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