Most New Year’s resolutions have a success rate in the teens – in some studies fewer than 8% of us ever stick to our plan (Journal of Clinical Psychology, 13th Dec, 2012). There must be a better way to ‘plan’? There is. It delivers a 50% success rate, and it involves habit formation.

Effortful self-control – or what behavioural economists call time-inconsistent preferencing – is likely to the first place many of us go. But really, it’s environmental conditions that hold habits in place. I’ve written about habits and the behavioural lock-in here so won’t replicate it in this post (do read, it’s interesting background if nothing else) but I will stress its pernicious side by quoting Ralph Keeney, of Duke University:

“America’s top killer isn’t cancer, or heart disease, or smoking, or obesity. It’s our inability to overcome our own short-term behaviour”

Ralph Keeney, of Duke University

So if our short-term behaviour is formed of habits that behave as a behavioural lock-in, do we try and break habits? Or do we try and use habits?

Diagnosis, prognosis, treatment

UCL’s study into habit formation is extraordinary (How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world). Not because it’s well written, or well regarded, or robust (it is all of these things) but because it’s the first time habit formation itself is described. Before, papers had attempted to classify what is, and what isn’t, a habit; for sure diagnosis is useful, but more was needed.

What do studies tell us about resolutions and habit?
In the study of how are habits formed Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. Van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts And Jane Wardle, From University College London, London, Uk, took 96 participants (30 men, 66 women) who were predominantly postgraduate students (two were undergraduates) with a mean age of 27 (range 21–45). The majority (65%) were White and born in the UK or Europe. They asked them to choose either a healthy eating, drinking behaviour, or exercise behaviour from a list. These had to be actions that they would like to make into a habit. Examples are:

• doing 50 sit-ups after morning coffee
• drinking a bottle of water with lunch
• eating a piece of fruit with lunch
• running for 15 minutes before dinner

The first thing you’ll probably notice about these is they seem a little small. They are not the usual grand ill-defined New Year’s plans such as ‘loose weight’, ‘get fit’, or ‘watch less telly’. Nor are they grand well-defined plans such as ‘run a 10k race by the end of June’, or ‘loose 14lbs before my summer holiday’, or ‘watch two fewer hours of television per week’. They are small, defined, and attached to an existing behaviour. (Don’t fall for false hope syndrome or cultural procrastination (Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail, Psychology Today)).

How do you form a health habit?
To make a successful New Year’s resolution one must pick an action that is:

• (i) Something you do not do already
• (ii) Can be performed in response to a salient daily event (cue)
• (iii) has a cue that occurs every day and only once a day

That’s really, it. Done. Do that and you’re well on your way to forming a habit that will deliver you a benefit. That is after all the definition of a New Year’s resolution.

You could leave the post here and get on with it, but you might want to known a little more about what to expect, and what else to do to make the addition or subtraction of an action, stick.

Remember…
1. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail
Get organised up front because performing an action for the first time requires planning (whether that’s long-term planning or planning seconds before you act – without planning you can’t do anything). That planning will pay off because “…behaviour transfers to cues in the environment that activate an automatic response: a habit.”

2. It gets easier as time goes by
And not only are you transferring the burden of action to cues in your immediate environment, habit formation does not follow a linear progression – it is a curve with a steep beginning so “…early repetitions result in larger increases in automaticity than those later in the habit formation process”. That feels good right?

3. Failure is an option (but only for a week)
In 1890 William James argued in his book The Principles of Psychology that habit formation required uninterrupted performance, but this is unachievable in the real world and yet we all still form habits. Similarly, Lally’s research indicates missing the opportunity to form a habit every now and then does not have a significant impact on formation of the habit – as long as it’s not greater than a week. So if you miss out on your glass of water one lunchtime, you will not automatically stop pouring yourself a glass from that day forward – there is only a very small decrease in automaticity. But don’t separate outright failure to do the action on one day with serial inconsistency in performing the action – pouring a glass of water only 1-3 times a week, at varying times after various meals, on various days, will not form the habit. Failure is an option (but only for a week).

4. Do it in the same place, not necessarily at the same time
Repeating a behaviour in a situation-consistent way allows cue response links to be formed better than time-consistent ways. Time cues require effortful monitoring to identify them, whereas memory research tells us that external situations cue internal actions comparatively effortlessly. I know I always check for my keys every time I leave a residential front door irrespective of what time I leave the house, or indeed, irrespective of who’s house it is (instigated by a rather dull event where I locked myself out of a newly bought flat 30 minutes after taking responsibility for ALL the keys and leaving them inside). Situational, not time cues are powerful; take advantage.

5. Rewards. Rewards?
Forget rewards. Or, don’t worry about them. Give yourself one if you like, but know that the Lally et al’s study “provided no extrinsic rewards, indicating that they are not required for habit development.” But do bear in mind that the actions in the study were selected by the participants so were likely to have been intrinsically rewarding. Choose wisely, and forget elaborate reward mechanisms.

6. Simplicity
Bas Verplanken (2006, Beyond frequency: Habit as a mental construct. British Journal of Social Psychology) tells us that for the same number of repetitions a simple behaviour has a higher habit score than a complex behaviour. Make is simples. (Appologies for that link…)

6. Not all behaviours are equal
Exercise is more complex, and takes longer to form a habit, than dietary actions. As far as we can tell, the duration needed to reach the point where an action is pretty much embedded to the point where it feels ‘weird’ not to do it (i.e. 95% of the asymptote) is:

• 59 days for drinking action
• 65 days for eating action
• 91 days for an exercise action

This can vary person-by-person wildly though – the study results varied from 18 to 254 days to form a habit. So you might be lucky one, or not. Either way, pick what’s good for you, go small, and you’ll be fine. (And ignore the ‘60 days for a habit to form’ rubbish that slops around the internet – it’s a repeated and misquoted reference to the length of time broken bones take to heal.)

_________________

We must remember a habit once formed is an automatic action – we never need consciously think of it again. Ever. For the rest of our lives. Couple that with the fact that of those involved in the UCL habit study, fully 50% successfully formed a habit.

How’s that for a New Year’s resolution?

Ahead of tonight’s TV airing Department for Transport I picked up a promo tweet (below):

Watch our THINK! don’t drink & drive advert ahead of tonight’s TV airing youtube.com/thinkuk #roadsafety

— Dpt for Transport (@transportgovuk) December 4, 2012

The ad (playable below) is a great example of collapsing consequences of an action into a compressed time frame.

Think! Drink drive advert

Great because we tend to ‘push off’ consideration of events construed in a distal dimension, and the

perception of drink driving events are distal in all four dimensions; not (likely to be) me, not (likely to be) here, not now (the consequences of being caught), and not clear (exactly what the penalty is).*

The actor – and the script – pulls all these ‘close’. It’s good; In fact the actor’s great. But…

We talked about Charles K Atkin’s ‘Mass Communication Effects on Drinking and Driving’ before in relation to norms and perception (Mirror mirror in the wall). We know that drink drivers overestimate the statistical risks of both crashes and police stops. They do this by quite a bit (perception of 1:100 versus reality of 1:2000).

So the perception of being caught is already thought – incorrectly – to be high. Making an ad, and the consequences described, seem more likely equals shifting a perception that already starts out in non-drink driving’s favour. We’re pushing at an open door.

Is there any other aspect of drink driving that could have a greater effect? Social approval might help. It’s skewed the wrong way.

” . . . drinkers underestimate the degree of social disapproval of drunk drunk driving (fully two-fifths believe that others excuse drunk driving, while just 5 percent of the public is actually tolerant) . . . “

Generally we underestimate disapproval; perceived behaviour is different to the actual average behaviour. Using overt communication, such as TV ads, we could ‘pick at that scab’ with the possibility of changing behaviour more fully.

How do we execute that approach? That’s a job for a creative team… but they at least they would start on more fertile ground.

195,000 years. Those that are of retirement age today are pretty-much the grandchildren of Victorians – the architects of this great leap forward in life expectancy. Evolutionarily speaking 162 years is only the blink (of a blink, of a blink), of an eye.

Secondly

The medical journal The Lancet crystallised the outcome of longer lives in a paper exploring the challenges ahead for managing ageing populations

“…most babies born since 2000 in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Japan, and other countries with long life expectancies will celebrate their 100th birthdays”

This is extraordinary, no? And the authors are confident the ageing process is modifiable to the point where we will live long without severe disability.

We have a phenomenally speedy increase in life expectancy coupled with quality of life.

Thirdly

If you ever wanted a one-line ‘pub fact’ that gets to the heart of this change, one evocation we can attribute to the researchers from the popular BBC TV show ‘QI’ – who call themselves the ‘QI elves’ – tweeted this recently:

“Of all the people in the world who have ever lived to be 65, two-thirds are alive today.”

_______

Evolutionarily speaking, we are ancient creatures living in modern times – thousands of years of short and brutal lives have left us with techniques that less and less relevant.

It’s no wonder we’re no good at saving for pensions, huh?

batch-sending a pre-written email. Cormac goes on to say

“Only when potential victims respond does the labor-intensive and costly effort of following up by email (and sometimes phone) begin. “

And this is where the genius of using a well-known scam format comes into its own – at this point you want only the most gullible to show themselves, because they are the ones worth spending individual time and effort on to seal the scam, so using a format that cuts almost everyone else out is the perfect way to find your target market. Or, have them find you.

As Cormac says

“Since gullibility is unobservable, the best strategy is to get those who possess this quality to self-identify.”

But don’t show too much

It is an approach that doesn’t want to increase the level of response – which it could easily do by placing the confederate in Holland, and spin a different story – because this means increasing the ratio of ‘viable’ to ‘non-viables’ in a way that eliminates profitability. When you see this type of scam and spam (including things such as penis enlargement, and viagra offers) it is clear that the amount of wastage is high, the cost of delivery are low, and the outcome is the target show themselves.

________

No scam is good, especially for those that are scammed, but the eradication of false positives by setting context is something communicators can learn from. And the normal run of (legal) businesses that we all work for or with are a good place to start. (And remain, or course.)

Vicki Morwitz from the Stern School, New York, and Gavan Fitzsimons of the Wharton School, Pennsylvania, conducted some fascinating work on the mere measurement effect in the late 2000s. Equally fascinating is their use of a dataset 40,000 respondents long.

40,000 respondents long

Morwitz and Fitzsimons asked of people something simple – the strength of their desire to buy a car in the next six months.

Dynamite isn’t it?

It is truly, because simply asking about the strength of desire – Morwitz and Fitzsimons found – disproportionately increased action.The actual rates of car purchase among the group in the following six months of the study shot up to over 35% above average. That’s not supposed to happen for a survey; changing behaviour?

Why are we so odd?

Our response to an initial-intent question – such as in a survey about purchasing a car – changes our subsequent evaluations of purchasing a car by remaining accessible and pronounced for some time if that existing attitude is positive. (If there were no existing inclination a version of such would not ‘magically’ appear. We are not good at constructing

negatives – try imagining ‘not an elephant’. Tricky, isn’t it?.)

Cut to the chase already

So how exactly does ’somewhat likely’ mean a lot more likely? In the YouGov graph (shown) SixthSense commissioned a survey drawing on a sample of over 2,000 UK adults (aged 18+) who own a car and used it mainly for personal use. One of the questions they asked was how likely consumers who own a city car are to buy another city car at this moment in time and how likely consumers are to buy a car within the next two years.

It is clear from the Morwitz and Fitzsimons study that those with an existing attitude get lit up like a Christmas tree – and in this instance the self-reporting ’somewhat likely’ and ‘very likely’ responses clearly have an existing attitude, and so are the ones that conform to our understanding of the mere measurement effect.

________

Not only opinion asked, but attitude enhanced. And if we do a direct read-across from Morwitz and Fitzsimons’ mere measurement effect experiment, a 35% uplift in purchase.

(I know we shouldn’t do a direct read across, but indulge me here, I’m bringing to life the direction of change.)

If you have a jar full of marbles, you have have a lot of marbles. Also, you have an interesting phenomenon; if you ask a group of people to guess the number in the jar, the average of all the guesses will be pretty much spot-on. The wisdom – it is said – of crowds.

But take the average of the guesses when everybody knows what the previous guess was and you” . . . we bend our decision toward the crowd.” get a skewed value. Solomon Asch’s famous experiment in the 1950’s on conformity (some say the experiment was intended to explore independence) shows the skew quite neatly: One person in a room of nine (or so) confederates all of whom have agreed to pretend that one of the shorter lines of those publicly presented is the longest, even when it is – very obviously – not.

Do this, and between 50% to 80% of the unsuspecting – lone – candidates in each experiment will agree with the group even though they know it to be wrong. Even across variations of this execution in Asch’s study, the average ‘conformity’ was a third.

Either knowingly, or unknowingly, we bend our decision toward the crowd.

Bend it like Asch

So this is how you skew a guesstimate then – pollute the guess with those of others?

Is this how you confound the wisdom of the crowd? By anchoring the guess – fair means or foul?

The right line

In Edge magazine (which is excellent btw – along with Farnam Street blog you will see your curiosity-thirst quenched many times over) Kahneman spoke of a line-length experiment. It is similar to the marbles-in-a-jar approach but can test two dimensions – one test is for“The average length of the lines we can estimate pretty accurately . . . the total length of all the lines placed end-to-end – we struggle” the average length of the lines, the other is the total length of all the lines. The average length of the lines we can estimate pretty accurately, and pretty immediately – so much so it seems we get the answer ‘as if’ for free; much like the marbles in a jar. And even more so if you average a group of individuals’ guesses. But if you ask for a guesstimate of the sum of the lines – the total length of all the lines placed end-to-end – we struggle. We really struggle.

This is not presented so much as an anthropological or behavioural quirk relating to line length” . . . we appreciate the world around us in both frictionless and frictionful ways.” (although, it may be that), but as a recognition that we appreciate the world around us in both frictionless and frictionful ways. And, more importantly, [Deity of your choice] help us if we can actually recognise which is which. As Kahneman says:

” . . . there is a really important distinction between natural assessment and things that are not naturally assessed.”

________

The lesson? If something seems easy look for the corollary. Suck a thoughtful tooth for a moment. Re-jig a choice, or a guess, or an appreciation, and see if you’re making frictionless or frictionful choices. Assumptions will be surfaced, and hard-thinking will be recognised as the product of an anthropological inability, rather than your inadequacies.

Thank [your deity of choice] for that.

It is rare to see something presented in terms of what it’s not. However, this new Winton Motor Carriage is evidently not a horse; it is to replace a horse. In fact, it is arranged so as to replace the horse, the horse-drawn carriage, and the up-keep of the horse. One can be sure there are no horse related options with the Winton Motor Carriage. This is all true, and relevant to the decision making process.

But it still ‘jars’. It seems – surprising saying it’s not a horse. Why does it seem so odd?

Why does it seem so odd?

We very rarely think outside of a category. We rarely consider what something is ‘not’. It’s reasonable really – something is ‘not’ everything else other than that which it is. And, pedantic semantics aside, we know we have trouble constructing negatives – the deeper work on Mere Exposure Effect provides this evidence. (I will write about that soon. It is also in chapter one of my book – free to download chapter here.)

Honda or Toyota, right?

Dan Ariely talked about these category boundaries in his talk at Authors@Google in 2008. His team went to a regular Toyota dealership and asked ”The true opportunity cost of buying a Toyota was not being considered.” visitors – prospective purchasers of a car – what they thought they would have to forfeit if they bought a Toyota. The team assumed people would have an answer for this question, but many were caught off-guard. Some said they were forfeiting a Honda for a Toyota. Many more were surprised – and a little shocked – saying they’d never really thought about it. The true opportunity cost of buying a Toyota was not being considered. This is quite common.

The true opportunity cost is broader than the category (Honda versus Toyota) and has effects extending into the future. Ariely says that consumers in the Toyota dealership were not saying: ‘In the future, I will have to give up two weeks of vacation and 70 lattes’ and 1,700 books’ (or– I would add – private schooling for their child for a term, or a family holiday, etc) even though they would make more informed choices by considering this. (Not different choices necessarily, but more informed choices certainly.)

In this sense, the car advert from 1898 is correct in presenting the true opportunity cost of owning the Winston car versus a horse and carriage. But it’s clear we don’t naturally think that way. Why?

Why do we rarely think outside of the category?
Primarily, we rarely think outside of a category because it’s hard work. Ariely’s Paris-Rome conundrum gives us insight (from his talk at Authors@Google in 2008.)

An all-expenses weekend trip to Rome is played

against an all-expenses weekend trip to Paris. They are different enough to present a challenging comparison. But with an additional ‘decoy choice’ of an all-expenses weekend trip to Paris excluding breakfasts, a closely related pair is created on the Paris side.

Now, the choice between the inferior and superior Paris options requires less cognitive load than either Paris options compared with Rome. Essentially, you are choosing only between breakfast and no breakfast. Because of this, the superior Paris option (all-expenses weekend including breakfast) usually wins in this scenario because it is the best choice of a dominant related pair. (Equally, you could adjust for Rome instead of Paris and create the opposite related dominant related pair.)

The ability of differences to be more closely examined with related pairs is described by the cost-of-thinking approach.” . . . it is clear we prefer economy of thought.” It states that decisions between closely related pairs (Paris with/without breakfast) are preferred because they charge a much lower cognitive ‘cost’ to work out than decisions where pairs aren’t related (Paris/Rome).

Indeed, one could easy switch Paris and Rome with the Winton hydro-carbon Motor Carriage, and a horse. Create a pair (dominant or related) with the Winton – another motor carriage with one inferior/superior function – and you make horse the outlying ‘Rome’.

However so presented, it is clear we prefer economy of thought.

Are there other reasons why do we rarely think outside of a category?
We may also rarely think outside of a category because we are trying to minimize regret. In this case, ‘regret’ is defined as the ” . . . a choice from . . . the middle . . . insulate[s you] from maximum regret.”distance between the selection made from the choice available and the perfect choice (for you). An outlier (because it is a new category ‘on the block’), such as a motor carriage has lots of potential regret when the main action is in the ‘busy’ (and established) category of horse and carriage. If you make a choice from somewhere around the middle of the action you insulate yourself from maximum regret.

_________

It is easy to critique an old-time piece of work (mostly because we enjoy the knowledge accrued by those whom lived before us), but it can be more revealing than dealing in-the-moment because distal construal engages our calm, rational brain – the ‘noise’ of immediacy decreases. (Construal is evident in past as well as future constructs on the temporal plane).

The revelation is that the surprise (salience) of seeing a car/horse comparison is born of unfamiliarity, and this unfamiliarity is a condition of our cognitive preference (handicap?) for economy of thought. It’s all ‘oranges and lemons’. This leads us to two one-line conclusions:

1. If you’re making a selection think outside of the immediate category about the true cost
2. If you’re selling a product or service find a comparison that pits one part of your product with a similar competitor in order to reduce cognitive choice load, and to minimise purchase regret

(Or you could try and find a faster horse.)

A ‘tree top’ view, versus a ‘nose pressed against the tree’ view changes the way we construct our understanding of the world. This may be no surprise. However, the fact that it substantially changes the way we behave, and does this without much (or any) cognitive recognition, is less well recognised and subsequently much more of a trapdoor than we may think.

What effect does it have?

A drought of action

Dr Sabine Pahl, from the Department of Psychology, University of Plymouth, UK, has worked with our distal/proximal quirk in reference to perceptions of climate change. In a test of 2007 drought risk perception respondents in the UK were presented with a newspaper article about a drought in the USA. Half were asked to imagine it was written the same year – 2007, and half asked to imagine it was written in 2057. When asked to comment on the likelihood of drought in the UK, the 2057-ers thought droughts seemed more likely far into the future and the 2007-ers the reverse was true.

It seems even known hypothetical adjustments to the calendar-scale make cognitively unrecognised changes to our perception of the world.

In a slightly recursive sense, this tells us that climate salience is high around events which are themselves climate created.

Do actions lead salience? Or can we tweak its evocation?

I think, I know what I mean

Adjustment to expectations of ‘distance’ can be triggered simply by keywords, too. Even when“. . . the ‘point of zero distance’ = actual experience.” asked about events and actions that relate to our own goals we can make them seem distal or proximal by asking ‘how’ we’re going to do them (proximal) versus ‘why’ we’re going to them (distal).

Pahl gives us a lovely pen-portrait of this effect using the example of asking someone about a meeting in relation to when it happened:

1. Yesterday: one would hear descriptions such as finalising presentation, arranging teaching for start of term, packing bag, navigating unfamiliar city (low level construal)
2. Six months ago: one would hear descriptions such as inspiring talks, meeting colleagues in the field, discussing new ideas, travelling to exciting places (high level construal)

The point of zero distance

The experiments described (and the vast companion work) tells us that the ‘point of zero distance’ = actual experience. And any shift to the distal, or perceptual, plane dilutes the evocation of experience – the more it becomes about strategy, planning, and the less about practicalities.

This sounds a lot like the problems of engaging people with pension planning, doesn’t it?

It sounds a lot like the problems of engaging people with pension planning

Can we use an understanding of proximal evocations to render actions concrete when marketing pensions? It seems we should be able to.The first question to ask is has it been done already? The answer is ‘yes’. But I’m not sure it was driven by a conscious understanding of construal. (I’m not sure it matters, terribly much – I am less of a fan of giving marks for one’s working out, and more a fan of the correct answer however derived.)

Over in New York an agency called Droga5 manage the Prudential marketing account.

Executive Creative Director Ted Royer says

“Retirement is a scary thing. And if we face it with real, stark honesty and not sugarcoat it by showing people on sailboats sailing off into the sunset–fake images that they couldn’t live up to–I think we can get a lot more done…”

which makes a lot of sense. It is scary. Showing stock-shots of aspirations unattainable turns people off.

He goes on to say

“It [retirement] just had to be framed in a truly honest, conversational way.”

This is true to an extent. From a social psychology position, retirement needs to be presented – so as to be viewed – as close to” . . . gets us thinking ‘how’, not ‘why’ . . . “ the ‘point of zero distance’ as it can be in order to cast it in the ‘how’ which creates action. (And of course, what is marketing without action?) However, by-hook-or-by-crook one outcome of communicating in an “honest, conversational way” is to bring us close to the point of zero distance.

The campaign – actually – works really well in this sense. It is called Prudential Day One. Have a look at the opening TV ad

This spawned many stories of retirement. Many versions – long-form, personal versions – on youtube. Have a look at Mujahid Abdul-Rashid’s Day One story.

As much as I am focussing on construal – or evoking recognition at the point of zero distance – there’s some great advantage showing multiple ’stories’ because prevalence drives behaviour by defining the norm. I have written about this here,
‘Mirror mirror on the wall‘
here ‘Bin recycling: communications‘
and here ‘The media informs our choice in way they don’t realise. (And nor do we.)‘

While Prudential were helping people retire – and the ads expressed the stark reality of such – what the work really did was to make the construal proximal; was to make the moment salient, and ‘now’. So, much like asking for consideration of droughts in the present makes them seem more likely, Prudential asking for consideration of retirement in the present, makes it seem more likely and gets us thinking ‘how’, not ‘why’.

This is where Pahl found the most immediate response, as much as Droga5 did.

And this is where we find the point of zero distance. Are you looking there, too?

Habits are nasty, and nice. Nasty, because the habit cueing mechanism – which enacts the entire sequence of behaviour – does not require the original supporting ‘goal’ to be remembered, or even exist. Nice, because the habit cueing mechanism – which enacts the entire sequence of behaviour – does not require the original supporting ‘goal’ to be remembered, or even exist.

A paradox, surely?

No. Not really. The nastiness or niceness of the characteristics of a habit depends on the view-point.

1. If one wishes to relieve oneself of habitual behaviour then habits are nasty, trigger happy, pervasive behaviours that happen unawares and a difficult to break
2. If one wishes to afford our limited cognitive capacity as much free space to think, observe, engage, and interact with the world around us, then habits are lovely, automatic, stress-free behaviours that happen unawares

How are habits formed?

We tend to repeat experiences that are rewarding. And repetition affords us a knowledge-bank. A knowledge-bank of rewarding experiences allows us to be confident in the outcome, and allows us to defer the process to instinctive behaviour. We are free to ‘think’, once more. This grab-bag of packed, folded, and wrapped behaviours accrued slowly over time would be at risk if we could simply forget them, or ignore them. So we don’t. Change is slow with habits. It has to be.

So slow, in fact, movie buffs will eat stale popcorn.

How are habits perpetuated?

Our popcorn eaters were asked to rate some movie trailers. They were given free popcorn and a fizzy drink. The popcorn was either fresh, or seven days sold. Those that were self-reporting occasional popcorn eaters ate less of the stale version. However, those that self-reported as habitual popcorn eaters liked the stale corn less but ate as much as they did when it was fresh.

Wood and Neal (PDF) tell us this captures an essential component of habits:

When people frequently have performed a response in stable contexts, the context can come to trigger the response directly in the sense that it does not require supporting goals and intentions.

Once embedded, they’re triggered by any part.

How are habits broken?

Wood and Neal tell us that

“habits are broken through the strategic deployment of effortful self-control”

but they forget one factor that Tim Cotter elevates (in conversation with Greg Foyster),

‘Fixed conditions hold habits in place, so if you change those conditions, you can help change the habit.…”

That’s how habits broken: change the conditions. How do you use this insight in marketing?

Conditional change and marketing

We tend to choose products such as cars instinctively (and consequently quite quickly) and then spend ages hunting for rational reasons to agree with

‘ourselves’. There’s a whole world of posts to write on this (particularly about how we think a brand reflects on us), but I don’t want to go there here.

However, it is clear once our decision is made we don’t have to make the decision ‘as new’ every time we do something – such as getting into our car. In fact, as long as our car performs as expected, we build a knowledge-bank of rewarding experiences allowing us to be confident in the car, and the manufacturer. Breaking this lock-hold is tough.

Too tough?

Chevrolet and Argentina

Chevrolet ‘rescue drive’ is an Argentinean campaign brought to my attention by Katie Allen through her new twitter account AdPitchBlog and her wonderful companion blog.

Of the campaign, she says;

“To get people to test drive the new Chevrolet Cobalt, they sent one to the point when people are most likely to think about changing their car: when they’ve broken down.”

Certainly those with breakdowns are forced to consider fixing or replacing their car, but the crux is that their habitual behaviour is under forced examination. This isn’t a home-run yet, though, because our knowledge-bank of rewarding experiences is accrued slowly over time, and while breaking down is not such a good experience, the research suggests it’s not enough alone to break behaviour. Indeed, Maréchal tells us of habits that, along with a change in environmental cues and induced deliberation (which is clearly in place with Chevrolet ‘rescue drive’),

‘ . . . time and repetition will be needed to promote alternative habitual behavior’.

This is not part of the campaign, as far as I can tell.

How long for a habit?

It is common to think a habit needs about twenty-one days to form. It seems this is a corruption of the time taken for bones to mend perpetuated clumsily. Phillippa Lally’s study into habit forming at University College London showed test subjects needed somewhere between almost twenty and over two hundred and fifty days to form a habit that could be repeated every day. The average was about seventy days.

Why not lend the Chevrolet Cobalt to the rescued drivers for two months (which approximates the seventy days Lally shows)?

Even better, do some lend-testing and give group A the car for a week, group B for a month, and group C for two months. (Or other variations more desk research would suggest.) Now you’re using some insights into behaviour to get some behavioural insights. That would make a robust piece of behavioural communication.

Not bad from Chevy in its current form though – well done them.