The Biggest Barrier to Brand Success

Every year, millions of people set goals they genuinely mean to keep. Organisations launch strategies they genuinely intend to deliver. Employees sign up to values they genuinely believe in. And then, quietly, not very much changes.

This isn’t hypocrisy. It isn’t laziness. It’s one of the most well-documented phenomena in behavioural science: the intention / action gap. You can receive a copy of our report into The Intention / Action Gap by contacting us today.

This gap has a name and a science

The ancient Greeks called it akrasia: acting against your own better judgement. Psychologists have been studying it rigorously for decades. And what the research tells us, consistently, is that the gap between what people say they’ll do and what they actually do isn’t a character flaw. It’s a structural feature of how human minds work.

Daniel Kahneman’s work on System 1 and System 2 thinking is the best place to start. System 2 is the deliberate, rational part of the mind – the part that makes plans, sets goals, and genuinely intends to follow through. System 1 is the fast, automatic part – the part that actually drives most of our moment-to-moment behaviour.

The problem? Most communication and change programmes are designed for System 2. They make a compelling case. They explain the rationale. They appeal to people’s better instincts.

And then the moment of decision arrives, and System 1 takes a different route entirely.

Add to this present bias – our tendency to overweight immediate discomfort against future benefit – and status quo bias – the brain’s ingrained preference for doing nothing over expending effort – and you start to understand why even the most motivated people, with the best of intentions, so often don’t follow through.

The gap isn’t caused by a lack of belief. It’s caused by an absence of the right conditions for belief to become behaviour.

What this means in practice

Once you understand the mechanics of the gap, a few things become clear.

First: information and persuasion are often the wrong tools. If people already believe in what you’re asking them to do – and in many cases they do – more communication reinforcing why they should act will have diminishing returns. The question isn’t how to persuade them. It’s how to make acting on their existing belief easier, more visible, and more normal.

Second: the environment matters more than the message. Tiny increases in friction – an extra step, an unclear pathway, an opt-in rather than an opt-out – can dramatically reduce uptake of a desired behaviour. Conversely, removing friction, making the right choice the default, and designing the context so that the desired behaviour is the path of least resistance, can have an outsized effect.

Third: identity is everything. The most durable behaviour change connects a new action to how people already see themselves, or want to see themselves. Not “you should do this”, but “people like you do this. This is what it means to be the kind of professional, colleague, or citizen you already want to be.”

Two examples that bring this to life

M&S – Captain Energy

M&S’s Plan A is one of the most ambitious sustainability programmes any major retailer has undertaken. Employees were proud of it. They supported its aims. They believed in it.

But translating that support into consistent everyday behaviour, in purchasing decisions, in how people used the working environment, in what they recommended to customers, turned out to be a structurally different problem.

When we dug into the research, we found something unexpected. The barrier wasn’t scepticism or lack of motivation. It was helplessness. Employees felt that the scale and seriousness of the sustainability challenge made their individual actions feel insignificant. The big message was, paradoxically, demotivating.

The answer wasn’t more earnest communication. It was entertainment.

Captain Energy is a slightly fallible, thoroughly endearing sustainability superhero and became the internal face of Plan A activation. Rather than communicating aspirational targets at a remove, Captain Energy showed up at the specific moments in the working day when decisions were actually being made: the light switch, the printer, the thermostat. The approach made sustainable choices the easy default, not the deliberate exception. It created visible social proof by celebrating colleagues who were living Plan A in practical ways. And it was designed to be genuinely enjoyable, not just informative.

The behavioural insight at the heart of it is one we come back to again and again: the most effective interventions don’t reinforce motivation that’s already there. They reduce the distance between intent and action in the specific contexts where decisions happen. In the language of behavioural science, Captain Energy was a fluent device. This is the same principle that makes the Compare the Market meerkat so effective at driving recall and action in a low-engagement category.

Moneyfarm – See More Than Money

A different kind of gap: one that played out not in employee behaviour, but in brand perception during a period of genuine uncertainty.

Moneyfarm, the digital wealth manager, faced a challenge common to financial services brands navigating volatile markets. Customers and potential customers were anxious. And financial anxiety, as the research shows, typically produces avoidance rather than engagement. People who are worried about their money don’t engage with it more – they engage with it less. Present bias at work: the short-term discomfort of confronting uncertain finances outweighs the perceived long-term benefit of doing something about it.

The work we did together on brand clarity – developing the ‘See More Than Money’ positioning – was fundamentally an exercise in reframing identity. Rather than positioning Moneyfarm as a solution to a financial problem (which would require customers to first acknowledge and sit with that problem), the work connected the brand to a broader sense of what it means to live a considered, purposeful life. Money as a means, not an end.

By shifting the identity frame – from anxiety and problem to aspiration and agency – the approach reduced the psychological friction of engagement. It gave customers a different story to tell themselves about why they were seeking financial guidance. And that identity shift translated directly into behaviour.

The question to ask before you design anything

When I’m working on a behaviour change challenge – whether it’s internal culture, customer engagement, or public health communication – I now always start with the same question:

Is this gap motivational, or is it environmental?

In other words: do people actually not believe in what we’re asking them to do – or do they already believe in it, and the conditions for acting on that belief just aren’t in place?

More often than not, it’s the second one. And that changes everything about how you approach the problem.

Instead of asking “how do we persuade people?”, you ask “how do we design a context in which the behaviour we want is the natural thing to do?” Instead of producing more content, you map the journey and ruthlessly eliminate the friction. Instead of communicating the why, you find the identity story that connects the action to how people already see themselves.

None of this is rocket science. But it requires a different starting point. It requires taking the gap seriously – not as evidence of failure, but as a diagnostic signal about where the real work needs to happen.

And when you do, the changes you create tend to stick.

Contact us for a copy of our report into the Intention Action Gap