On Breaking Habit | Beyond Madison Avenue

TalentZoo.com | Flack Me | Digital Pivot | Beneath the Brand

Archives | Categories

On Breaking Habit

By: Dwayne W. Waite Jr.

When a brand becomes part of a consumer's habit, organizations love it. The advertising world considers it an element of brand loyalty. When a consumer routinely chooses your brand over another, regardless of price, convenience, and substitutes, it creates a bond that is tough to break. Plenty of us know friends and family that buy certain brands simply out of habit; the uncle who always brings over that certain brand of beer because that is all he drinks. We have that friend who always wears that certain brand of jeans or shirt because they believe it fits them the best. And so on.

One of the toughest elements of marketing is when we find our client or brand on the outside. How do we break the consumer's habit of buying a certain brand, and make them switch it up?

Journalist and writer of The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, talked to NPR about this very subject. He believes that the secret lies in interrupting the "habit loop" of consumers.

According to Duhigg, the habit loop of consumers, the process a consumer goes through to turn actions into a habit, is made up of three steps: a cue, a behavior (the action itself), and the reward — the reason or reinforcement for engaging in the behavior.

Duhigg explains a very interesting fact about the difference between habit and decision-making. Scientists have found that the habit-making processes and the decision-making processes are in two separate locations of the brain. This means that once a behavior becomes a habit, the decision-making parts of the brain become dormant; therefore, arguments of cost/benefit analysis and forces of competition are irrelevant. Also, the habit-making processes lie within the same compartments as the developments of emotions, memories, and pattern recognition, which makes sense. In animal behavior, there is a common, instinctive trait called a "fixed-action pattern." The FAP is triggered (cue) based on an object in its environment. The behavior happens (action) because of the evolutionary pattern of survival (reward). It is true, that few things separate Man and beast.

But we digress. Based on the research gathered, Duhigg and others determined that if one, let's say the consumer, is taken out of their usual habitat, the habit pattern is broken. Duhigg says that "...once the cues change, patterns are broken up."

If this hypothesis proves true, then the best way to introduce a new product or service to consumers is to interrupt their habit loop. That means finding out when consumer change their routines, and get them while they are out their comfort zone. Examples in the article include going on vacation, and Target's activity of marketing to women when they show traits of becoming pregnant.

Interesting theory. Your thoughts?

blog comments powered by Disqus

About the Author

Dwayne W. Waite Jr. is partner and principal at JDW: The Charlotte Agency, a marketing and advertising shop in Charlotte, NC. He enjoys consumer behavior, economics, and football.

Beyond Madison Avenue on