The Behaviour Change Department: Hot states will always trump cold logic

Behaviour change is all about timing. Knowing when to show your cards is key when it comes to influencing how a consumer interacts with your product.

This being my third column, I hope by now you are a fully signed-up member of The Behaviour Change Department.

After all, we’ve explored how marketers need to reframe their power to the business to grow their influence, and also why the marketers who leave a legacy are those who made a difference to customer behaviour. What comes next?

Well, with all that being said, let’s talk about sex.

In 2001 professors Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein launched a study into the ‘heat of the moment’ phenomenon, and without meaning to sound like I’m descending into clickbait: the results may surprise you.

Male heterosexual undergraduates at Berkeley were asked a series of sexual preference questions in two separate conditions. The first when sitting alone, sober and not aroused, and later on they were required to fill out the same questionnaire but this time in mid-arousal.

The answers given could not be more different, the same people giving totally different answers.

The study showed that societal traditions and norms went out the window when in an aroused state. In the ‘cold state’, only 23% said they might forgo a condom if one wasn’t available, whereas in the ‘hot state’, that number almost doubled to 45%.

This pattern continued across the board. Attraction to much older partners leapt from 26% to 46%. Willingness to consider a same-sex partner leapt from 4% to 12%. Even interest in partners they had previously described as “unattractive” nearly tripled, from 9% to 26%.

The Behaviour Change Department: Your legacy is defined by changing consumer behaviourWhat’s more surprising is that we are blind to these effects, and that’s because our bodies affect our brains as much as our brains affect our bodies.

Understanding this “Hot-Cold Empathy Gap”, as behavioural scientists call it, can become a competitive advantage and a key to unlocking behaviour change. The customer doesn’t even need to be aroused for it to work, either, though admittedly in certain categories I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt.

Too many marketers try to prompt humans like they prompt AI, but the behaviour change department understands that timing beats tinkering when it comes to delivering a message.

Robots may have a constant state of cold logic, but humans have a bomb of biology pulsing through their veins, which means that power isn’t always in what we ask but when we ask it.

Lesson 3: Power is knowing when to ask

Our industry is full of inherited conventions that no one ever stops to question. But when you see your role as “behaviour change” rather than “marketing”, you start interrogating the small and big things.

Everyone’s experienced that moment: you spot a sofa, holiday or pair of trainers in an ad but at completely the wrong time. You’re on the train. In bed. Between meetings. Right message, wrong moment.

So someone finally asked: why can’t ads be saved for later?

Enter Tickle, a “save ad for later” button that lets people capture an ad they like and revisit it when they’re actually ready to act. From a marketing mindset, it feels like a nice-to-have. From a behaviour change mindset, it’s a no-brainer.

As Joe Martin, founder and CEO of Tickle Global, told me: “We found 78% of people will screenshot ads to visit them later. By making ads saveable, we’ve skyrocketed engagement. Our ads are saved 20× more than standard ads are clicked.”

Tickle didn’t win through louder ads or bigger budgets. They won because they understood a behavioural truth: timing beats tinkering.

When we forget that humans have shifting states, we default to cold logic and miss the moments where decisions are actually made.

Marketers gain power when they stop thinking like communicators and start thinking like change designers. The behaviour change department doesn’t ask how do we sell harder? But instead when is our audience most ready to say yes.

Because in the end, power comes from knowing when humans are most ready to act – and with results like that we go from being marketing people, to the business’s secret weapon.