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Category : Thinking

The Habitual – Vol. 1 | DiGo – The Positive Behavior Change Agency™

The Habitual by DiGo

Well, hello.

Welcome to The Habitual. It’s nice to see you here. We hope you’ll hang out for a bit, because we have something important to tell you about big changes we’re making at DiMassimo Goldstein (DiGo).

After more than 25 years of doing well, we came together as a team and decided to do only good. We agreed to be guided by a single mission—to help form better habits that change lives for the better.

You see, people don’t always do what they know they should do. Much of marketing makes it worse. We’re not afraid to admit that, in the past, we too have contributed to that noise. Too often we have worked on things we did not believe in. But not anymore.

From now on we have decided to work exclusively on promoting better habits by building brands and businesses using Positive Behavior Change marketing.

If we can help anyone eat betterbreathe easierlive longersleep smarterlearn fasterlove deeperfeel mentally healthieremotionally stronger, or financially more well, then we believe the investment in creating those stories will have been worth it.

Welcome to the new DiGo – The Positive Behavior Change Agency™️.

We are a community of people working around the globe with diverse talents all committed to being agents of Positive Behavior Change. We work with brands that help people make better choices and form better habits. When they succeed, better things happen for us all—individuals, organizations, and the world we all share. Helping everyone reach their potential is how we intend to reach ours.

We take this stance seriously, which is why we’ve decided to relaunch our brand, starting with The Habitual by DiGo.

The Habitual is a new publication from DiGo – The Positive Behavior Change Agency™ dedicated to helping people, businesses, and brands form better habits. Why? Because habits are the result of committed, consistent, and continuous Positive Behavior Change. There has never been a more important time for a positive statement. This is ours.

If you share our view or want to join our cause, we’ll help you find the right Positive Behavior Change for you. If you want to work for us, let Felicia know. If you want us to work for you, reach out to Lee. And if you want to learn more about Positive Behavior Change marketing, Mark is ready to chat. Finally, we’d love it if you helped share our first publication, but no pressure.

Oh, and that platypus? More on him later. 

Follow us on our social channels.

*** 

DiMassimo Goldstein (DiGo) is the world’s first creative agency focused exclusively on promoting better habits by building brands and businesses using Positive Behavior Change marketing. Over the years, we’ve lent our expertise to life-changing brands, including BetterHelp, Shutterstock, Wondrium, Partnership to End Addiction, WW (formerly Weight Watchers), SodaStream, Samsung, Echelon, Pfizer, and CVS Health, among many others across various industries. Headquartered in New York City, DiGo has teams across the globe and is committed to creating an enriching environment of diversity, equality, inclusion, and creativity. For more information, visit digobrands.com.

How to Improve LTV: Start. Stick. Stay.

Looking to improve your LTV (Lifetime Value of a Customer)? I have a story for you.

My friend, a former CMO now a fitness entrepreneur, told me about his version of “The Big Problem.”

I’m willing to bet it’s a lot like the biggest problem you face in your industry.

The second week of every year is the biggest week of gym membership sign-ups. Talk about a great start.

After a visit or two, 9 out of 10 of those new gym members won’t be seen at the gym again.

Fewer than 2 out of 100 will be there by the end of the year.

Think about the influx of gym membership promotions you see leading up to the new year. When putting pencil to paper, that’s a lot of money for an advertiser (like you) to spend on customer acquisition when the retention rate is less than 2%. For all the cost of acquiring 100 new gym members, more than 98 don’t stay.

I can tell you similar stories across a broad range of industries. People don’t do what they know is best for them.

More often than not, they don’t follow through on their best intentions. Your job as a marketer is to help them. And our job is to help you improve your LTV by getting your customers to not only stick, but stay.

START – STICK – STAY

Our 3Ms Model of Positive Behavior Change Marketing process sustains Motivation and increases Momentum through the Moments that Matter for getting more members from START to STAY and beyond.

When twice as many stay, you improve your LTV by twofold, your growth accelerates, and you help many more people create habits that help them flourish. And those habits mean they will stick with your brand.

Would you like to improve your LTV? To get things going, we can give you a 3Ms analysis of your industry and show you how DiGo can blow that out into great creative for your brand. And great creative is the ultimate economic multiplier.

Let me know if you’re interested.

Helping creative people build a creative habit.

Creative people hate tools they view as uncreative, and the word “stock” smacks of satisficing sameness.

Yet, not all creative asset companies are created equal.

While art directors, designers, and creative directors have been challenged with lower budgets, canceled shoots, and tighter schedules, many avoided “stock” sites and services for fear of stock sameness.

DiGo client Shutterstock had built something very different – a great set of tools for enhancing creativity, and a remarkable range of assets that seemed to be anything but “stock.”

Since most of the budget would go into connecting creators, we’d need to hijack news and memes to get our message out. The Fyre Festival fiasco presented us with our first opportunity. Within 72 hours, using $2000 of Shutterstock assets, we created a video that was ultimately seen by millions – nearly 700,000 on YouTube alone. Though it was not a SuperBowl commercial, since it did come out during SuperBowl season, one subtheme of comments was, “Shutterstock wins the SuperBowl with Fyre Festival Video.”

The theme of our winning campaign: It’s Not Stock. It’s Shutterstock.


Challenge

The creative tools and content at Shutterstock unlock potential, freeing creative people to realize their best ideas. However, our research showed that a mental-behavioral block was preventing most creative people from enjoying these benefits.

Desired Positive Behavior Change

From closed-rigid-creativity to open-nimble-creativity measured by increasing engagement, usage, and revenue-per-creative person on Shutterstock. 

Positive Behavior Change Idea

It’s not stock. It’s Shutterstock.


Helping more people get into therapy.

BetterHelp reached out to DiGo to change behavior and get more people into therapy.

The largest therapy brand in North America, BetterHelp’s commitment to address America’s behavioral and mental health crisis exceeds even their market share. 

In fact, the problem was so big that taking market share wouldn’t solve it. Less than half of the people who need therapy actually get it. The only way to get many more people the better help they need is to change behavior on a massive scale. 

Doing this started with a business analysis and identifying the behaviors that would drive impact and value. Many more people would need to try therapy through BetterHelp.

Through our 3M’s Behavior Change Marketing process, we discovered a key insight that unlocked motivation and inspired action: 

People suffering from anxiety or depression also suffer from a lot of bad advice.

While much of the advice the target audience was enduring was well-meaning, it made a lie of the notion that non-professional care could address these painful conditions.


Challenge

Less than half the people who need therapy actually get it. BetterHelp is the largest therapy brand in North America. The way they grow their impact is to grow therapy. They asked DiGo to help them crack this challenge, so we did.

Desired Positive Behavior Change

From relying on the well-meaning but poor advice of non-professionals and white-knuckling it alone to getting better in therapy. This adds up to millions of more people taking advantage of professional psychotherapy.

Positive Behavior Change Idea

Advice that actually helps.


Helping families build an anti-addiction habit.

From “This is your brain on drugs” to “To end addiction, start with connection.”

Over 25 years, we helped the Partnership evolve as the nation’s drug misuse and addition challenges evolved.

Partnership for a Drug-Free America was the largest single-issue public service advertising campaign. A later iteration, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids helped hundreds of thousands of families. Throughout this history, DiGo had a front-row seat for some of the most consequential behavior-change marketing experiments of the 21st Century.

In 2018, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and CASA (the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse) merged, and we helped create a new strategy and lead the process of creating a new identity – the Partnership to End Addiction.

It was an identity with a “moon shot.” The bold mission to end addiction as a public scourge was embedded in the name, signaling an extraordinary level of commitment.


Challenge

After guiding the Partnership through the creation and launch of their new identity, we faced a mental health crisis in America together. Our job was to get their proven family-based solutions used by many more families.

Desired Positive Behavior Change

From fearfully disconnected to confidently connected, as measured by dramatic growth in the use of the Partnership’s digital and human-to-human services. 

Positive Behavior Change Idea

Ending Addiction Starts With Connection.


Suddenly, a global pandemic was sucking up all the attention. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? But something was growing underneath. A mental health and addiction crisis. Families driven suddenly together began to notice things that had been hidden by normal life. In other homes, isolation accentuated problems or incubated new ones.

Naming another crisis wasn’t going to help. Where hope is invisible, denial is invincible. 

The behavioral scientists and parent coaches at the Partnership knew a hopeful secret and we decided that our job was to get it out there.

We needed to speak directly about the relationship between young adults and the adults who love them. 

Our message, “To end addiction, start with connection.”

We faced a novel set of production challenges that we decided to transform into blessings. Unable to shoot, we shifted our creative attention toward the emotive potential of animation.

Working with Bonfire, we create emotional stories of alienation and connection, accentuated by gorgeous music from The Lumineers.

The results exceeded all expectations. We made hundreds of thousands of connections. We helped the Partnership change behavior and save lives.

Our Positive Behavior Change Line In the Sand.

For 25 years, we’ve tried to inspire greatness. 

For well over a decade, we have been honing our approach to behavior-change marketing. 

Then, in 2021, we came together and decided, going forward, Positive Behavior Change would be our everything. 

Of course, being a creative agency, we wrote a statement. 

And of course, it is a positive one. Read it here:

If Ever There Was a Time For 

A Positive Statement, 

This Is It.

After more than 25 years of doing well, we all came together and decided to do only good.

We agreed to be guided by a single mission – to help change the behaviors that change lives for the better.

People don’t always do what they know they should. Much of marketing makes it worse. In this industry, too often we have worked on things we did not believe in.

Not anymore. Not here. If we can help anyone eat better, breathe easier, live longer, sleep smarter, learn faster, love deeper, feel mentally healthier, emotionally stronger, or financially more well, then we believe the investment will have been worth it.

DiGo is a community of people with diverse talents all committed to being agents of positive change. We champion the brands that help people make better choices and form more empowering habits. When they succeed, better things happen for us all – individuals, organizations, and the world we all share.

Helping everyone reach their potential is how we intend to reach ours.

There has never been a more important time for a positive statement.

This is ours.

Selling Behavior Change

Warby Parker doesn’t sell eyeglasses.

Warby Parker sells a behavior change – a different way to buy eyeglasses.

Peloton Interactive doesn’t sell an exercise bike.

Peloton sells a behavior change – a way to make sure you exercise and keep exercising, no excuses.

Airbnb doesn’t sell rooms and apartments.

Airbnb sells a behavior change – a different way to travel.

Uber doesn’t sell rides.

Uber sells behavior change – a different way to get from here to there and a different way to earn a living too.

Dollar Shave Club doesn’t sell razors.

Dollar shave club sells a behavior change – a different way to buy razors.

HelloFresh doesn’t sell meal kits.

HelloFresh sells a behavior change – a way to make home cooking fit modern life.

Sun Basket doesn’t sell meal kits.

SunBasket sells a behavior change – a way to cook Paleo or Whole30 or Vegan…

Stitch Fix doesn’t sell clothes.

StitchFix sells behavior change – a totally different way to get yourself dressed.

If you’re in the direct-to-consumer business, you’re a behavior change marketer. Period.

Your customer doesn’t choose you to get something.

Your customer chooses you to change something.

You are in behavior change marketing.

Branding for behavior change is different.

Designing for behavior change is different.

Content for behavior change is different.

Advertising for behavior change is different.

Marketing for behavior change is different.

Both! Brand and Business, Simultaneously.

“We can’t solve your problem because we haven’t done our strategic work yet.”

When I worked at other agencies, I always thought this to be the ultimate bureaucratic blindness.

Building the BRAND While We Build The BUSINESS.

This is the core promise of our agency, DiMassimo Goldstein. This is the experience our clients have bought when they’ve bought us.

Not: “First we’ll build the brand, then we’ll build the business.”

Not: “First we’ll build the business, then we’ll build the brand.”

Instead, we do both, and simultaneously. Like you do!

Sometimes this translates as “Building the brand while lowering the cost of acquisition.” Sometimes it’s “Building the brand while driving sales efficiency.”

Sometimes it’s just “Growing the business and the brand.”

Our clients never wait months to see returns from an agency engagement. We typically deliver measurable revenue within the first 30 days, and we don’t have to sacrifice future success to do it.

We call it two-track planning, and it’s implemented in everything we do. Imagine two columns on a page, the left titled URGENT and the right titled IMPORTANT.

Some urgent things are truly unimportant, but some we term “The Runway.” The board meeting coming up. The quarterly results reporting. The partner’s meeting.

If a plane doesn’t get aloft by the end of the runway, it doesn’t matter how good the food service and the movie was going to be. There are things you just need in the short run to make the long run possible. Often these things include results. That’s the Runway.

And, we don’t lose our strategic heads. We see the long-term opportunities in urgent problems. We see growth in behavior change. 

And we manage them both, so that our clients can move forward, paying for tomorrow’s opportunities with today’s wins, all while strategically planting the seeds that ensure growth for the future in a time-starved world.

Yes, we build the brand. Yes, we build the identity and design the brand. Yes, we develop a theory of growth and build out a marketing plan. Yes, we develop advertising and content. Yet, we view all of this through a Behavior Change Marketing lens.

In short, behavior is where brand and business meet. Until someone acts, nothing changes. Until behavior changes, businesses don’t grow. Behavior is the intersection of meaning and emotion.

Every KPI in a business is driven by a Key Behavioral Indicator. Behavior drives results.

By keeping our eye on the behavior and the result, we see eye to eye with our clients as we accelerate value creation for the business.