Why People Don’t Act, Even When They Could

I was walking a client through a lead generation campaign last week. We had chosen a specific job title, built the audience around that role, and written the ad around a very specific problem that someone in that position tends to experience daily. All our boxes were ticked nicely, and we were ready to launch. 

But as we were wrapping up, the client paused and asked a question that pulled us into something deeper. They wanted to know whether we should also mention all the other people who could use the product. And look, their thinking made sense on the surface. If more people can benefit from their product, it surely makes sense to say so somewhere in the ad.

It’s a question that comes up more often than people realise, usually from a kind of marketing FOMO… The sense that every impression, every image, every piece of marketing material should do as much work as possible.

The Instinct to Widen the Message

That natural pull toward broadening a message so it can stretch further, cover more ground, and appeal to more people feels efficient, and it feels safer. If more people can see themselves in it, then more people should respond, so it feels counterintuitive to zero in on one message and one pain point. 

The difficulty with this is that attention does not expand in the same way. When a message is stretched to include multiple audiences, it often loses the edge that makes someone stop in the first place. What’s left is something that feels generally relevant but not personally meaningful enough to act on.

There’s a reason for that, and it is not just something we see in campaign performance. Research in persuasion, particularly the Elaboration Likelihood Model developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986), shows that people engage more deeply with messages they perceive as directly relevant to them. So, when something feels distant or loosely connected, it tends to be processed quickly and then dismissed. But when it feels close to home, people are more likely to consider it, interpret it, and act on it. 

It’s subtle, but it has a direct impact on how people respond.

When the Ask Becomes Real

We also weren’t asking anything passive of our target audience in this campaign, like reading something or watching a video. The campaign’s purpose was lead generation, so we asked them to submit their details.

That, in and of itself, changes how people respond, because even a simple lead form introduces a perceived cost. People start thinking about what happens next, whether they will be contacted, whether it is worth the time, and whether the exchange feels fair. While those considerations tend to sit in the background, they have a considerable impact on shaping how people respond.

This is where specificity starts to matter more. When someone sees a message that reflects a problem they recognise in their own context, the effort required to understand and evaluate that message drops. It feels more immediate, and the next step feels more justified.

There is strong support for this in research as well. Research on language and persuasion, including work by Kronrod et al. (2012) in the Journal of Marketing, shows that how specifically a message is framed has a direct impact on how people respond to it. In simple terms, when someone can see themselves in the problem being described, the leap to action becomes smaller.

Why “Just One More Audience” Creates Friction

This is also where the idea of adding a small line to include other audiences starts to work against you. Yes, it doesn’t feel like a big change. It might be a short sentence or a passing mention, but even small additions change how a message is processed by the reader.

From a cognitive perspective, people have a limited capacity to process information in any given moment. This is well explained by Cognitive Load Theory, which shows that as the amount of information increases, so does the effort required to understand it. In digital environments, where attention is already stretched, that extra effort has consequences. And those consequences usually show up in your campaign performance.

Research on decision-making (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000) shows that as the effort required to process information increases, the likelihood of action decreases. In digital environments, where decisions are made quickly, even small increases in complexity can create hesitation, and hesitation often shows up as inaction. 

So, what looks like a small addition to an ad for you can dilute the impact that made the message effective in the first place.

This Is Not Just a Funnel Problem

There is a common way of explaining this that splits things into broad messaging at the top of the funnel and specific messaging further down. It is a useful starting point, but it does not tell the full story. And yes, I am guilty of simplifying this concept as well.

The thing is, specificity works at every stage. Its effectiveness is not reserved for bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns and marketing material. When we look at the impact and use of specificity in messaging, what changes is not whether you are specific or not, but how much context you provide and how much you ask someone to do.

At earlier stages in the funnel (and yes, don’t come for me, the funnel is still very much alive), the goal is often to help someone recognise a problem or see something in a new way. That still benefits from being grounded in a real situation (i.e., being specific). The difference is that you are not asking for a commitment at that point.

As you move closer to an action (or more down the funnel), whether that is submitting a form or booking a call, the message needs to do more. It needs to connect more directly and make the next step feel worthwhile.

This ties into Byron Sharp’s work in How Brands Grow, which shows that most buyers are light buyers who purchase infrequently, and that growth comes from being easy to buy in more situations. In practice, that means people are only in a buying position occasionally, and whether they act depends on whether that need is active when your message appears. And that sense of being ready to act is shaped by context, urgency, and how clearly the message reflects what they’re dealing with.

Where Campaigns Start to Go Off Track

When campaigns don’t perform the way we expected them to, our first instinct is usually to look at the platform or the campaign type we chose. We start wondering whether the issue is Meta versus LinkedIn, whether the budget needs to change, or whether broadening the audience might help the campaign find more of the right people. It’s a very understandable reaction, because those are the parts of the setup that feel the most visible and the easiest to adjust once the campaign is live.

The problem is that the issue often starts earlier than that. In many cases, what has gone wrong is the relationship between the audience, the message, and the ask. When those three things aren’t aligned, your campaign is not going to work. 

The message may be too broad for the problem it is trying to speak to, the ask could require more confidence than the message and the brand have earned, or the audience may be too wide for the level of action being requested from the reader. All the while, on paper, the setup still looks perfectly reasonable, which is why this kind of issue is easy to miss.

That is also why changing the platform may change the numbers without changing the outcome. 

You may get more reach, different click behaviour, or a slightly better cost metric, but the underlying mismatch is still there… It just shows up in a different metric. 

A Practical Way to Sense-Check Your Ads

If you want to pressure test an ad before changing platforms, budgets, or audiences, here are a few things you can do to make sure everything aligns correctly.

Step 1: Look at the ad as if you know nothing about it

Open the ad and look at it without filling in the gaps yourself. Set aside the brief, the audience targeting, and what you meant for it to say. Focus only on what is actually there.

The question here is whether it is immediately clear who the ad is for.

If someone in your target audience came across it, would they recognise themselves in it without needing to interpret it? If that connection is not clear, that is often where people move on.

Step 2: Check whether the problem feels real and recognisable

Once you know who it is for, and you’re sure they’ll know it’s for them as well, look at what the ad is saying about their situation.

Does it reflect something specific enough that the person can recognise it from their own experience, or does it sit at a level where it could apply to almost anyone?

This is where a lot of ads lose their strength. They describe benefits in a general way and avoid naming the actual problem. That makes them easier to agree with, but harder to respond to. If someone needs to pause to figure out whether the problem applies to them, the ad is already asking for more effort than most people will give.

Step 3: Look at the step you are asking them to take

Now look at the action.

Based on what the ad has said so far, does that next step feel like a natural continuation, or does it feel like a jump? Submitting details, booking a call, or even clicking through all carry a level of commitment, and if the message has not built enough confidence, the ask will always feel heavier than it needs to.

The message and the ask need to match. When you are asking for something meaningful, the ad needs to do enough work to make that step feel worthwhile.

When you go through these steps properly, the gaps in your messaging and your creative tend to become more visible.

Coming Back to the Original Question

So, when the client asked whether we should include other audiences in the ad, the answer was never that those other audiences didn’t matter. They do matter. The issue is that they don’t all belong in the same message at the same time.

Trying to speak to multiple groups within a single ad means trying to hold different contexts, different pain points, and different motivations in one place. That usually makes the message feel less precise for everyone involved. The people you most want to reach no longer feel addressed as directly, and the people on the edges are still unlikely to act because the message was not built closely enough around their situation, either. In trying to keep the door open for everyone, the ad loses some of the precision that made it compelling in the first place.

When those groups are separated and addressed on their own terms, even if that means creating multiple variations of the same campaign, the message becomes easier to recognise and easier to respond to. So, yes, you do need to narrow your audience when it comes to the settings in your campaign, but what’s even more effective (and what will improve your results more than any setting can) is giving the right person the chance to feel that the message was meant for them and that the next step makes sense.

References

• Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Kao, C. F., & Rodriguez, R. (1986). Central and peripheral routes to persuasion: An individual difference perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(5), 1032–1043. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.5.1032. 

• Sweller, J. (1988) ‘Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning’, Cognitive Science, 12(2), pp. 257–285.

• Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995. 

• Kronrod, A., Grinstein, A., & Wathieu, L. (2012). Go Green! Should Environmental Messages be So Assertive? Journal of Marketing, 76(1), 95-102. 

• Sharp, B. (2014) How brands grow: What marketers don’t know. Revised e-book edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.