Picture this: You’re a food manufacturer with an innovative product that solves a real consumer problem.
You’ve spent years perfecting the taste, conducted 14 focus groups on the name and packaging, and launched with heavy advertising. But the product tanks and disappears from shelves within months, leaving barely a memory trace.
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario—it’s the true story of breakfast chips, a product that should have succeeded but violated one of behavioral marketing’s most fundamental principles: behavioral proximity.
The Breakfast Chips Disaster: A Case Study in Behavioral Distance
The concept seemed brilliant. Make a convenient breakfast that you can eat anywhere. The sensory development was meticulous, the market research extensive, and the advertising budget substantial.
The idea was to take cereal, run it through a potato-chip-making machine, and create a product that tastes like breakfast cereal but offers superior convenience.
No bowl needed, no milk required, no cleanup—just grab a bag and eat on your way to work or school.
The product offered genuine consumer benefits. It was easier to consume, more portable, and solved the time constraints of traditional breakfast routines.
Yet it failed spectacularly.
The reason lies in understanding how human behavior actually changes, versus how we think it should change.
The breakfast chips asked consumers to make not one behavioral shift, but several simultaneous leaps: reclassifying chips from snack to meal, abandoning established morning routines, and overriding deeply ingrained social norms about appropriate breakfast foods.
[Credit: Adam Ferrier—The Advertising Effect]
The Fogg Behavior Model: Decoding Consumer Action
Stanford researcher BJ Fogg identified that behavior change occurs when three elements converge at the same moment:
Motivation (the desire to perform), Ability (the ease with which a person can perform), and a Prompt (the trigger that initiates the behavior).
This can be expressed as B = MAP.
But here’s where most marketers get it wrong: they assume high ability (ease) can compensate for low motivation.
The breakfast chips example above had exceptional ability—they were incredibly easy to consume—but motivation remained stubbornly low because the behavioral distance was too great.
Breaking Down Motivation: The Twin Engines
Motivation operates through two primary channels:
- Individual Incentives: Personal benefits that appeal to self-interest.
These include pleasure, convenience, cost savings, status enhancement, or problem-solving.
The breakfast chips offered clear individual incentives: time savings, convenience, and portability. - Social Norms: The powerful influence of what others do and expect us to do.
This includes social proof, peer pressure, cultural expectations, and the desire to belong.
Here’s where breakfast chips stumbled—eating chips for breakfast violated established social norms about appropriate morning foods.
The Emotional Pathway: How Behavior Really Changes
Most marketing models focus on rational decision-making, but neuroscience reveals that emotions drive behavior first, with rationalization following.
The actual pathway looks like this:
Thoughts → Feelings → Actions → Behavior Change
Let’s trace this through one successful and one failed product example:
The Behavioral Proximity Principle in Action
Successful behavioral marketing respects the proximity principle: the closer a new behavior is to an existing one, the higher the adoption probability. This explains why:
- Overnight oats succeeded where breakfast chips failed (still breakfast, still oats, just prepared differently)
- Greek yogurt exploded in popularity (still yogurt, just thicker and more protein)
- Meal kit services thrived (still cooking at home, just with pre-measured ingredients)
Each of these innovations asked for minimal behavioral modification while delivering significant benefits.
The Marketing Sweet Spot: Where Motivation Meets Ease
The most effective marketing campaigns engineer situations where both individual incentives and social norms align, while keeping the required behavior change minimal.
Case Study: Apple’s AirPods Strategy
Apple faced a challenge: convincing people to adopt wireless earbuds when wired ones worked perfectly well. Here’s how they engineered behavioral change:
Individual Incentives:
Eliminated tangled wires, seamless device integration & superior sound quality
Social Norms:
Early adoption by celebrities and influencers, distinctive white design created social signaling & association with innovation and tech-savviness
Behavioral Proximity:
Still earbuds, just without wires, same usage patterns and contexts & familiar Apple ecosystem integration
Ease:
Simple pairing process, charging case eliminates battery anxiety, & widely available at Apple stores
Practical Applications for Marketers
1. Map the Behavioral Distance
Before launching any product or campaign, map the behavioral distance between current consumer behavior and desired behavior. The greater the distance, the higher the motivation requirement.
2. Start with Feelings, Not Features
Lead with emotional triggers that create the desired feeling state, then provide rational justification. Duolingo doesn’t sell language learning; it sells the feeling of daily progress and achievement.
3. Engineer Social Proof
Create visible adoption signals that establish new social norms. Tesla’s distinctive design wasn’t just aesthetic—it was a social signaling mechanism that made environmental consciousness visible.
4. Minimize Friction Points
Identify every step between intention and action, then eliminate or reduce friction at each point. Amazon’s one-click purchasing didn’t just add convenience; it removed the opportunity for second thoughts.
5. Sequence Behavior Changes
Rather than asking for large behavioral leaps, sequence smaller changes that build toward your ultimate goal. Fitness apps start with five-minute workouts, not hour-long sessions.
The Final Thought
The breakfast chips failed not because they lacked merit, but because they violated behavioral proximity. They asked consumers to make too great a leap from established patterns while underestimating the power of social norms and emotional associations.
Successful behavioral marketing respects human psychology: we’re creatures of habit who change incrementally, driven more by emotion than logic, and heavily influenced by what others do. The most powerful marketing doesn’t fight these tendencies—it works with them.
The next time you’re designing a campaign or launching a product, ask yourself:
- How close is this to what people already do?
- Can I make the behavioral change smaller while keeping the benefit large?
- Am I creating the right emotional context for action?
Answer these questions correctly, and you’ll avoid the breakfast chips trap while creating genuinely transformative consumer experiences.
About the Author: Jawahar Kaushal
