The Force of Habit

The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore

Neale Martin was driving to a meeting on the outskirts of Atlanta and had the disconcerting experience of being unable to recall the last 10 miles of highway he had driven.  He had successfully navigated a 4,000-pound car at speeds in excess of 70 mph, responding to hundreds of cars around him, without any conscious control of his  actions for at least 10 minutes. That experience, familiar to many of us, illustrates the power and scope of the unconscious mind.

Dr. Martin has his Ph.D. in marketing and a passion for psychology and neuroscience. In his book Habit, he explores the relationship between the conscious and unconscious  – which he terms the Executive Mind and Habitual Mind. Why do customers abandon perfectly good products? Why do 80% of all new product launches fail or significantly under perform? Why is customer satisfaction NOT a good predictor of what customers will do in the future?

Because, he posits, we are all creatures of habit, driving on autopilot with much less “free will” in our purchasing and decision-making than we might like to admit.  He suggests there are four significant implications to his research:

1. Companies must focus on customer behavior, not attitudes or beliefs.
2. Training the habitual mind is different than training the executive mind.
3. To hold on to customers, you should keep them from consciously thinking about you.
4. To take a customer away from a competitor, you must break the customer’s existing habits by first getting him to consciously think about the product.

Much of this my readers may already know but there is great value in seeing the argument framed as a battle between “Habit” and “Choice.”  I saw this first-hand when working on an assignment tracking website usage and how visitors navigated landing pages.  Why did web users habitually click images placed in a certain portion of the screen?  Because they were used to it. When we converted what was formerly spot art into action items, the habit was harnessed.

The lesson learned here is that despite the advances in neuromarketing and psychographics the advice of John Dryden more than three hundred years ago still holds true: “”We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.”

[via: BrandWeek]

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