This was inspired by a great presentation from Christa Trantham, a very aware young lady with an incredible marketing perspective!
Habits are funny, little people with big feet …
No, that’s a hobbit …
But habits are pretty weird, too.
We don’t always know why people do what they do, but figuring it out is what marketing is, so it’s important to understand how our customer behaves.
According to Charles Duhigg, who wrote “The Power of Habit,” people in every walk of life and every disposition are somehow or another creatures of habit.
We start out following a reward system, looking for a satisfaction or feeling of completeness that causes us to act in a certain way.
Claude Hopkins recognized this when he began newspaper ads for Pepsodent tooth paste. Wildly successful, his headline was, “Just run your tongue across your teeth.” Every time people heard or read this suggestion, what happened? Yeah, people would run their tongue across their teeth and inevitably decide it was a good idea to brush them. What he had discovered was called a habit loop.
A habit loop begins with a que, suggestion, or visual trigger, that sets off a habit of behavior that leads to a reward. That habit of behavior is routine to someone, a natural motion that becomes subconscious.
Like driving out of your driveway. When you first started, you thought about every thing from putting the keys in the ignition to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. I bet you haven’t thought about that in a long while, but still have the exact routine down pat.
Now, what does that have to do with your company?
When you identify the reward your customer is seeking, and analyze how that desire is being met right now, you can begin to see where you fit in. You want them to experience that ‘reward’ with your products and services, so you’re going to have to:
- Recognize the ‘que’
- Alter the routine, introducing your product or service by suggesting a natural behavior,
- And make sure the reward is exactly what they were looking for!
- Habits don’t disappear, anyone who’s quit smoking will tell you that! But they can be altered and changed when you recognize where you fit in your customer’s habit loop.
As a business owner, it’s your job to find out where that is. Great marketing will turn that reward from something someone likes, to something they want, to something they NEED.
Make the desired reward a craving, and your competition will go NUTS trying to keep up!
Leave me your comments here!
