What drives human motivation and how can we influence it?
What drives human motivation?
Understanding what most commonly drives human motivation is a useful insight to hold for brand comms, but this can also be used to motivate influencers to:
Want to be part of your brand campaign
Create the very best content for your brand
Take on board the brands feedback and act upon it well
First, it’s worth knowing what many psychologists deem as the two main forms of human motivation:
Intrinsic motivation - this derives from something internal to us, we are motivated to do something because it benefits ourselves, i.e., we enjoy it, it’s fun, often we are motivated in a ‘play like’ state of mind
Extrinsic motivation - this derives from something external to us, so we are motivated to do something because of a reward that someone else may give us if we do it, i.e., motivated at work for the next promotion
It won’t be a surprise to learn that humans find intrinsic motivation more fun, easier to achieve and more likely to stick to. Extrinsic motivation on the other hand, whilst a necessary part of our everyday lives, is at times less play like, harder to achieve and harder to stick with.
People are often more comfortable, creative, and positive in their physical and mental wellbeing when they are intrinsically motivated by something in their life.
Where marketers should play to attract the influencers, you really want, is to consider what may intrinsically motivate an influencer into working with your brand. To do that, we need to look at how you can influence motivation and here’s where behavioural science can play a part.
How to influence motivation in others
One tool to use is the self-determination theory, this looks at how motivation is derived from 3 basic human needs:
Autonomy (we feel motivated when we feel in control)
Mastery (we feel motivated when we feel competent or accomplished)
Connected (we feel motivated when we feel linked to others in our tasks)
At the heart of what drives human motivation is normally one, two or all three of these needs. We feel most motivated when we fulfil these needs.
So, when you first review an influencers profile, an influencer you really want to work with, take a step back, and try to work out which of the three human needs might be driving why they create their content. For example, a gardening expert may create content full of tips and advice that educates their following. For the influencer, this style of content is likely to be fulfilling their need for mastery. They feel highly accomplished in their subject, and this is what motivates them to share their knowledge with others. As a brand owner, you could use this mastery need as an ‘in’ when you first contact them. Talk about how much you value their specific skill set and demonstrate how you would like to use that skill in your branded content. To get them to bite and prioritise your approach over others, you could find alignment in mastery between your brand and their expertise.
It could be argued that many influencers are already in a great motivational state of mind – they are intrinsically motivated to do what they do. Often, they will be creating content that focuses on a topic they are passionate about, or comes naturally to them, they are often in a creative and play like state of mind when doing their job. So, our role as marketers is to identify what need state they are fulfilling when they create content and ask ourselves, how can we ensure we also meet this need state for them in a) our approach, b) our content ideas we put forward and c) the way in which we feedback on content they’ve created for us.
A good influencer fulfils a human need in their content, an excellent one will fulfil more than one human need in their content. Similarly, when their following also have their same needs met when they engage with the content – they feel educated and as if they have mastered something / it makes them feel more in control / or it makes them feel part of something – their local community perhaps, then you’re onto a winner with regards to finding alignment with need states in your approach.