When my mum was a girl, not many young people had watches.
So they were a bit of a status symbol.
So in the summer, she and her friends would stick a watch paper template around their wrists.
Which would give them a watch tan line – so it looked like you had a watch, you just didn’t happen to be wearing it.
Then watches became more common. Mechanical wind-up watches were replaced by more reliable, less hasslesome quartz watches. Digital watches made the time easier to read and added new functions. Swatch made Swiss movements inexpensive and created fashion watches.
Soon, everyone had a watch.
Now things are going the other way again. Fewer and fewer young people bother with watches. Because all most watches do is tell the time.
And what’s the point of that? Having something that only does one thing? Especially when you’re using your mobile every other second, and that’s got the time on it. As well as the date, stopwatch, alarm clock, calculator, voice recorder, MP3 player, weather, your exact location, photo album, Twitter account, internet access and 50 games on it.
Makes a watch look pretty lame. Like walking around with a separate watch, compass, stopwatch, calculator, dictaphone, GPS tracker, notepad, travel scrabble and so on.
So, things have come full circle in behaviour (young people not wearing watches). But the motivation behind each is completely different.
Looking only at behaviour doesn’t give you the full picture. Yet it’s often all we bother with, since motivation can be harder to work out.
For example, a charity is unlikely to classify someone who gives £10 as ‘high value’. To us, their behaviour has a fairly low value.
Yet they may be a pensioner on a low, fixed income. For whom £10 is a significant sum.
To them £10 is high value, and they’re giving it because they’re very engaged with the cause (and might even leave a legacy if we treat them properly).
Yet because we don’t judge their behaviour to be ‘high value’, there’s a good chance we won’t treat them properly.
Similarly, regular givers – people who give a monthly gift by direct debit – are often referred to in fundraising as ‘committed givers’. We judge their behaviour – this regular, dependable gift, as showing real commitment.
Yet, again, the reverse can be true.
People who sign up to a direct debit never have to make a conscious decision to support you ever again. Their bank automatically sends on the money without involving the donor.
So the donor may be a regular-but-not-very-committed giver.Which might mean we have to worker harder to keep them engaged than someone who makes a cash gift three times a year.
It’s why understanding motivation, not just measuring behaviour, can be so important.
And why people no longer buy watches to tell the time. But to tell you something about them.
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