The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg
Most businesses treat loyalty like a campaign. A program. A points system. Something customers must consciously choose, remember, and bother to use.
But habits don’t work that way.
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg breaks down why we do what we do, and more importantly, how repeated behavior slowly moves from effortful to automatic. Our brains are exceptionally lazy, and are constantly looking for ways to save energy. When a behavior proves useful or rewarding, it gets encoded into a simple loop.
A cue triggers a routine, which delivers a reward. Repeat it enough times, and it stops feeling like a choice. It becomes the default.
That is where real loyalty lives.
3 steps to form a habit
What I liked most about this book is how it puts habit building into everyday terms. Your brain makes habits to save effort. Every habit has three parts:
- A cue
- A routine
- A reward.
The cue triggers the behavior, the routine is the action you take, and the reward that tells your brain the loop is worth remembering.
Over time, this loop becomes hard-wired. You stop deciding to act when you see the cue, you simply do.
And Once a behavior reaches that stage, it no longer feels like effort. It feels like the most natural thing to do.
Changing a habit
You see chocolate, you eat it, you feel happier. Simple as that. To change a habit, you have to keep the cue and reward the same, but swap out the routine. If you snack when you're bored, maybe you just need a distraction.
I was a sucker for a piece of dark chocolate past 10pm on a weeknight, which I've managed to make that into a trigger to go and have a glass of water or go and read.
Find what reward you're actually craving and replace the bad routine with something better.
Coffee addicting is most common
Turning your product into a habit
Creating onboarding pathways that create "small win patterns" is a nudging method that gives your customer a greater sense of satisfaction with an instant reward (visually), and a reward for coming back.
Good habits spill forward into other areas of your life. Small wins give you motivation for more small wins. Build up those small habits and they'll transform your life without you even thinking about it.
The best methods of creating habits is by providing goods or service that is incorporated in everyday lives so it becomes as natural as breathing.
How to drain ones soul.
What I got out of it
Most people are guilty of some pleasurable habits that we engage in, like watching a episode of your favourite show before bed, or staring at our phones for hours on end. On the other hand, some of those habit become addictive, and downright soul sucking if the creator of that habit loop has succeeded.
Habitual loops are most pronounced within Social Media and the use of infinite scroll. You see something you like, you scroll, you get a reward. They have managed the inverse of this as well, see something negative, scroll, get reward.
What you can think about for your business
Here are a few questions to get your mind racing.
- What is something that your users do out of habit?
- What sort of habits would you like them to have?
- What nudges could you give customers to act as a cue for your habit loop?
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