Charles Duhigg | MarketingSherpa Blog

Charles Duhigg on How You Can Use Habit to Influence Customer Behavior

March 8th, 2016 Courtney Eckerle

“Although we think of ourselves as people who can make decisions, and in control of our own lives, 40 to 45 percent of what we do every day is a habit. It’s something that happens almost subconsciously,” Charles Duhigg, best-selling author, The Power of Habit, said in the Media Center at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016.

Right now, he added, we are going through a golden age of understanding the neurology of habit formation.

“Which is great, if you’re … a marketer who wants to influence what people are doing with their time or their money,” he said.

A central insight of this, is that every habit has three components that it is made up of.

Cue: A trigger for an automatic behavior to start
Routine: The behavior itself, what we usually think of as habits
Reward: The gratification from performing the habit.

“What we’ve learned is that these cues and these rewards are really the important parts of what influences how people behave,” he said. “If we figure out how to diagnose these cues and rewards, we can change how people behave.”

Using the Science of Habit Formation in Customer-First Marketing (interview with Charles Duhigg)

December 11th, 2015 Daniel Burstein

As much as 45 percent of what customers do every day is habitual. That is just one interesting piece of research we shared in Tuesday’s MarketingSherpa blog post, which was part one of my interview with Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times and author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

In today’s blog post, we share part two from the interview. You’ll learn about the reward schedule for customers, conducting research that informs effective writing and optimizing the habits in your day-to-day life, along with a question that was really nagging me — can you leverage the science of habit and still be an ethical, customer-first marketer?

If you’re interested in learning more about Charles’s research, we’re giving away a copy of his book in this week’s MarketingSherpa Book Giveaway (enter by December 13 for a chance to win) and Charles will also be a featured speaker at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 in Las Vegas.

Understanding the reward schedule for customers

MarketingSherpa: So, in the book, and what you’re talking about, you talk about the ways that brands or marketers influence customers to create habits essentially like, hey, marketing to have milk with cookies, or what have you, or Febreze. Have you seen any examples of customer habits actually influencing the brand? So working vice-a-versa or a smart brand out there that’s doing some research and really sees what natural customer habits are and taps into them as opposed to creating them?

Charles: Oh yeah! Absolutely, all the time. I mean, one of my favorite examples of this is video games. Right? When a video game designer designs a new game, the first thing that they decide upon is what the reward schedule is. What that reward schedule is, is really looking at when people play games, when do they expect to get some type of thing that makes the playing continue to feel kind of fun, when you get a reward that you can anticipate, when you get a reward that you don’t anticipate.

Marketing Research: 45% of consumer behavior is habitual (interview with Charles Duhigg)

December 8th, 2015 Daniel Burstein

Let’s pretend for a second you are an alien from outer space studying economics. You’re presented with these two options:

Option A: People can make a cup of coffee for 16 to 18 cents in the comfort of their home.
Option B: They can haul themselves out of bed earlier, stop at Starbucks and pay two … three … four … five dollars for a cup of coffee.

As a rational alien studying economics, you would know that people will certainly choose Option A.

Except, as we all know, people don’t. They choose Option B. Not everybody, of course. But enough people to generate $16.447 billion in revenue for Starbucks. So many people, in fact, that you must look at this purchase decision — which we’ve become so accustomed to being a part of daily life — as an alien economist to even notice that it’s not a rational economic decision every time people make that purchase.

Why people make repeated, economically irrational decisions

So why do people act this way? Because they are no longer making rational economic decisions; rather, they are on autopilot following automated habits. Starbucks’ marketing department has helped turn a simple cup of coffee into a cheap luxury habit.

It’s not just Starbucks, of course. It’s the daily newspaper on your driveway. Movie night. And even, according to Charles Duhigg, the mundane act of brushing your teeth.