🧠 Nudging Goals with Emergency Reserves

TL;DR: A Single Slip Doesn’t Mean All is Lost.

🎓 Researchers:
— Marissa A. Sharif, Associate Professor of Marketing, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
— Suzanne B. Shu, Professor of Marketing, Cornell University

Who is this for?
Marketing & Communication Teams, Change Managers, UX Researchers, Banking & Finance, Health & Wellness Apps, Learning Designers, and Product Teams.

💡 Vishal’s Strategy for Evidence-Based Communications

👉🏾 Flexible buffers: Build in “emergency reserves” to allow people flexibility to stick with long-term goals. e.g. With financial products like saving accounts, offer no-penalty months for withdrawals to keep people motivated after unexpected expenses.

👉🏾 Normalising setbacks: Help people view occasional missed targets as part of their journey rather than as a failure. E.g. For health goals, label missed days as “cheat days” in wellness tracking apps can reduce the “all-or-nothing” mindset.

👉🏾 Boost interventions: Equip people with tools that “boost” their ability to create personalised interventions. E.g. In learning platforms, create flexible self-set targets so people can design a system that works for them.

📚 The Evidence

Researchers Marissa Sharif and Suzanne Shu investigated how “emergency reserves” in goal-setting improves persistence. One of their key experiments found that people who had few emergency skip days were more likely to reach their step goals than those with strict, fixed goals.

Article: Sharif, M. A., & Shu, S. B. (2019). Nudging persistence after failure through emergency reserves. Journal of Consumer Research

Access the abstract (full paper paywalled) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2019.01.004

📊 Key Findings and Results

• Flexible reserves, on a weekly or monthly basis, served as mental “safety nets,” encouraging participants to see setbacks as part of the journey rather than a reason to quit.

• Structured flexibility maintained participants' motivation, helping them stay focused on goals even when using a reserve day.

• Emergency reserves reduced the “all-or-nothing” mindset, promoting resilience and commitment to long-term goals.

🧪 Footnote on experimentation

Evidence evolves over time and rarely fit all contexts—start with a small experiment to find out what works for your specific challenge and audience.

🧠 Behavioural by Design Masterclass: Join our in-person or online Masterclass for a hands-on guide to apply behavioural science in your policy, strategy, communications and design challenges.