Cap­tol­ogy is the study of com­put­ers as per­sua­sive tech­nolo­gies. Dr. B.J. Fogg, direc­tor of the Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Per­sua­sive Tech­nol­o­gy Lab, derived the term in 1996 from an acronym, Com­put­ers As Per­sua­sive Tech­nolo­gies (CAPT). Cap­tol­ogy includes the design, research and analy­sis of inter­ac­tive com­put­ing prod­ucts – com­put­ers, mobile phones, web­sites, wire­less tech­nolo­gies, mobile appli­ca­tions, video games, etc. – cre­at­ed for the express pur­pose of chang­ing people’s atti­tudes or behav­iors. In oth­er words, it’s tech­nol­o­gy as an influ­encer in its own right. Although the con­cept of Cap­tol­ogy has been around for near­ly 20 years, per­haps the time is right for it to move cen­ter stage as an inte­gral part of mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

Do we inter­act with com­put­ers or do we inter­act through them?

At first glance, this may seem like a rather pedan­tic ques­tion. How­ev­er, a book pub­lished more than 11 years ago begs us to dif­fer.

Fogg’s book, “Per­sua­sion Tech­nol­o­gy”, is about Cap­tol­ogy, or com­put­ers as per­sua­sive tech­nolo­gies. Giv­en that mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions today is con­cerned with influ­ence and per­sua­sion, Fogg’s insights have some inter­est­ing impli­ca­tions.

He argues there is a dif­fer­ence between human-com­put­er inter­ac­tion and com­put­er-medi­at­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions (even of the dig­i­tal vari­ety) has often only focused on the lat­ter – but the for­mer may be worth clos­er scruti­ny by mar­keters.

Accord­ing to Fogg, in human-com­put­er inter­ac­tion, the com­put­ing prod­uct is a par­tic­i­pant in the inter­ac­tion and can be a source of per­sua­sion in its own right. Indeed, one of his key asser­tions in the book is that in the future, we’ll see more com­put­ing prod­ucts designed for the pri­ma­ry pur­pose of per­sua­sion. In his view, “It will become impor­tant for most peo­ple design­ing end-user com­put­ing prod­ucts to under­stand how prin­ci­ples of moti­va­tion and influ­ence can be designed into inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ences with com­put­ers.”

Bear in mind that this was writ­ten over a decade ago. And don’t get hung up on the phrase “com­put­ing prod­ucts.” Pret­ty much any­thing these days could be argued to be a com­put­ing prod­uct.

Smart­phone, for exam­ple, is a mis­nomer. It is real­ly a pow­er­ful mobile com­put­er. Our cars have con­tained more micro­proces­sors than desk­top com­put­ers for many years now.

In fact, Fogg could claim to have had a hand in some of the most pop­u­lar influ­ence tech­nolo­gies today – name­ly, Face­book and Insta­gram. Fogg was one of the first Face­book Devel­op­er Part­ners in 2007. Some his stu­dents devel­oped some of the very first Face­book apps, which gained mil­lions of users with­in a few weeks. And one of the co-founders of Insta­gram was a for­mer stu­dent as well.

But is there prac­ti­cal rel­e­vance for today’s mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als from Cap­tol­ogy?

More than 20 years, Fogg devel­oped a set of “rules of per­sua­sion and influ­ence.” Let’s look at how some of them can be con­sid­ered in the con­text of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing.

1. Choose A Simple Behavior To Target

Accord­ing to Fogg, “The first crit­i­cal step in design­ing for per­sua­sion is to select an appro­pri­ate tar­get behav­ior. I believe the best choice is the sim­plest behav­ior that mat­ters. Often this requires a team to reduce their ambi­tious long-term goal to a small near-term objec­tive.”

He cites the exam­ple of a large health care com­pa­ny which has the goal of help­ing peo­ple reduce their stress lev­els.

“That goal was too vague and too large-scale. So, for starters, we picked a small­er tar­get behav­ior: Let’s per­suade peo­ple to stretch for 20 sec­onds when prompt­ed,” Fogg says. “Note that this small­er goal was so sim­ple that any­one could achieve it, and the suc­cess rate was mea­sur­able. This was a good start­ing point for the larg­er goal of reduc­ing over­all stress lev­el.”

In a sim­i­lar way, rather than expect your dig­i­tal cam­paigns to imme­di­ate­ly result in pur­chas­es, you might wish to focus more ener­gy on sim­pler, upper fun­nel behav­iors first.

2. Learn What Is Preventing The Target Behavior

Appar­ent­ly, there are only three main rea­sons why peo­ple don’t do what you want them to:

• Lack of moti­va­tion.
• Lack of abil­i­ty.
• Lack of a well-timed trig­ger to per­form the behav­ior.

“As we auto­mate per­sua­sion, we need to think clear­ly about what leads to behav­ior change. Three ele­ments must con­verge at the same moment for a behav­ior to occur: Moti­va­tion, Abil­i­ty and Trig­ger. Tech­nol­o­gy inter­ven­tions that require only a trig­ger are the eas­i­est to cre­ate and the most like­ly to suc­ceed,” Fogg says. “For exam­ple, in the stress reduc­tion project, par­tic­i­pants in our pilot need­ed only to be remind­ed to stretch. We didn’t need to moti­vate them to stretch, or teach them how. Any solu­tion designed to change behav­iors must orches­trate all three ele­ments – Moti­va­tion, Abil­i­ty, Trig­ger – com­ing togeth­er at one moment. The com­mon mis­take is to focus sole­ly on moti­va­tion. But the path to suc­cess often is about increas­ing abil­i­ty and trig­ger­ing the behav­ior.”

In dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing terms, how do you get bet­ter at increas­ing the abil­i­ty of the tar­get audi­ence to research and pur­chase, as well as iden­ti­fy the opti­mal trig­gers?

3. Choose The Right Tech Channel

Accord­ing to Fogg, “While tech­nol­o­gy presents us with many options for per­sua­sion, the selec­tion of chan­nel must match the tar­get behav­ior and the audi­ence. To fail on either account will doom your project. To suc­ceed with behav­ior change, you must lever­age a chan­nel peo­ple already know and use. You can’t add a new tech­nol­o­gy to their lives. This com­bi­na­tion – new behav­ior + new chan­nel – nev­er wins.”

For dig­i­tal mar­keters, deep under­stand­ing of what chan­nels audi­ences real­ly do use (and why) must under­pin any kind of cam­paign that hopes to have a gen­uine impact in the real world.

4. Start Small And Fast

“The fastest way to learn what works in the mar­ket­place isn’t by meet­ing and dis­cussing, but by imple­ment­ing and launch­ing. Many crum­my tri­als beat deep think­ing,” Fogg says.

No sur­pris­es here, per­haps. The idea of test and iter­ate is a famil­iar one in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. And yet how many com­pa­nies are still essen­tial­ly mak­ing big, untest­ed bets on cer­tain cam­paign strate­gies and tac­tics?

5. Build On Small Successes

“Sim­plic­i­ty requires courage. Inside big com­pa­nies and aca­d­e­m­ic research labs, think­ing small will rarely boost your sta­tus. An inno­va­tor who says, ‘No,’ to com­pli­cat­ed designs and unre­al­is­tic goals may appear timid to col­leagues or clients,” Fogg says. “I believe big com­pa­nies and aca­d­e­m­ic research labs are often biased against sim­plic­i­ty. This is why so many of today’s win­ning con­sumer ser­vices start­ed in dorm rooms and garages. Small teams with lim­it­ed bud­gets had to find suc­cess quick­ly. And that often meant fig­ur­ing out the sim­plest solu­tion.”

Which is prob­a­bly the most inspir­ing mes­sage of all. Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing suc­cess can come from hum­ble and small scale begin­nings.

Conclusion

Suf­fice to say, I sus­pect there are many more things the savvy mod­ern mar­keter could learn from Fog­g’s analy­sis of per­sua­sion tech­nol­o­gy.  Focus­ing on build­ing your influ­ence expe­ri­ence rather than using tools oth­ers have pro­vid­ed is some­thing to keep an eye on.

Per­haps most impor­tant­ly, Fogg seems to sug­gest that in order for tech­nol­o­gy to be an influ­encer of human behav­ior in its own right still ulti­mate­ly requires a deep­er under­stand­ing of moti­va­tion, abil­i­ty, and trig­gers. Those mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als who keep this in mind when build­ing their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing approach­es may well be bet­ter placed to suc­ceed than those who don’t.

What do you think about the poten­tial appli­ca­tions of per­sua­sion tech­nol­o­gy for mod­ern mar­keters?