Habit - A Holy Grail that every Marketer is searching for.

Habit is defined as a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.

Habits are associations that relate aspects of your world to action. Your brain is a habit-creating machine that allows you to perform those actions without having to think.

This habit will form whether you practice the action deliberately or just repeat it in the course of your daily routine. Not only are habits crucial to your personal success, but they are also central to the behavior of your customers.

How is a habit formed?

Habit formation involves learned associations between an event and a behavioral response. Before we develop automatic associations (habits), we begin with purposeful, goal-directed behavior. Action-outcome associations are goal-directed behaviors in which an individual performs some action, and, if the outcome is rewarding, the behavior is reinforced.

With training and repetition, this behavior becomes automatic and the association becomes an ‘outcome insensitive’ stimulus-response association. Once we’ve performed a particular action sequence enough times with a similar response, the brain tries to free up processing space by saving an automatic stimulus-response association that can be triggered with almost no thinking.

How is the brain giving birth to a Habit?

During the process of learning goal-directed associations, connections between the cortex (responsible for higher-level cognition, like thinking and planning) and basal ganglia (important for selecting a movement for a particular situation) change their activity, reflecting the switch to more automatic associations.

A signal arises during the early learning process (before the behavior is automatic) in a basal ganglia region known as the dorsolateral striatum (DSL), which ‘chunks’ the task-related events together so that the brain sees the whole task from beginning to end as one event. Neurons related to the task fire at the beginning or end of the task (or both) while neurons, unrelated to the task, are quiet. Thus, the entire task is represented as a single event within the DSL.

During the shift from trial-and-error learning to a more consistent task response, the strength of this ‘chunked’ representation increases. This representation appears to remain stable as long as the routine is performed and at least partially reinforced (rewarded). Other cells in the DSL have different roles in habit formation; some cells don’t respond during the task at all but respond right after, representing ‘outcome feedback’. When the task is first being learned, some DSL neurons respond to correct performance while other cells signal when the task is performed incorrectly.

As the response to the task becomes more automatic, the number of cells that appear to participate in error-signaling (signaling for incorrect performance) gets smaller and smaller, and the cells responding to correct performance increase. This lack of error-signaling for well-formed habits could be the reason why our brains are less sensitive to the outcomes of habitual actions and the reason why habits are so difficult to change.

The DSL is not the only brain region that forms a chunked representation of learned tasks. A version of the chunking pattern also develops in a region of the prefrontal cortex known as the infralimbic cortex. In contrast to the DSL pattern, the chunking pattern in the infralimbic cortex develops later in the learning process as the response to the task becomes consistent and outcome-insensitive. The infralimbic pattern is also different from the DSL pattern because it’s sensitive to changes in the task that require changes in behavior, such as changing which action is needed to receive a reward. The infralimbic pattern decays rapidly when the rules of the task change and it re-emerges when an alternative routine takes shape. Overall, different regions of the brain may function in parallel to promote habit formation – an infralimbic response (cortical-associative-limbic circuit), and a DSL response (basal ganglia).

What can we learn about processing a habit? 

It was previously thought that the brain circuitry underlying goal-directed actions and habitual actions were competing with one another for dominance in the brain. The idea was that all actions begin as goal-directed, and then the habitual action system takes over and inhibits the goal-directed connections, freeing up brain processing for other things. However, more recent evidence suggests that the two systems can actually work together. For example, goal-directed action circuitry may be needed to initiate a given routine, but habitual automaticity can result in the completion of a complex set of behaviors that the brain has learned to see as one unit.

Research has also shown that context cues (for example, cues from our environment) play an important role in habit formation.

When people are trained on a sequential task (performing step 1, then step 2, then step 3), repeated practice resulted in fast reporting of the next step when primed with the prior step. When people are particularly fast at reporting the next step (interpreted as strong habits), their habits were likely to persist, even when they intentionally wanted to add, remove, or change one of the steps. 

Why does a habit matter? 

Understanding the deep connections that the brain forms between a given stimulus, the perceived reward, and the related environment can lead to a better understanding of how the brain forms habitual connections. It is useful to know how we can improve our behavior to create better habits. But, perhaps, it is more important to realize which aspects of habit formation are under our personal control.

Habits & Marketing

Most businesses have, without knowing better, set themselves up to be nothing more than a commodity. And when you’re a commodity, your product can easily be interchanged with other products. When people are in the market for your type of product, they won’t have an alliance with your product, let alone think about your product. Aligning your product with your target’s habits and environmental triggers, like in the above example, makes your product more than a commodity. It makes them irreplaceable and makes them feel like they can’t live without them or use any other brand. 

As a marketer, we have to focus on 2 key actions to differentiate our products from commodity to a habit,

1. Nurture new habits
2. Disrupt old habits

Nurture new habits. Customers have to repeat a new behavior before it becomes a habit. The studies on habit development suggest that there are many factors that affect exactly how many repetitions that is, but 20 is not a bad start. Help customers repeat a new behavior enough times for a habit to form. Get to know how your customers interact with you and work to create that practice for them.

How to create a habit-forming product or experience?

“Hooks” are experiences that connect users’ problems to a company’s solution with enough frequency to form a habit. Hooks are in all sorts of products we use with little or no conscious thought. Over time, customers form associations that spark unprompted engagement. In other words, habits.

Use of the product is typically associated with an emotional pain point, an existing routine, or situation. For example, what product do people use when they’re feeling lonely and seek connection? Facebook, of course! What do we do when we feel uncertain? We Google! What about when we’re bored? Many people open YouTube, Pinterest, check sports scores or stock prices.

What questions should marketers ask when trying to build a habit-forming experience?

• What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal trigger)
• What brings users to your service? (External trigger)
• What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action)
• Are users fulfilled by the reward, yet left wanting more? (Variable reward)
• What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

"The goal is to make the key behavior as simple as possible,"

Creating an immersive brand begs the question of if your target market really needs your brand or product in their life. And what problem does it solve? The more impact your brand has on their life, the more value it will hold for them, and the more likely your brand will break into the habit of your customers’ lives.

Disrupt habits for competitors. Chances are, there are at least a few people out there who could be your customers but are loyal to a competitor instead. Those people have habits too. Study the habits of people who use your competitors. Find ways to affect their environment to get them to think about their choices. Of course, you need to make sure that any changes you make don’t disrupt the habits of the customers who are already loyal to you.

How to disrupt a habit-forming product or experience of the competitors?

• Researching what products and systems customers are using to solve their problems will help you pinpoint your direct and indirect competitors in the market.
• By understanding whom competitors are targeting, you get a lens into where competitors believe there is an opportunity, or what customer segments find their products particularly useful.
• What features are important to customers? Features show you the value proposition that customers are seeing. The features customers are exposed to set the expectation that they have for products in the market. Analyze competitor features, you’ll start to understand how your market has evolved based on the way features have been added over time in these competing products.
• How well are competitors meeting customer needs? Digging into competitors helps you understand how customers feel about existing solutions and products. You’ll also quickly find out which competitors and alternatives customers prefer over others, and why.
• Talking to customers is the single most valuable thing you can do in creating disrupting behavior.

Once you figure out how your product fits into your target market’s lives, the next step is to anchor your brand or product in a way that’s continually triggered.

What do we mean by this? You want to pair your brand with a trigger they experience in their environment regularly. When they continually perform a habit, you want to integrate your product with that habit. When you can pair their habits and routines with your brand or product, you create brand alignment and affection – meaning they feel like they can’t live without it and they must use your product specifically. This also makes your product more than a commodity.

There's no magic number for how often a behavior has to occur for it to become a habit, But we do know that greater frequency is better and that behaviors that don't occur within a week's time or less are unlikely to become habits." Over time, users adopt new habits and come back to a product on their own.

Reference:

1. New Year, New Me: The Neuroscience of Habit Formation
2. Smith, K. S., & Graybiel, A. M. (2016). Habit formation. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 18(1), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/clr.12458_111
3. Carden, L., & Wood, W. (2018). Habit Formation and Change. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 20, 117–122. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.12.009
4. Robbins, T. W., & Costa, R. M. (2017). Habits. Current Biology, 27(22), R1200–R1206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.060
5. Make Your Company a Habit - HBR
6. HOOKED - Nir Eyal
7. Stop Ignoring Your Competitors And Learn How To Do Competitor Analysis Instead
8. 6 Ways to Make Your Product into a HabitStanford lecturer and author Nir Eyal explains how to make turn your product into a habit.
9. Breaking into the Habit – Creating an Immersive Brand
10. How Customer Loyalty Is Built Through Creating Habits