As I sit at home, socially distancing myself from the world, I can’t help but constantly check stock prices, both to see the sad status of my own investments and to try to understand how the world is reacting to the Coronavirus. As I watch prices of various companies go up and down, I’m particularly fascinated to watch the trends of stay-at-home-friendly businesses like Peloton, GrubHub, Blue Apron, and Netflix. And as some of these stocks rise while others fall, I realize that smart investors are embracing the same concept that smart marketers have long embraced. Namely that behavior is driven by habit. And perhaps equally important, smart investors and smart marketers can recognize the occasions when consumers are most likely to form a new habit and take advantage of those unique times. I think we’re living in one of those unique times.
When we advertise to consumers, in almost all businesses, we are eventually hoping to drive a sale. But it’s abundantly clear that not all sales are created equal. Your goal (depending on your business of course) should not be to drive one sale, but to drive a sale that turns into regular, consistent, repeated sales. In other words, I don’t want to sell you an egg, I want to sell you an egg that leads to you eating eggs every day for the rest of your life. I don’t want to sell you a one month subscription to my program, I want to sell you a monthly subscription that you renew forever. We want habits.
Aiding in the creation of a habit is equal parts “what can I do as a brand?” and “what is my customer already doing?” Here are the four things I’d focus on when trying to advertise toward habit creation:
Sell a good thing- Let’s not kid ourselves. The greatest tool in any marketers bag of tricks is to have a good product to sell. This is where immediate opportunity and long term habit diverge. If you sell some sort of weird toilet paper substitute right now, guess what, your sales are going up for the next month while no one can find toilet paper. But if your product kinda sucks, we’re all rushing back to Charmin post-Covid-19, and your weird toilet paper substitute company is not where I want to invest big bucks long term.
Study the calendar- When a brand looks at their annual calendar and attempts to align media and assign strategies, they should really start with an attempt to understand the annual calendar of their consumers. There are key times of the year when consumers are more likely to form habits because they are embarking on new routines. On January 1st we commit to our new workout routines or diets. At the end of May our children are out of school for three months and in late August, they go back to school for nine. Let’s go back to the idea of selling an egg. I’d love to sell you an egg at any time of the year, but if you’ve got school age children at home, its infinitely more valuable for me to sell you eggs in late August. Why? Because if you make eggs for your kids’ breakfast the first week of school, I may have just become part of a 5 day a week, 9 month a year routine. I may have just infiltrated your habits.
Understand consumer moments- Calendar based habits are incredibly important and prevalent, but today’s consumers don’t all live on the same schedule. And while calendar events like back-to-school are important, an individual’s life events can shape consumer routines even more. When we go off to college we start a whole new life worth of habits (what we eat, what we wear, what we do for fun). Same story when we get a job, move, get married, buy a house, have children. Luckily for advertisers, modern digital marketing platforms now give us the ability to isolate these so called “Life Events” and market to consumers in these times of major habit formation.
Help with use- Let’s face it- consumers are stubborn. And first impressions can most certainly be permanent. If you want your product or service to become part of someone’s habit, a repeated purchase, you have to make sure the experience lives up to and exceeds their expectation. Obviously if you’ve got a good thing to sell (see strategy 1), you’re off to a good start, but it’s still possible for consumers to misuse your product and end up with a bad experience. Our sales and marketing journey cannot end at the point-of-sale. We must be willing to put significant time, thought, and investment into understanding how our consumer will engage with our products, where they might go wrong, and how to mitigate that risk. One bad experience with your product, even if it's the consumers own fault, and they may very well form the habit of never buying from you again.
So as I scroll through my LinkedIn for the 18th time today (again, I’m social-distancing and I’m bored), and I see the 15th article or blog post written by a friend or former colleague loosely titled “How to do Marketing/Social Media/Communication During the Corona Virus,” I realize that the “how” might not be the most important thing. The important thing for marketers right now might simply be THAT YOU ARE marketing. If you’ve got the inventory available, you should have your foot to the floor on your marketing campaigns. You may even want to steal budgets from the latter part of the year so you can maximize your impact right now. Life will undoubtedly go back to normal (or mostly normal) at some point. But for many consumers, the things we’re trying, the new stores we’re visiting, the new restaurants we’re getting takeout from, the new foods we’re cooking, the new games we’re playing, will become habits that last forever. Make sure you’re one of those things.