Stop designing events. Start designing behaviors.

Author:

Katie Streten, Head of Creative Strategy and Insight, Emota

Originally published by EVCOM, October 8, 2026

 

Why do we do events at all?

It sounds like an obvious question. Yet surprisingly often, we start planning an event without really answering it.

Instead, we start with the event itself. Does any of the following sound familiar?

Get the senior leader on stage. Build in networking breaks. Innovate the plenary. Put a coffee station on the exhibition stand. Create a product theater. Find a luxury hotel. Install something interactive.

These might all be perfectly good ideas. But they are solutions, and we’ve jumped to them before properly defining the problem we’re trying to solve.

An event without a purposeful outcome risk becoming little more than a party, a museum, a series of lectures, and worse, a gamble.

What if there was another way to think about it? Instead of designing events, we should design behaviors.

 

Experiences have the power to change behavior

We know that experiences can influence what people subsequently think, feel and do.

Part of their power comes from their ability to create feelings. And feelings can affect both how experiences are remembered and the decisions people make afterwards.

The affect heuristic, for example, describes the mental shortcut through which our feelings toward something can influence our decisions about it, rather than those decisions being based purely on a rational assessment of the available choices.

The Peak-End Rule, explained by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman, suggests that our memory of an experience can be disproportionately shaped by its most intense moment and by how it ends, rather than by an average of the whole experience.

 

Small things can change behavior

Research has also demonstrated relationships between mood, environment and behavior. A 1993 study by Gerald Gorn, Marvin Goldberg and Kunal Basu found that consumers’ current mood could influence their evaluation of products, with happier moods associated with more positive evaluations.

And an intriguing 1999 study by Adrian North, David Hargreaves and Jennifer McKendrick found that playing French music in a wine store was associated with greater purchasing of French wine, while German music was associated with greater purchasing of German wine. Shoppers reported being unaware of the music.

The point isn’t that every event needs carefully selected background music! (although why not?)

It’s that apparently small aspects of an experience can influence behavior.

If we approach every brief with preconceived ideas about how an event is supposed to work, we may never discover our equivalent of the French or German music. We may miss the intervention that actually helps create the behavior we need.

 

Start with the behavior, not the format

So instead of beginning with what an event should contain, start with a much simpler question:

What do we want people to do as a result of this experience?

Once we know that, we can start designing the conditions that make that behavior more likely.

Consider language at international conferences.

Research published by PLOS in 2023 found that around 30% of early-career Japanese and Spanish researchers surveyed said they often or always decided not to attend an English-language conference because of language barriers.

If you’re organizing an international event, the desired behavior here is straightforward: we want people to feel comfortable enough to attend.

That changes the design question.

Instead of asking, “What should our event look like?”, we can ask, “What is preventing some people from coming?”

One potential response is to provide transcription and translation services — and, importantly, tell prospective attendees that they’re available.

The intervention is designed to create confidence and make people feel valued. Those feelings can then help support the behavior we’re actually looking for: attending.

We haven’t simply designed another feature for an event.

We’ve designed around a behavior.

 

Let’s look at an example where designing an event rather than designing for a behavior ended up failing us all

When physical events disappeared, we tried to recreate their constituent parts digitally. We replaced meeting rooms with video calls, stages with livestreams and in-person networking with online networking rooms.

But replicating the format didn’t necessarily replicate the behavior.

Creating a virtual networking area and expecting people to network there overlooked what makes networking happen in the first place. What, after all, is the real promise of networking?

At its best, it is a valuable and enjoyable business connection.

We want attendees to talk to one another, discover common ground, feel connected and feel that the event organizer has created the conditions for useful interaction.

Once we frame the problem that way, we can start asking why those behaviors might not happen.

This is where behavioral science can provide a practical framework.

 

Capability + Opportunity + Motivation = Behavior

The COM-B model proposes that three interacting components are necessary for a behavior to occur:

Capability: Can the person do it?

Opportunity: Does their environment allow them to do it?

Motivation: Do they want, or feel sufficiently prompted, to do it?

Apply this to an online networking room and some obvious barriers appear.

Capability: I don’t know what to say to a stranger in an online networking moment.

Opportunity: I have to find the networking area and deliberately enter it.

Motivation: Talking to strangers can already feel awkward. Doing it online, one-to-one, with no easy means of escape can feel even worse.

Now we can design differently.

Rather than creating a networking room and hope people use it, imagine beginning a conference session by randomly placing attendees into small virtual groups and giving them a short task connected to the session they’re about to attend.

Suddenly, the barriers change.

They have something to talk about, addressing capability.

They don’t have to search for the networking space, addressing opportunity.

And they don’t have to summon the motivation to enter a room and introduce themselves to strangers. The connection happens naturally.

The networking experience becomes spontaneous, relevant and purposeful.

That’s designing behavior.

 

From business objective to human behavior

The same thinking works for commercial objectives.

Imagine the objective is to generate 1,300 warm leads from an exhibition.

“Generate 1,300 warm leads” isn’t an attendee behavior. Nobody arrives at a trade show thinking, Today I’m going to become somebody’s warm lead.

So, break the objective down.

To generate those leads, people may need to:

• Come to the stand.
• Engage with the hosts.
• See the company as an innovative and exciting provider.
• Have a conversation with a sales representative.
• Give their details.

Now we have behaviors we can actually design for.

The next question is: what is stopping them?

Capability barriers might include not knowing where the stand is or what the company offers.

Opportunity barriers might include a crowded agenda and limited time.

Motivation barriers might include knowing that visiting the stand is likely to result in being “sold to” and wanting to avoid that interaction.

Only now should creative solutions enter the conversation.

• A highly visible LED sign might address discoverability.
• Sponsorship beyond the stand might build recognition elsewhere in the venue.
• A distinctive timed experience could give people a reason to prioritize visiting.
• Training hosts differently and creating interactive experiences that naturally trigger conversation could reduce the sense of walking into an overt sales encounter.

The creative work hasn’t become less important, quite the opposite. It now has a clearer job to do.

 

Designing for behavior in the real world

This approach can also help when trying to stand out in an extremely crowded environment.

At drupa 2024 — the huge print-industry exhibition returning after an eight-year absence — Ricoh had a 30% smaller footprint than at previous editions.

Its objectives included creating a memorable experience, bringing its HENKAKU principle of “Transformational Innovation” to life, and facilitating purposeful connections with print clients that could generate leads and support sales.

Thinking behaviourally reframed the creative challenge.

The environment itself creates a capability problem: it is an enormous, busy exhibition and visitors need a distinctive reason to recognize, understand and engage with a particular presence.

Opportunity was principally constrained by time.

Motivation was different again. Print buyers are dealing with the challenges created by the digital evolution of their industry and were actively looking for partners who can help them respond.

That gives creative teams something far more useful to work with than simply “design us a memorable stand.”

It gives them behavioral problems to solve.

Our solution was an incredible space, including a theater and show, a Zen print garden, and experiential zones centered around the printers. Rather than simply loading in their impressive printers, we considered how long we wanted attendees to dwell and what we wanted them to do.

The result? We collected 3,092 sales leads, exceeding the sales lead target by 210%, and saw an average of four repeat visits lasting 1 hr 17 min.

So what does this mean for me?

 

Putting behavioral design into practice

For people commissioning events internally, the change can begin with the questions asked of stakeholders.

Instead of:

“What do you want to say?” or “What topics should we cover?”

ask:

“What do you want attendees or customers to do as a result of this event?”

Then consider the behaviors that might need to happen along the way.

Perhaps someone first needs to accept an invitation. Perhaps they need to initiate a conversation, make a commitment, provide their details or schedule a meeting.

For agencies and consultants, the principle is similar.

When a brief describes the event in detail but says little about behavior, go back to the objectives. Translate those objectives into the behaviors required to achieve them. Then use a framework such as COM-B to identify what might prevent those behaviors from occurring.

Most importantly, don’t become prescriptive about formats too early.

• A plenary isn’t an objective.
• Networking isn’t an objective.
• An immersive experience isn’t an objective.

Even innovation isn’t an objective unless we can define what we want people to think, feel or do differently as a result.

 

A simple behavioral approach to event design

The process can ultimately be reduced to four steps:

1. Set the objectives.
2. Work out the behaviors that will deliver them.
3. Establish the barriers preventing those behaviors.
4. Design formats, agendas, topics and experiences that overcome those barriers.

This changes the role of event design.

Rather than asking how to fill an agenda, populate a space or reproduce familiar event formats, we begin with people.

What do we need them to do? Why aren’t they doing it already? What is getting in their way?

And what could we change about the experience to make that behavior easier, more attractive or more natural?

Ultimately, the most important question isn’t:

What event should we design?

It’s:

What behavior are we trying to create?

 

• Slovic, P., Finucane, M. L., Peters, E., & MacGregor, D. G. (2007). The affect heuristic. European Journal of Operational Research, 177(3), 1333–1352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2005.04.006 ScienceDirect
• Fredrickson, B. L., & Kahneman, D. (1993). Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45 PubMed
• Gorn, G. J., Goldberg, M. E., & Basu, K. (1993). Mood, awareness, and product evaluation. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2(3), 237–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1057-7408(08)80016-2 Society for Consumer Psychology
• North, A. C., Hargreaves, D. J., & McKendrick, J. (1999). The influence of in-store music on wine selections. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(2), 271–276. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.2.271 ResearchGate
• Amano, T., Ramírez-Castañeda, V., Berdejo-Espinola, V., et al. (2023). The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science. PLOS Biology, 21(7), e3002184. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002184 PLOS
• Michie, S., van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011). The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation Science, 6, 42. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-6-42