A quick scan of my e-mail summary from the New York Times suggested that the article titled "Warning: Habits May Be Good for You" would be worth reading. That feeling was correct; the article once again focused my attention on the role of cues in driving human behavior.

It was the word "habits" that cued my interest and led me to click through and read the article. I’m interested in habits because I have spent a lot of time investigating how humans use heuristics to shortcut their decision making. (See my post from earlier this year.) The most generally applicable heuristic when it comes to buying brands – at least for frequently purchased ones – is "take the same one as last time." In other words, habit rules. Most brand purchasing is habitual. Instead of thinking about which brand of toothpaste, cereal, soft drink or detergent to buy, we choose the brand we bought the last time (provided our needs, brand knowledge or satisfaction with the brand have not changed). And when it comes to this type of habitual purchasing, cues are critical. Whether they have to do with the position of brands on the shelf, the color of a box, or the shape of the bottle, cues are the triggers that set our "automated" purchasing into effect.

In addition to being on a topic of interest to me, it turned out that the article featured someone I knew. Dr. Val Curtis, the director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, had been one of the participants at a Millward Brown seminar on global advertising held in London last year, and she and I subsequently discussed the role of basic human motivations in driving behavior.

The article centers on Dr. Curtis’s efforts to persuade people in the developing world to make a habit of washing their hands with soap. On the surface, Dr. Curtis would seem an unlikely associate for people in the world of marketing. But as she joked at the seminar last year, "The only place that Colgate-Palmolive, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever talk to each other is at the meetings of The Global Public Private Partnership for Hand Washing." With the help of these corporations, Dr. Curtis aims to "sell" hand-washing and save many of the lives that would otherwise be lost to disease caused by dirty hands.

In the article there is an interesting review of how P&G managed to turn the Febreze brand from a failing product designed to remove bad smells to a successful one that adds a pleasant smell to signal the end of the cleaning process. The key to the turnaround was the identification of a cue that would trigger the use of the brand. As Dr. Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, is reported as saying, “Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods." The article reports 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."

And that, of course, is an important point. We rely on cues for all decisions and actions we take, habitual or not, but it is easier to identify cues that lead to higher involvement decisions, because we actively think about those decisions. The cues that lead to habitual behavior can often be very subtle and are not actively considered. Therefore they are not easily available to introspection.

This is why research techniques like ethnography and video-recorded shopping trips have become popular over the last few years. They offer a more detailed insight into the cues that trigger certain behaviors, not just the choice of brands in a store but also the use of products once they have been bought. People may not be able to easily voice why they do things, but independent observation can identify common cues and traits that would otherwise be missed.

One last thought on this topic for now. The New York Times article states "Through experiments and observation, social scientists…have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through relentless advertising." Here is a question for the packaged goods marketers amongst you. How "relentless" can you be in this new world of consumer "engagement"? Or to put it another way, can you encourage habitual purchasing and usage through viral campaigns, word of mouth, and event sponsorship, or does the creation of habits require the sort of overwhelming repetition that only old-fashioned interruptive advertising can bring?

I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions. Please add your comments below. Thank you.

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