Similarly, a UX audit - something my team regularly undertakes for clients - often reveals significant opportunities to remove friction we might initially overlook. By reducing psychological difficulty (complex instructions, endless forms) as well, sales or signups rise substantially.

Ability is far easier to influence than motivation. Un-grease the user journey and make it easy for those motivated people to take action - and your primary job will be to put a prompt in front of a motivated audience so they can easily become a customer.

Prompts - The Crucial Trigger for Action

Without prompting, even highly motivated and capable audiences rarely take immediate action they'd otherwise want to. 

Well-timed prompts act as powerful cues, urging prospects from inertia toward instant action. Look at notification panels, email reminders or retargeting ads - these simple cues increase conversion rates dramatically. 

A huge part of our success in paid media has been how our targeting self-organises audiences into stages via their own behaviour. For example, if they’ve interacted with the brand but not been on the website, or they’ve visited a category page but not a product. These behaviours signal what the next easiest step looks like for each group. A chain of these micro-prompts triggered by specific, predictable user actions, align precisely with moments where user motivation and ability peaked, delivering optimal results. 

This might sound like a traditional marketing funnel, but in practice it means you can have branches of prompts that give users a dynamic ‘choose your adventure’ vibe. With Flash Pack, as a travel example, some users might be at the category stage for browsing trips in Asia (where the next step is to browse specific Asia trips), while in the South America category they’ve already visited an Amazon trip, and can be be shown specific details of that trip to draw them to a checkout.

Instead of sitting in one position in a discrete funnel, the user is in multiple states across different branches, and they are exposed to ads that encourage the next-best micro behaviour at any step.

The Power of "Anchoring" to Existing Habits

Fogg introduces another fascinating behavioural element: habit anchoring. If your marketing objective involves frequent, recurring actions - like monthly renewals or regular engagement - tying new habits directly onto existing ones creates powerful results. 

Picture attaching a desired micro-behaviour (like checking a credit score) to an inevitable existing action (like applying for a mortgage): when mortgage brokers prompted customers to run a credit check via a simplified process at just the right moment, conversion rates skyrocketed. That's habit-anchoring made practical.

Applying the Model in Real-World Marketing Scenarios

I encourage every marketer to map key customer journeys through lenses of motivation, ability, and triggering behaviour. In my own experience, implementing a structured audit based around the Fogg method has delivered immense value in improving campaign results. 

Many organisations miss opportunities because they overlook small friction points or moments of lost motivation within customer journeys. By deliberately breaking campaigns into achievable micro-steps - using timely nudges and clearly highlighting frictionless next steps - I have repeatedly seen impressive increases in click-throughs, conversions and overall ROI.

The Simplicity of Human-centered Marketing

Mastering marketing at scale demands more than adopting the latest technologies or algorithmic tweaks. It demands a fundamental shift in mindset: stop viewing marketing as merely sending messages outward, and start viewing it as intricately understanding - and influencing - human behaviours.

Marketers who consistently drive powerful results deeply grasp that humans are creatures of behaviour and habit. Clearly separating motivation, ability, and triggers and using that understanding as a foundation reshapes your approach from average, hit-or-miss tactics to more predictable, repeatable marketing victories.

If you’d like to explore how applying deep, human-centric strategies can significantly enhance your marketing efforts, contact our team today and we’ll map out your journey and how to apply targeted digital marketing systems to drive it.