The NY Times has a great article this Sunday about how habits may be good for you.
It is ostensibly about how Dr. Val Curtis turned to Proctor and Gamble,
Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to help create a new habit in Ghana,
washing hands with soap, thereby reducing the death rate from hygiene
related diseases like diarrhea. But why turn to consumer products
companies to solve a public health problem?
From the article:
“If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the
products we use every day — chewing gums, skin moisturizers,
disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks,
antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins
— are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people
regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of
canny advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans
habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a
day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands advertising
that no morning is complete without a minty-fresh mouth….
“For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,”
said Dr. Berning, the P.& G. psychologist. “But about a decade ago,
we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking
about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.”
Academics were also beginning to focus on habit formation.
Researchers like Wendy Wood at Duke University and Brian Wansink at
Cornell were examining how often smokers quit while vacationing and how
much people eat when their plates are deceptively large or small.
Those and other studies revealed that as much as 45 percent of what
we do every day is habitual — that is, performed almost without
thinking in the same location or at the same time each day, usually
because of subtle cues.
For example, the urge to check e-mail or to grab a cookie is likely
a habit with a specific prompt. Researchers found that most cues fall
into four broad categories: a specific location or time of day, a
certain series of actions, particular moods, or the company of specific
people. The e-mail urge, for instance, probably occurs after you’ve
finished reading a document or completed a certain kind of task. The
cookie grab probably occurs when you’re walking out of the cafeteria,
or feeling sluggish or blue.”
Entrepreneurs should ask themselves the same question: How can they
make their product a habit? In some cases, it helps to build off of
habits that already exist, as the P&G psychologist mentions above.
One example is Stardolls, an online version of playing with dolls,
already a habit for many girls. Club Penguin relies on a metaphor of
feeding and playing with your pet, again, already a habit for many of
its young players. Digg relies on the habit of sharing interesting
links. Relying on existing behavioral cues is always a good place to
start.
For many startups, there are no existing behavioral cues, and they
will have to find or create a cue that can habitualize their users.
This sounds hard because it is hard. Changing consumer behavior is a
very tough challenge. Your best bet will be to try to latch on to some
existing habit and associate your product with that habit. This is
exactly what happened with the case of washing hands in Ghana:
However, the studies also revealed an interesting
paradox: Ghanaians used soap when they felt that their hands were dirty
— after cooking with grease, for example, or after traveling into the
city. This hand-washing habit, studies showed, was prompted by feelings
of disgust. And, surveys also showed that parents felt deep concerns
about exposing their children to anything disgusting.
SO the trick, Dr. Curtis and her colleagues realized, was to create
a habit wherein people felt a sense of disgust that was cued by the
toilet. That queasiness, in turn, could become a cue for soap.
A sense of bathroom disgust may seem natural, but in many places
toilets are a symbol of cleanliness because they replaced pit latrines.
So Dr. Curtis’s group had to create commercials that taught viewers to
feel a habitual sense of unseemliness surrounding toilet use.
Their solution was ads showing mothers and children walking out of
bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that
contaminated everything they touched.
The commercials, which began running in 2003, didn’t really sell
soap use. Rather, they sold disgust. Soap was almost an afterthought —
in one 55-second television commercial, actual soapy hand washing was
shown only for 4 seconds. But the message was clear: The toilet cues
worries of contamination, and that disgust, in turn, cues soap.
