The Intersection of Habit Formation and Marketing
In Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, author Nir Eyal explains that the future of the technology products we use will be built upon the habits we form. Over the past decade, many technologies have emerged that have touched hundreds of millions – if not billions – of people, including social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Many of these technologies started out almost as toys, but after a few short years have had massive impact on our day-to-day behavior. The success or failure of many such technologies depend on repetition – repeated use and repeat traffic. But as a marketer, how can you position your product to create a consumer habit? According to Eyal, the answer lies in connecting your customer’s problem to your solution through four steps: trigger, action, reward, and investment. Here, we’ll look through these four steps in Eyal’s “Hook Model,” with a particular focus on how they can be applied to marketing for habit formation.
Trigger
The trigger for a product is most likely associated with a pain point in someone’s life. The trick for marketers comes in linking that internal trigger with the satisfaction of using your product. Eyal explains there are two different types of triggers, internal and external. Internal triggers come directly from the customer in response to a pain point or emotion. There is nothing in an internal trigger that tells a person what to do next, but as marketers we can reinforce associations between an internal trigger and a product. For example, with social networks, an internal trigger might be loneliness or boredom. Before social networks were ubiquitous, there was nothing in that feeling of loneliness or boredom that said, “Scroll through Facebook!” but over time, that has become a second-hand response through habit-formation. These internal triggers cannot be created, but they can be identified and addressed by marketers through the creation of buyer personas.
External triggers, on the other hand, can be created and controlled. They are used to raise awareness of the product, such as an online advertisement, billboard, event, or even word of mouth. To marketers, this is the ideal opportunity to raise top of the funnel awareness.
Action
In the Hook model, the action phase revolves around what you want the user of your product to do. In order to make the action easy and accessible to customers, marketers (and user experience designers) should strive to keep the action simple. Start by thinking about what is the most basic behavior you want a user to do. On social networks, for example, the action is so simple, it has changed the way we use smartphones: scrolling. Or consider how simple it is to press play on YouTube, or type what you’re looking for into Google. As marketers, the ease of the action is the simplest and easiest selling point. To better understand how to highlight and drive a customer’s action, BJ Fogg’s behavior model can help. Fogg’s model shows that there are three elements that combine to drive behavior: motivation, ability, and a trigger, or MAT for short.
When marketing for customer action, brainstorm the motivation, the ease or difficulty in executing that action, and the triggers that might inspire the action. All of this information informs the buyer persona and desired action that you are trying to elicit from your customer.
Reward
According to Eyal, when it comes designing and a habit-forming product, consistency is your enemy. That’s because our brain’s reward system runs not just on pleasure, but an anticipatory response that is sparked by variability. One of the standout studies that changed the way we understand the concept of reward in behavioral conditioning came from BF Skinner, the father of operant conditioning. Skinner put pigeons into what became known as a “Skinner box,” where pigeons learned to peck at a colored disk to get food. When the schedule was set on a consistent basis, their pecking began to dwindle. But when their feed schedule and reward were varied, the pigeons’ pecking increased. A “variable ratio” or varied schedule of reinforcement is the basis of the “Hook” model. The basis of Skinner’s studies is that behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. For marketers, the key takeaway of the reward phase is that you want something that entices the user to keep checking in. For marketer’s it is also important to consider that the reward has to respond to the original trigger. If the trigger is boredom, for example, the reward has to be engagement; if the trigger is loneliness, the reward needs a social component. So marketers, focus on reinforcing the behavior, and addressing how the reward responds to the trigger.
Investment
You may think the game is won at the reward phase, but if you stop there, you’re coming up short in your marketing efforts. The final step in Eyal’s model, the investment phase, loads the next trigger, and brings the user back to that trigger. In many social networks, the investment is the anticipation of a response. You post something on Facebook, for example, but it is the response you get (who commented on the post? who liked it?) that brings a user back to that initial trigger (loneliness, boredom, etc.). This is particularly necessary for technological products, because the investment phase sets the stage for the product to appreciate in value. Think about the data, content, and friends/followers on a social network – this is all part of the investment stage for a technology product. This runs counter to many physical products, which typically depreciate in value over the course of their use. Overall, the goal of habit-forming products is that they should become more valuable to the user over time as the user continues to invest in the product. Proactive marketers follow through on highlighting and reinforcing this investment phase, because it prepares the customer to appreciate the product and assign more value to it. Our brains also have a tendency to shift our preferences towards things we put effort into. Psychology and behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely calls this the “Ikea Effect,” meaning we tend to assign more value to things we take the time to assemble or invest energy into. If as a marketer you can highlight the return on the customer’s investment of time and money into the product, then the lifetime value of that product will increase. For marketers dealing with a technology product, this repeated user buy-in is key to long-term habitual use. I’ve simplified Eyal’s Hook model and insights here (check out his website for more), and his analyses are applicable well beyond the field of marketing. But for marketers, his four stages of trigger, action, reward, and investment provide a simple roadmap to drive customer engagement and assign value to your product or solution.
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Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
