Tim Berney, CEO of VI Marketing and Branding, explains why fear-based campaigns fail and what actually moves people to quit smoking, recycle, or switch banks.
Fear doesn’t work. That’s not a hunch, it’s what 35 years of running behavior change campaigns has taught Tim Berney, CEO of VI Marketing and Branding. His agency has spent decades trying to get people to stop smoking, buckle their seatbelts, and recycle, and the throughline in all of it is that showing someone a diseased lung does almost nothing if they’re already addicted. What actually moves people is empathy, and understanding the emotion sitting underneath a decision that raw data can’t show you on its own.
That’s a different kind of data conversation than we usually have on this show, and it’s exactly why it stuck with us.
What Is Behavior Change Marketing and How Is It Different From Traditional Advertising?
VI Marketing and Branding started under a different name: social marketing. The term got hijacked once social media platforms arrived and “social media marketing” became the more familiar phrase, so the industry rebranded itself as behavior change marketing. The goal hasn’t moved: shift how a segment of society acts around a specific issue.
Berney’s favorite way to explain it is seatbelts. If you’re old enough, you remember a childhood without them. Now it’s not just law, cars physically strap themselves around you. That’s what successful behavior change looks like once it’s finished, it becomes invisible because it became normal.
VI is 35 years old, employs about 65 people (two-thirds based in Oklahoma City, where the agency was founded), and has picked up 11 Best of Show awards along the way.
“There’s a saying that if you’ve won one Best of Show, you’re lucky. If you’ve won two Best of Shows, you’re legit. We’ve won 11.”
— Tim Berney, CEO, VI Marketing and Branding
Why Doesn’t Fear-Based Messaging Work, Even When the Data Is True?
Berney’s clearest example comes from tobacco cessation work. His industry used to lean on shock: diseased lungs, scare tactics, worst-case outcomes. All true. All useless.
“If I try to scare you, it’s like, ‘But I’m addicted.’ I already know every day when I light up, or 20 times a day when I light a cigarette, that it’s bad for me. And you telling me that it’s bad for me is not what motivates me to quit.”
— Tim Berney, CEO, VI Marketing and Branding
The pivot came from qualitative research, in-depth interviews and intercept surveys, not another round of quantitative data. It surfaced something the numbers alone never would: people already know the danger. What they need is a message that meets them where they are.
“We have to empathize with our audience, understand that it is a struggle for them. Anything that we do to shame them or try to scare them is ineffective because they already know it.”
— Tim Berney, CEO, VI Marketing and Branding
The tactical shift that followed was just as important: show, don’t tell. Instead of picturing someone smoking and narrating the consequences, VI shows people living smoke-free, enjoying their families, not thinking about their next cigarette. Model the behavior you want, not the behavior you’re trying to eliminate.
How Do You Find the Emotion Behind a Decision When People Won’t Tell You the Truth?
Here’s where it gets interesting. Cross-tabs and quantitative data tell you what happened. They don’t tell you why, and Berney treats that “why” as the entire job.
“The data is the truth, but it’s the insight into that data that helps us tell the story that actually motivates people.”
— Tim Berney, CEO, VI Marketing and Branding
He shared a rebrand project for a bank around commercial loans. The client’s assumption was that customers hated being told no, so the brief was to soften rejections and find ways to say yes more often. Fieldwork blew that up.
“What was right was, I don’t care if you tell me no, but tell me quick. Don’t string me out and then tell me no. If it’s no, it’s no.”
— Tim Berney, CEO, VI Marketing and Branding
If VI had trusted the client’s assumption instead of going back into the field, the campaign would have solved the wrong problem entirely. That’s the risk of stopping at what the data says instead of asking what’s driving it.
Berney also leaned on research: he cited a claim that roughly 95% of decision-making is emotional, and referenced a neuroscience study finding emotional campaigns can outperform rational ones by a wide margin, with emotionally connected customers spending roughly twice as much with a brand. Whether or not you’ve seen those exact numbers before, the direction matches what every marketer already suspects and rarely acts on.
Does Personalization Still Matter When You’re Targeting a Cause, Not a Customer?
Berney’s answer surprised me a little: personalization at VI isn’t one-to-one, it’s small groups, or what he calls micro-groups. Not everyone dealing with the same issue is standing in the same place with it.
Take smoking in cars with kids present, still legal in plenty of places. Some people believe strongly in protecting children and don’t need convincing. Others believe secondhand smoke is simply wrong in any context. And others are doing it without realizing the danger, they need empathy, not judgment. Same behavior, three completely different messages.
“Personalization for us is small groups with different types of messaging, and we can target them by the engagement they’ve had with our messages.”
— Tim Berney, CEO, VI Marketing and Branding
The other rule Berney insists on: talk like a human. His team uses the term NRT (nicotine replacement therapy) internally, but never in front of an audience.
“We got to talk like humans… or else we lose them. It’s why a lot of campaigns fall flat, because we’re using our language and not their language, our scenarios and our beliefs and not theirs.”
— Tim Berney, CEO, VI Marketing and Branding
He closed the thought with a quote he keeps coming back to, attributed to Maya Angelou:
“People will forget what you say. They’ll forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.”
— Tim Berney, CEO, VI Marketing and Branding
The Bigger Picture
What sticks with me from this conversation is how much of it applies outside of public health campaigns. Berney’s team has used the same emotional-intelligence approach on banking clients trying to understand brand loyalty, and the lesson holds: brand loyalty is built on trust and connection, not features or price, and trust requires understanding the emotion behind a customer’s choice, not just the choice itself.
That’s the same instinct behind good identity data. Knowing that someone visited your site or opened your email is the equivalent of the quantitative cross-tab, it tells you what happened. Knowing who they actually are, and being able to reach them with a message built for their specific context instead of a generic segment, is what turns that data into something that actually moves people.
Find Tim Berney on LinkedIn, or learn more about VI Marketing and Branding at vimarketingandbranding.com.
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Watch the full episode: From Data to Impact: Driving Behavior, Insights & Personalization on YouTube
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
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