I’ve just got back from a 10 day holiday from work, which is why I haven’t sent an update for a few weeks. I meant to send something during my time off, but when you’re out of the habit it’s hard to motivate yourself. Which is ironic, because it’s habits I’d like to talk about this time round.

What are they? How do they influence things? And how can we use them in marketing?

Atomic Habits

In Atomic Habits, which I’ve been heavily inspired by for most of this year, James Clear talks about how you can ditch unhealthy habits and how to train yourself into building new ones.

I’ve been using some of the methods for weight loss since Christmas. I’m not going to win ‘Slimmer Of The Year’, but I’ve lost more than a stone in five months through subtle changes to my lifestyle that I’ve found pretty sustainable.

There’s a lot covered in the book, but Clear talks about how a lot of what we do is following a habit rather than anything else. Some of the points I’ve acted on:

• Having positive triggers in the environment.
• Removing unhealthy triggers.
• Replacing elements of the habit.

A positive trigger for me is having the food scales on the kitchen bench at all times, right where I prepare lunch. This means they’re always there, I see them, and they serve as a visual reminder to weigh out portion sizes so that I can track them to help keep to a calorie count.

One of my unhealthy habits was chocolate after lunch - I’d actually get cravings for it. But by making the commitment to not buy it in the first place I can’t eat it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, but it took the realisation of the fact I wasn’t hungry and was eating it out of habit to make me commit to it.

And I’ve removed one day of alcohol - a Sunday - from my weekly habit. Not by not drinking at all, but by replacing it with something alcohol-free. If we remove something from our habit we wind up resenting it. Replacing it keeps us happy, because it’s the habit and routine we crave rather than anything else.

I’m not about to go all ‘new age’, but it’s been hugely useful for me. And it leads on to how we can use triggers in marketing to try and influence customer behaviour.

How to be contagious

In Contagious, one of Berger’s criteria for making something catch on is to make use of triggers.

The example he gives is that breakfast cereals are discussed more than Disney World. Why? Because every single day people sit down and eat breakfast, so there is a big daily opportunity for someone to discuss their breakfast cereal options with someone else. For most people Disney World doesn’t come up in everyday discussion.

Sights, smells, and sounds can trigger related thoughts and ideas in the minds of customers.

• When NASA’s Pathfinder mission touched down on Mars, Mars bars experienced an uptick in sales (they’re named after founder Franklin Mars).
• A group of music researchers found that by piping different countries’ music into supermarkets, it influenced how popular each country’s wine was.
• Ever sang Rebecca Black’s Friday on the last working day of the week, or tried to annoy co-workers with it? Exactly.

If we want to influence behaviour, we need to be present. And we also need to be appearing in the times and places where people are thinking about our products and services. It’s perhaps a bit of an obvious one, but if you’re organising a wedding you go to wedding fairs. If you’re looking for Christmas presents you’re likely to go to Christmas markets. If you’re thinking about studying an apprenticeship you’ll turn up to careers events.

But we also need to be consistent. It’s not enough to do one careers event, we need to be at every school and as many events as possible. People need to associate us with that product or service so that we’re the first ones they think of when the time comes.

Berge also says that “products and ideas have habitats, or sets of triggers that cause people to think about them”. The good news is these habitats, or links, can be manufactured.

In 2007, KitKat managed to associate themselves with people taking breaks. I can’t hear the phrase “Toyota Aygo” without thinking about how they sponsored Friends on T4 years ago. I had repeated exposure to that message over time, which has created a trigger in my mind that’s nigh-on impossible to shift.

One local restaurant, sadly now closed, became my family’s go-to for every birthday thanks to their special birthday offers. So much so, that even when the annual offers stopped we kept going because that’s how we’d trained ourselves to celebrate them.

I’ll give Berger the final word, given so much of this section has been inspired by him:

Triggers and cues lead people to talk, choose, and use … Top of mind means tip of tongue.

My favourite recent reads

This thread on reframing organic social by Tommy Clark is good. It talks about how organic social is the assist to the sale, and how it’s not useful to think of it as the main driver.

The Marketing Student has written a short summary of the brilliant How Brands Grow. The book itself is pretty heavy going - it’s very academic - but this summary gives you the key points. If you’re a marketing student yourself then the book is a must-read, but the summary works for everyone else.

If you’re going to work on your triggers and increasing your mental availability, you’re going to want to think about your brand’s tone of voice. Thankfully, Grammarly have you covered.

And that’s it for this week

Thank you for reading Inform, Educate, Entertain. I’d love it if you got the chance to pass it on to someone else if you found it useful. If you didn’t, this conversation never happened.