The relationship between behaviours and motivations is a little like the relationship between chickens and eggs: nobody is really sure which comes first, but it’s awfully difficult to form one without the other.
Behaviour follows motivation
For the first half of my career (so far), I thought the relationship between motivations and behaviours was fairly straightforward: brands work by identifying what motivates people and then exploiting those motivations to influence how we behave. This idea is implicit in the notion that in order to effect change, we must first capture people’s ‘hearts and minds’. It’s central to how marketers think:...