As anyone who has ever made a New Year’s resolution knows, it’s not always easy to change your behavior. But understanding why your customers behave the way they do can ultimately help your bottom line.
One way of understanding human behavior is using the Fogg Behavior Model. In ecommerce and growth analytics, this framework helps explain why customers drop off, hesitate, or convert even when intent seems high.
Here, learn more about the Fogg Behavior Model, how to apply it to your brand, and where it falls short.
Key Takeaways
The Fogg Behavior Model explains a person’s actions or inactions. The model states that for a target behavior to happen, three elements must be present simultaneously: motivation, ability, and a prompt.
This is expressed in the following formula:
Behavior Change = Motivation + Ability + Prompt or B=MAP for short
If a target behavior doesn’t happen, at least one of these elements is missing.
Motivation is plotted on the vertical axis. Ability is on the horizontal axis. And curving through the graph is the “action line”. You can visualize the model here.
When a prompt is simultaneously present, it’s likely that behaviors that fall above the line will happen. Behaviors that fall below the action line typically won’t. The curve of the action line represents the fluidity of motivation and ability. If the behavior or action is simpler, it requires less ability and motivation; more challenging behaviors and actions require more of these resources.
The Fogg Behavioral Model was created by BJ Fogg, PhD, a behavior scientist at Stanford University, where he’s directed a research lab for more than 20 years.
Concerned about the way digital experiences could persuade product adoption by consumers, Fogg set out to explain how behavior works so he and others could create innovative, helpful products and services people would actually use and need.
Today, BJ Fogg‘s Behavior Model helps people “lead high-impact projects, get breakthrough results, and change lives at scale,” as Fogg writes on his website.
In the Fogg model, there are three core motivators that make someone more likely to take a certain action or behave in a certain way.
Every human has these motivators hard-wired into our brains. But that doesn’t mean motivation is constant.
In fact, Fogg visualizes motivation as a wave: When motivation, the swell of the wave, is high, people will do hard things. When the wave crashes, aka motivation is low, people will only do easier things.
Motivation is often highly dependent on your environment. While you’re at a health conference, for example, you might feel more motivated to eat a nutrient-dense diet and exercise regularly. But back at home, your motivation to continue these beneficial behaviors evaporates.
Motivation is about your customer wanting to act. Ability is about them being capable of doing so.
To put it simply, in order to complete a target behavior, we have to have the ability to complete that behavior. Sure, that’s pretty obvious. But the takeaway here is that easier actions to complete are more likely to be completed.
The Fogg Behavior Model thinks of ability as simplicity and frictionlessness. The idea is to minimize friction, barriers, or obstacles to performing a desired behavior.
Fogg identified five factors that contribute to ability, which he calls the Ability Chain. They are:
If you’re lacking in any of these categories, a given task will be harder to complete.
For example, if it takes 15 minutes to leave a review of your brand through your testimonials page, and a customer only has six minutes to spare, they do not have the ability to take this action. “Your weakest link determines what makes a behavior hard to do,” Fogg writes on his website.
Marketers often assume people have greater ability than they really do, whether it’s the capacity for physical or mental effort or the time and money to invest.
Generally, it’s going to be simpler for you as a marketer to decrease the friction surrounding a desired action than it’s going to be to increase your customer’s motivation to take said action.
Fogg lays out three ways to increase ability:
The final element of the Fogg Behavior Model is the prompt. No prompt, no target behavior — even if motivation and ability are both high. The prompt is the signal that tells someone to take the action.
You’re probably familiar with prompts in your own daily life: Maybe you leave your running sneakers by your door so you’ll be reminded to exercise. Maybe you place a sticky note on your bathroom mirror with a list of bucket-list travel destinations so you’re prompted to save up for your next flight.
These little reminders can go by many different names, like cues, calls to action, and triggers (which Fogg used until changing the term to “prompts” in 2017, as he writes on his website).
The FBM identifies three different types of prompts:
Prompts often set off a chain reaction of cascading behaviors. For example, when Triple Whale users download our mobile app and connect more than two integrations, we see major increases in their daily usage. If you think strategically about how small asks can lead to big gains, you can build chains of prompts that encourage the user flow and behavior you need for long-term success.
There’s variability in both motivation and ability, and tradeoffs between the two. That’s why the action line in the FBM graphic is curved. You can have high motivation and low ability and still complete a desired behavior, or vice versa. But when motivation is low and ability makes a task hard to do, a behavior is less likely to happen.
Prompts succeed above the action line, when there is appropriate motivation and ability. Prompts fail below the action line, when motivation, ability, or both are lacking.
Let’s look at some concrete examples of how prompts can succeed despite tradeoffs in motivation and ability:
Prompts fail when motivation is too low, ability is too low, or the prompt comes at the wrong time or doesn’t come at all.
When motivation is too low, a person won’t take a specific action because they simply don’t feel like it. For example, imagine you’re watching TV on a Friday night with your phone next to you, so you have the ability to answer it. It rings, which is your prompt. You see it’s your boss, but it’s already way after working hours, so you have no motivation to talk to him and decline the call. The behavior never completes because of lack of motivation.
When ability is too low, a person won’t take a specific action because they aren’t able to or the action is very hard to complete. Tasks that are easy to do require little motivation for a prompt to be effective. Tasks that are harder to do require more motivation to complete.
This time, imagine you’re in the shower, so you have little ability to answer your ringing phone that you left downstairs in the kitchen. It’s your real estate agent calling to tell you the offer you submitted on a new home was accepted, so you’re definitely motivated to take the call.
You hear the phone ring, which is your prompt, but you don’t answer the call because it would be hard to run down there in time from the shower.
When the prompt is off, you can have high levels of motivation and/or ability but simply never get the signal it’s time to act — or get this signal at an inopportune time. For example, imagine you’re walking home after seeing a movie with your phone in your pocket, so your ability to answer a call is high.
You’re waiting to hear from your brother about how his job interview went, so you’re motivated to answer. But your phone is still on Do Not Disturb from the theater, so you don’t know it’s ringing. Despite high motivation and high ability, you don’t answer the call because you don’t get a prompt.
So how does this psychological research apply to user behavior? And what does it all have to do with the success of your business?
If you have a good grasp of the principles of the FBM, you can put them to work for your brand.
Take the product onboarding process, for example. It’s a chance to remove friction for your users, which increases their ability to complete a desired behavior.
Break up complicated steps into smaller action items and remove any unneeded tasks. Start with the simplest to-dos and ease users into more challenging asks so they don’t lose their motivation. Keeping this whole process clear and linear will eliminate overwhelm that could cause someone to miss or ignore a prompt.
The Fogg model can also help with checkout and conversion flows, particularly when it comes to tipping a customer over the edge and finally making a purchase or increasing average order value. Here, it all comes down to strategic prompts.
If a user has added items to their cart, they’re clearly motivated and able. But if they’re then prompted with a social-proof prompt like “Join 10,000 happy customers!” (increasing motivation) or a one-click checkout option (increasing ability), they’ll be more likely to convert.
Appropriately timed prompts can also help drive customer engagement and retention. Prompts like “You’re halfway there” or “Don’t break your streak” can remind users to interact with your product regularly.
Others like “Renew now” can more explicitly drive repeat purchases — a type of conversion rate optimization. Plus, steps you take to reduce friction and improve simplicity at any point in your marketing funnel improve a customer’s motivation and ability to stay connected with your brand, leading to long-term retention.
Like most ecommerce metrics, it’s not enough to simply know B = MAP. Just having this data won’t change your users’ behavior.
Instead, you’ll need to implement some changes aimed at improving ability or motivation or tweak your prompts — and then measure the results. This process will give you insights into where customers drop off and when others convert.
Then, you can continue to iterate to improve those outcomes.
Here, the most important thing to keep in mind is raising motivation and ability when it’s time to check out. High motivation can overcome high friction (aka low ability), but you can’t bank on consistent high motivation, because we know motivation fluctuates.
Checking out shouldn’t feel like work, or it won’t happen. Simplify steps, remove fields, offer guest checkout, speed up load times, provide social proof, and make the purchase feel urgent. All of these can help you avoid cart abandonment, no matter a user’s motivation level.
The FBM provides a clear, simple description of the elements needed to spark a behavior. It does a great job of explaining how motivation and ability work together and can lead to a desired action when the right prompt is present at the right time.
But, like any theoretical framework, it falls short in certain real-world scenarios.
For example, it doesn’t take into account other important variables, such as habits, social context, and mood.
Your customer can have high motivation and high ability to make a purchase but ignore your spot-on prompt because they’re participating in a buy-nothing week, for example. The FBM doesn’t clearly capture other external factors that affect decision making.
It also focuses on one single moment of behavior change, such as clicking a “purchase” button or entering their email to sign up for your newsletter. But if your customer journey is long or complex, shoppers may need multiple prompts that encourage them through fluctuating motivation and ability over time until they reach your true desired endpoint.
That’s why the FBM is especially tricky when applied to long-term social or emotional behavior change. It isn’t easy to capture that kind of introspective behavior change in a model designed around a specific action point.
Using the FBM to, say, help someone quit smoking, is a lot different from using it to sell something in an ecommerce store.
To some critics of the model, it’s also too one-size-fits-all, overlooking individual differences that affect our behavior. While you can account for some of this by tailoring your prompts to different customer segments, everyone’s unique needs and preferences will ultimately mean they respond differently to the same motivation, ability, and prompt.
Lastly, there are ethical concerns about any model that has the potential to manipulate people into making a certain decision. Prompts should be encouraging, not exploitative or overly persuasive, or you risk short-term, compulsive engagement instead of long-term loyalty to your brand.
Fogg himself has discussed the moral issues of designing for behavior change. He stresses the importance of using his model to help people feel successful and do what they already want to do. This requires transparency from marketers and consent from shoppers every step of the way.
The Fogg Behavior Model is a way of understanding how motivation, ability, and the perfectly timed prompt come together to create a desired action. This framework is often used in ecommerce analytics to understand measures like conversion rate, retention, and engagement.
The model was created by a behavior scientist at Stanford University named BJ Fogg, and it’s used today in design, healthcare, user experience, and more.
It’s praised for its simplicity and clarity, but it may fall short in explaining long-term, sustainable behavior change. Still, it’s a helpful way of understanding how incentivized your audience feels to take a desired action with your brand and the ability they have to do so.
This kind of understanding is the first step; measuring behavior accurately is the next. Triple Whale's fully managed, AI-optimized data warehouse can help. Book a demo today!
The formula for the Fogg Behavior Model is Behavior Change = Motivation + Ability + Prompt or B=MAP.
Prompts are reminders, cues, or calls to action that spark behavior in the Fogg Behavior Model. Fogg identified three types of prompts: facilitators (for high motivation and low ability), sparks (for high ability and low motivation), and signals (for high motivation and high ability).
No, it’s also used in product design, user experience, and health interventions, for example. It’s a popular model for any type of desired behavior change.
The FBM can be applied to conversion optimization because when motivation, ability, and the right prompt all occur at the same time, a user will convert. That means businesses can take steps to improve motivation and ability and tailor their prompts to their audience to optimize conversions.
As anyone who has ever made a New Year’s resolution knows, it’s not always easy to change your behavior. But understanding why your customers behave the way they do can ultimately help your bottom line.
One way of understanding human behavior is using the Fogg Behavior Model. In ecommerce and growth analytics, this framework helps explain why customers drop off, hesitate, or convert even when intent seems high.
Here, learn more about the Fogg Behavior Model, how to apply it to your brand, and where it falls short.
Key Takeaways
The Fogg Behavior Model explains a person’s actions or inactions. The model states that for a target behavior to happen, three elements must be present simultaneously: motivation, ability, and a prompt.
This is expressed in the following formula:
Behavior Change = Motivation + Ability + Prompt or B=MAP for short
If a target behavior doesn’t happen, at least one of these elements is missing.
Motivation is plotted on the vertical axis. Ability is on the horizontal axis. And curving through the graph is the “action line”. You can visualize the model here.
When a prompt is simultaneously present, it’s likely that behaviors that fall above the line will happen. Behaviors that fall below the action line typically won’t. The curve of the action line represents the fluidity of motivation and ability. If the behavior or action is simpler, it requires less ability and motivation; more challenging behaviors and actions require more of these resources.
The Fogg Behavioral Model was created by BJ Fogg, PhD, a behavior scientist at Stanford University, where he’s directed a research lab for more than 20 years.
Concerned about the way digital experiences could persuade product adoption by consumers, Fogg set out to explain how behavior works so he and others could create innovative, helpful products and services people would actually use and need.
Today, BJ Fogg‘s Behavior Model helps people “lead high-impact projects, get breakthrough results, and change lives at scale,” as Fogg writes on his website.
In the Fogg model, there are three core motivators that make someone more likely to take a certain action or behave in a certain way.
Every human has these motivators hard-wired into our brains. But that doesn’t mean motivation is constant.
In fact, Fogg visualizes motivation as a wave: When motivation, the swell of the wave, is high, people will do hard things. When the wave crashes, aka motivation is low, people will only do easier things.
Motivation is often highly dependent on your environment. While you’re at a health conference, for example, you might feel more motivated to eat a nutrient-dense diet and exercise regularly. But back at home, your motivation to continue these beneficial behaviors evaporates.
Motivation is about your customer wanting to act. Ability is about them being capable of doing so.
To put it simply, in order to complete a target behavior, we have to have the ability to complete that behavior. Sure, that’s pretty obvious. But the takeaway here is that easier actions to complete are more likely to be completed.
The Fogg Behavior Model thinks of ability as simplicity and frictionlessness. The idea is to minimize friction, barriers, or obstacles to performing a desired behavior.
Fogg identified five factors that contribute to ability, which he calls the Ability Chain. They are:
If you’re lacking in any of these categories, a given task will be harder to complete.
For example, if it takes 15 minutes to leave a review of your brand through your testimonials page, and a customer only has six minutes to spare, they do not have the ability to take this action. “Your weakest link determines what makes a behavior hard to do,” Fogg writes on his website.
Marketers often assume people have greater ability than they really do, whether it’s the capacity for physical or mental effort or the time and money to invest.
Generally, it’s going to be simpler for you as a marketer to decrease the friction surrounding a desired action than it’s going to be to increase your customer’s motivation to take said action.
Fogg lays out three ways to increase ability:
The final element of the Fogg Behavior Model is the prompt. No prompt, no target behavior — even if motivation and ability are both high. The prompt is the signal that tells someone to take the action.
You’re probably familiar with prompts in your own daily life: Maybe you leave your running sneakers by your door so you’ll be reminded to exercise. Maybe you place a sticky note on your bathroom mirror with a list of bucket-list travel destinations so you’re prompted to save up for your next flight.
These little reminders can go by many different names, like cues, calls to action, and triggers (which Fogg used until changing the term to “prompts” in 2017, as he writes on his website).
The FBM identifies three different types of prompts:
Prompts often set off a chain reaction of cascading behaviors. For example, when Triple Whale users download our mobile app and connect more than two integrations, we see major increases in their daily usage. If you think strategically about how small asks can lead to big gains, you can build chains of prompts that encourage the user flow and behavior you need for long-term success.
There’s variability in both motivation and ability, and tradeoffs between the two. That’s why the action line in the FBM graphic is curved. You can have high motivation and low ability and still complete a desired behavior, or vice versa. But when motivation is low and ability makes a task hard to do, a behavior is less likely to happen.
Prompts succeed above the action line, when there is appropriate motivation and ability. Prompts fail below the action line, when motivation, ability, or both are lacking.
Let’s look at some concrete examples of how prompts can succeed despite tradeoffs in motivation and ability:
Prompts fail when motivation is too low, ability is too low, or the prompt comes at the wrong time or doesn’t come at all.
When motivation is too low, a person won’t take a specific action because they simply don’t feel like it. For example, imagine you’re watching TV on a Friday night with your phone next to you, so you have the ability to answer it. It rings, which is your prompt. You see it’s your boss, but it’s already way after working hours, so you have no motivation to talk to him and decline the call. The behavior never completes because of lack of motivation.
When ability is too low, a person won’t take a specific action because they aren’t able to or the action is very hard to complete. Tasks that are easy to do require little motivation for a prompt to be effective. Tasks that are harder to do require more motivation to complete.
This time, imagine you’re in the shower, so you have little ability to answer your ringing phone that you left downstairs in the kitchen. It’s your real estate agent calling to tell you the offer you submitted on a new home was accepted, so you’re definitely motivated to take the call.
You hear the phone ring, which is your prompt, but you don’t answer the call because it would be hard to run down there in time from the shower.
When the prompt is off, you can have high levels of motivation and/or ability but simply never get the signal it’s time to act — or get this signal at an inopportune time. For example, imagine you’re walking home after seeing a movie with your phone in your pocket, so your ability to answer a call is high.
You’re waiting to hear from your brother about how his job interview went, so you’re motivated to answer. But your phone is still on Do Not Disturb from the theater, so you don’t know it’s ringing. Despite high motivation and high ability, you don’t answer the call because you don’t get a prompt.
So how does this psychological research apply to user behavior? And what does it all have to do with the success of your business?
If you have a good grasp of the principles of the FBM, you can put them to work for your brand.
Take the product onboarding process, for example. It’s a chance to remove friction for your users, which increases their ability to complete a desired behavior.
Break up complicated steps into smaller action items and remove any unneeded tasks. Start with the simplest to-dos and ease users into more challenging asks so they don’t lose their motivation. Keeping this whole process clear and linear will eliminate overwhelm that could cause someone to miss or ignore a prompt.
The Fogg model can also help with checkout and conversion flows, particularly when it comes to tipping a customer over the edge and finally making a purchase or increasing average order value. Here, it all comes down to strategic prompts.
If a user has added items to their cart, they’re clearly motivated and able. But if they’re then prompted with a social-proof prompt like “Join 10,000 happy customers!” (increasing motivation) or a one-click checkout option (increasing ability), they’ll be more likely to convert.
Appropriately timed prompts can also help drive customer engagement and retention. Prompts like “You’re halfway there” or “Don’t break your streak” can remind users to interact with your product regularly.
Others like “Renew now” can more explicitly drive repeat purchases — a type of conversion rate optimization. Plus, steps you take to reduce friction and improve simplicity at any point in your marketing funnel improve a customer’s motivation and ability to stay connected with your brand, leading to long-term retention.
Like most ecommerce metrics, it’s not enough to simply know B = MAP. Just having this data won’t change your users’ behavior.
Instead, you’ll need to implement some changes aimed at improving ability or motivation or tweak your prompts — and then measure the results. This process will give you insights into where customers drop off and when others convert.
Then, you can continue to iterate to improve those outcomes.
Here, the most important thing to keep in mind is raising motivation and ability when it’s time to check out. High motivation can overcome high friction (aka low ability), but you can’t bank on consistent high motivation, because we know motivation fluctuates.
Checking out shouldn’t feel like work, or it won’t happen. Simplify steps, remove fields, offer guest checkout, speed up load times, provide social proof, and make the purchase feel urgent. All of these can help you avoid cart abandonment, no matter a user’s motivation level.
The FBM provides a clear, simple description of the elements needed to spark a behavior. It does a great job of explaining how motivation and ability work together and can lead to a desired action when the right prompt is present at the right time.
But, like any theoretical framework, it falls short in certain real-world scenarios.
For example, it doesn’t take into account other important variables, such as habits, social context, and mood.
Your customer can have high motivation and high ability to make a purchase but ignore your spot-on prompt because they’re participating in a buy-nothing week, for example. The FBM doesn’t clearly capture other external factors that affect decision making.
It also focuses on one single moment of behavior change, such as clicking a “purchase” button or entering their email to sign up for your newsletter. But if your customer journey is long or complex, shoppers may need multiple prompts that encourage them through fluctuating motivation and ability over time until they reach your true desired endpoint.
That’s why the FBM is especially tricky when applied to long-term social or emotional behavior change. It isn’t easy to capture that kind of introspective behavior change in a model designed around a specific action point.
Using the FBM to, say, help someone quit smoking, is a lot different from using it to sell something in an ecommerce store.
To some critics of the model, it’s also too one-size-fits-all, overlooking individual differences that affect our behavior. While you can account for some of this by tailoring your prompts to different customer segments, everyone’s unique needs and preferences will ultimately mean they respond differently to the same motivation, ability, and prompt.
Lastly, there are ethical concerns about any model that has the potential to manipulate people into making a certain decision. Prompts should be encouraging, not exploitative or overly persuasive, or you risk short-term, compulsive engagement instead of long-term loyalty to your brand.
Fogg himself has discussed the moral issues of designing for behavior change. He stresses the importance of using his model to help people feel successful and do what they already want to do. This requires transparency from marketers and consent from shoppers every step of the way.
The Fogg Behavior Model is a way of understanding how motivation, ability, and the perfectly timed prompt come together to create a desired action. This framework is often used in ecommerce analytics to understand measures like conversion rate, retention, and engagement.
The model was created by a behavior scientist at Stanford University named BJ Fogg, and it’s used today in design, healthcare, user experience, and more.
It’s praised for its simplicity and clarity, but it may fall short in explaining long-term, sustainable behavior change. Still, it’s a helpful way of understanding how incentivized your audience feels to take a desired action with your brand and the ability they have to do so.
This kind of understanding is the first step; measuring behavior accurately is the next. Triple Whale's fully managed, AI-optimized data warehouse can help. Book a demo today!
The formula for the Fogg Behavior Model is Behavior Change = Motivation + Ability + Prompt or B=MAP.
Prompts are reminders, cues, or calls to action that spark behavior in the Fogg Behavior Model. Fogg identified three types of prompts: facilitators (for high motivation and low ability), sparks (for high ability and low motivation), and signals (for high motivation and high ability).
No, it’s also used in product design, user experience, and health interventions, for example. It’s a popular model for any type of desired behavior change.
The FBM can be applied to conversion optimization because when motivation, ability, and the right prompt all occur at the same time, a user will convert. That means businesses can take steps to improve motivation and ability and tailor their prompts to their audience to optimize conversions.
.webp)
Body Copy: The following benchmarks compare advertising metrics from April 1-17 to the previous period. Considering President Trump first unveiled his tariffs on April 2, the timing corresponds with potential changes in advertising behavior among ecommerce brands (though it isn’t necessarily correlated).
.webp)
.webp)
.png)
.png)
