Why are we Slaves to our Triggers and how Organisations leverage them?

"Trigger"-- a loaded word-- a weapon with a heavy bottom and a fiery snout, ready to disrupt the order of things in its way.

In contrast, you may have come across the word 'trigger' to also mean something subtle, almost invisible, like a subconscious signal that has the power to influence our daily behavior.

Whether we recognize them or not, triggers move us to take action. And they are of two types: external and internal.

Habit forming technologies start to change behaviour by first creating subtle hints or 'internal' triggers that make us take action, while 'external' triggers tell us what to do.

They communicate an action, and they make it ample clear... a pesky ad, a persistent email, a note from Mom can all 'make us do' things with a clear call to action. Paid triggers in the form of advertising, owned and earned triggers in the form of retained apps and notifications are some triggers we all experience.

Some triggers are more efficient than others, especially if they come as word of mouth, product referrals etc and have the potential to create beautiful viral loops of growth for that service/product.

Yet, external triggers are only the first step.

When users are cued into habits, they begin to see and listen to even better triggers: aka Internal triggers.

When a product becomes tightly associated with a thought, an emotion or a pre-existing routine, it begins to transform into internal triggers, which are the most powerful kind of triggers since they are manifested in the mind and occupy the most important real estate — your mindshare. It takes weeks and months of usage to cement, but, gradually, these internal triggers propel us into behaving a certain way and hence creating impermeable habits.        

Organisations build products that leverage triggers in the long term--> Products which soothe the users’ pain become habitual products and bring in economic returns.

However, there are some hard steps to uncover:

1. First, finding customers’ internal triggers requires learning more about people than what is visible on a survey, it requires digging deeper to understand how they really feel.

Usually, findings are surprisingly different, because a customer’s ‘declared preference’ can be vastly distant from their ‘revealed preference’.

Drawing from Daniel Kahneman’s wonderful dive into human psychology, this article talks about how memory can deceptively remember our lived experiences.

2. Second, they look for discrepancies between the two perspectives of life, narrated by our user and find opportunities.

Users’s actions 'before' and 'after' experiencing a trigger can reveal a lot of information.

3. Third and last, asking what specific 'pain' these habits solve and what the user might be thinking before one of these actions. The next logical question to uncover is 'what would they achieve by using your solution?'

When you unlock answers to some of these questions, you come closer to your audiences' reality and draw both--> information and insight, using the above method of investigation.

For great marketers, the power of enquiry unlocks their own value by empowering them to do even more meaningful marketing work.