Acumen Presents: Dan Ariely on Changing Customer Behavior

Many innovations deployed to solve social problems never reach their full potential. Sometimes they fail because people resist changing their behavior even when they know they should do things like stop smoking, show up to a job training course, start using solar power, take a daily pill, or wash their hands. Knowledge alone won’t cause them to make the switch. There are other motivations, other drivers, and other factors about how their environments are set up that need to be accounted for and potentially redesigned.  

This is where social science research can inform the work of social entrepreneurs. In this course, Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke University and the author of the New York Times bestseller Predictably Irrational, will help social entrepreneurs apply insights from behavioral economics and psychology to understand how people make decisions. His research shows that when people make small adjustments to their environment or their daily routines, they can generate new use patterns and trigger better decisions that improve health, education, financial wellbeing, environmental preservation, and other forms of social good.      

By drilling down to specific behaviors that your customers need to perform to use your product or service in an intended way, you’ll uncover new opportunities to redesign elements of the experience or motivate people to take the required steps. 

In addition to video tutorials from Dan, you'll also gain access to 4 Behavior Change Design Guides (totaling over 90 pages) that will include step-by-step exercises to apply these principles to your product, along with examples from other social enterprises. Once you start seeing these principles in everyday life, you won’t be able to resist redesigning elements of your own life and business to help you and the people around you.