If You Want to Influence Your Customer Behavior—Be Their Environment

We naturally develop our habits and behavior because our environment forces us to live and grow in survival mode, where habits are believed to make us feel more comfortable and in greater control of our environment.?We labor to design reactions to our environment by accommodating responses to different types of triggers, such as the types of people we deal with and the impressions certain events around us evoke. In addition to the different events that occur?before us, things and places can trigger us and shape our attitudes and thinking. Every trigger is a seed for a habit or an impression.

Habits are established from the repetition of a serial of actions whose output is a reward (such as pleasure, comfort and feeling in control). Whenever the loop trigger-action-reward is repeated we will become more trapped and will turn out more easy to do it over and over and this is applied to certain repeated thoughts that initiated by a trigger and developed thinking habits

Customer behavior and decision-making processes are no more than habits of a customer’s thinking strategy, which reflect to their emotions and become observable then by their bodily movements and habits

You decide to buy a mobile device for example??because of certain triggers and impressions?that happened around you and within your environment, such as advertisements, finding a friend or some well-known figure with the same mobile. Eventually?you become drawn by these triggers, like gravitational forces pulling you strongly to take certain actions and make decisions to feel in control and activate an old system of survival and growth. within environmental triggers

As concluded, consumer habits behave like mechanical and automatic actions that repeat themselves repeatedly with fixed buying strategies inside your mind.

Interruption and management of environmental triggers

When habits occur automatically, there is a vicious cycle (trigger-action-reward) that you will find hard to break by yourself unless—through being aware of the triggers—you develop a proactive approach to interrupting the habitual reaction before it starts. The interruption tool is an artful, intentional approach to break a habit loop that you can apply successfully. Once you identify and recognize the components of?habits of a customer you can do your intervention wisely by introducing new triggers to initiate opposing forces or weakening the current trigger effects as well?

If you want to increase customer loyalty toward your company product,?develop new habits in your customer’s mind, design certain triggers that pull him?or her?toward your product. Influence their environment - Be their environment. Give certain thoughts, stimulate an event in front of them, and link your products with well-known figures. Even if you can put your customer in a place that evokes the reaction you want from them, surround your customer with things like posters and other marketing materials that trigger their thinking and feelings in favor of your product.?

You need to repeat these triggers and let your customer be exposed for enough time to succeed to pull them toward your product as powerfully as gravity.

Interruption and managing customer environmental triggers are two powerful tools to break your customer’s habits and recreate other habits in favor of your products and solutions.

In a volatile business environment increasingly affected by rapidly emerging and changing triggers, such as the catastrophic effects of COVID-19, we are in dire need of self-awareness and self-control. We need to observe ourselves more attentively and discover how we interact with the environment.?We need to learn how to identify customer habits and change them

We need to help customers be more conscious of their habits so that they can minimize their gravitational effects toward your competitor. By interrupting their automatic actions, and managing the environmental triggers around them, you should become their environment, and they will be drawn to your company products and solutions.

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?Dr Shadi Obeidat, Managing Director of Business Psychology Center, Accredited Senior Mentor b y IAPCM, Author of Antigravity Book

References

·????????Henry H. Yin, Barbara J. Knowlton. The role of the basal ganglia in habit formation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2006).

·????????F. Gregory Ashby, Benjamin O. Turner, Jon C. Horvitz. Cortical and basal ganglia contributions to habit learning and automaticity (2010).

·????????Charles Duhigg. The power of habit (2012).

·????????Shadi Obeidat, Antigravity (2016)

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