subtle habits

How subtle are your habits? What prompts them. Since most of our habits are unconscious, its often hard to answer this, yet this challenge is often key to solving marketing challenges. The New York Times had an excellent article talking about research into this issue and it's application in developing good habits connected to health and safety (e.g. washing hands in developing countries to prevent the spread of disease).

The research showed that most habits - habits that by their estimate are 45% of our behavior - have specific cues that fall into four categories:

• a time
  
• a location
• certain people
• certain moods

All of these cues have to happen fairly frequently for a habit to form.

Most of these things cannot be cued with messages because they get formed with actual behavior - you can't associate a location with using a product unless someone actually uses it there for a while. However, advertising can suggest it in subtle ways, can own certain time slots and certainly some moods.

But all of this is very subtle, and none of it is one would call "messaging". This where strategy, production and promotion have to meld together to subtly suggest or create behavior which has value to people (if it didn't have value this would be malicious). But while this just confirms what the blogosphere has been filling about messages and propositions, it does suggest a role for repetition.

But really, how long did it take you to get into the Starbucks habit?