Absolutely, I can help you with that! Here is the updated transcript with new chapter headings and corrected speaker labels, ready to be posted to Canvas:
The Habitual Mind: Unlocking the Secrets of Habit-Driven Buying Decisions
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 21 of The Brainy Business, understanding the psychology of why people buy.
Announcer: This Behavioral Economics Foundation’s episode is focused on habitual buying. Ready? Let’s get started. You are listening to The Brainy Business podcast, where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to The Brainy Business podcast. Habits are a crazy thing, and they are so much more powerful than most people realize. This episode is going to dig way deeper than the old 21 days to make a habit philosophy that you’ve probably heard once or twice. And while I wish I could claim that this was all strategy to have episode 21 be about habits, it was just a happy coincidence. In this episode, I’m going to really break this down for you and make sure it’s super applicable for you and your business, including the different strategies you should use if you’re the market leader versus someone trying to break into the market, because those strategies are very, very different.
First Five-Star Review
Melina Palmer: But before we get to that, it’s time for a shout out. I’ve mentioned before that the United Kingdom is the country with the second highest number of downloads coming in before Canada. Surprisingly, and I am so excited to say that The Brainy Business podcast has received its first five star review from the UK. Well, at least this is the first one I’ve been able to see. So if you have left a review, and I maybe haven’t seen it yet, I apologize. As I’ve said in the past, I can only see reviews in the US from my iTunes because it’s different by country. Podkite lets me see some countries, which allowed me to start incorporating Canada into my review shoutouts mix, and it should also be mixing in different platforms like iTunes as well as Android and things like that. And now it shows a review from the United Kingdom, which is so exciting. As I have also said before, Podkite doesn’t pull the name of the person who’s leaving the review. So I don’t know who left this for me and I can’t actually give you a shout out. So I’m reading it here with the hopes that you will let me know who you are and I can give you a proper shout out on a future episode. You can either send me an email melina@thebrainybusiness.com or reach out on social media where you can find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere. The review is titled Psychology of Marketing and reads. It is an awesome podcast. You learn marketing from psychology points of view. The podcast is very entertaining and informative. A lot of information provided for an active learner though you learn the fundamentals by just listening to the podcast. There’s a new podcast every Friday. I enjoy listening while driving from and to work. I start to enjoy driving in busy roads so I would have the time to listen to an entire episode and I would strongly recommend it. That’s awesome. I appreciate that the podcast has made your commute better, my UK friend. I have actually had someone here in the states comment that she has missed her exit on the freeway on two separate occasions because she was so engrossed in the content which made me laugh. If you listener have a funny story about listening to the podcast, definitely share it with me. I love hearing from all of you. And similarly you can either email melina@thebrainybusiness.com or shout out on social media where you can find me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as the brainybiz. And thank you again to everyone who has rated and left a review on the podcast. I appreciate you so much. What about you? Have you subscribed, rated or left a review? It’s super easy to do and subscribing means you’ll never miss an episode. They download automatically onto your device, which is awesome, and you get them right when they come out. You just tap the subscribe button in whatever app you’re listening on, and right there you can see the stars if they’re not yet filled in. I would also appreciate you considering giving them a tap. Hopefully you feel five stars is appropriate and you can also click to leave a review if you feel like it. And if you do leave a review, keep a listen out on a future episode where you will probably hear me give you a shout out and a link in the show notes.
00:05:00
Melina Palmer: That’s just my way of saying thank you. I know it’s out of the norm and what you do all the time to leave a review, and it takes a lot of dedication to be willing to do that. So if you do, for everyone who’s done it already, thank you so much. And if you choose to do so, I would really, really appreciate it. And it helps other people to find and see if it’s a podcast they’re going to want to listen to. So on their behalf, I thank you as well.
Where to Find Show Notes
Melina Palmer: And now that I have mentioned the show notes a couple of times, I just want to make sure you know what they are and where to find them. I’m probably not going to mention them again, but know that anytime you think, ooh, I should make a note of that so I can look it up later. Check the show notes because I have anticipated those needs and I link everything there. There are tons of great links in there for you. You can find the show notes within the podcast app you’re listening to, or by visiting thebrainybusiness.com/21 because this is episode 21. In addition to the links to those who get shoutouts in the episode, you will also find links to any referenced articles or relevant studies in case you want to dig into those, as well as any past episodes that are mentioned. I tend to bring up quite a few of those that way. They’re really easy to find and listen to again, or for a first time if you are just joining us, in which case, welcome. And because this is a foundational episode, there is a free worksheet available for you to download on that same page of the website, thebrainybusiness.com/21. Just click on the image near the top of the page. You can download it now and follow along as you listen, or grab it later if you’re out and about whenever you get it. No, it will help you reinforce and apply the lessons of habitual buying into your business and life, which is why you’re here.
How Habits Work
Melina Palmer: Okay, now that we’ve got all that out of the way, let’s talk about habits. When you hear the word habit, you likely think of bad habits, but you have a lot more good habits than bad ones. Way more, actually. You just aren’t consciously aware of the vast majority of them. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, or have heard me speak, or been to a workshop, you know that the subconscious brain does about 99% of the brain’s processing, and if you remember, it does this using rules of thumb it has created over time. Those rules guide all sorts of behaviors, from how you brush your teeth and drive a car to how you respond to bright lights and how you buy things at the grocery store. So if 99% of decisions are made using these automatic rules based on the way things have been done in the past and what has worked, clearly a lot of the buying decisions you and your customers make must be done automatically, which is also known as habitually, right? Do you have a guess as to what the percentage is to help you out? Let’s imagine some scenarios. You’re at the grocery store and have a long list of items to get one of the items on the list is soup. When you get to the soup aisle, are you looking for red cans or blue cans? And without me telling you, did you already know which soups I was talking about just by the colors? What about soda? If you drink cola, are you looking for again red or blue? And even if you don’t drink soda, do you know the name of the brand that is blue and the one that’s red? And which one would you get if you were going to splurge and have a soda? Sorting by color is a form of habitual purchasing. You are looking for a specific brand and your subconscious is going to look for and buy it automatically. Along those same lines, here’s another example. It’s time to upgrade your phone. Do you even consider another brand? Or if you have an iPhone, are you looking for the next best iPhone? Or if you have a Samsung, are you looking for the new Samsung? Even with infrequent purchases, the place you go and look is based on habits. Say you’re looking for a new dress or a back to school clothes for the kids. What store would you go to? Let’s say it’s Macy’s.
00:10:00
Melina Palmer: I’d be willing to bet if you saw an ad for Macy’s in August, or even just their logo or drove by one that you’ve been to a lot, or someone mentioned the mall with the store you prefer to shop at, you might instantaneously think all right, I need to add school clothes shopping to the to do list. Maybe I can get off early on Thursday. And did you see what happened there? It was so subtle, but it was an association in the brain that triggered an action or a desire to take an action. M that is essentially all a habit is. It’s been broken down into a four step process which we have all pretty much approached completely wrong in trying to change habits over the years, by the way.
The Brain and Associations
Melina Palmer: But before I break that down for you and unlock the secrets of how habits work, I’m going to give a little reminder of how the brain works as a whole. Some of this is a refresher from episode one, unlocking the secrets of the brain, and I would also recommend checking back to episode 15 on availability. And don’t worry, there are links in the show notes to both of those episodes. The human brain essentially works on many, many associations. When I say the words red circle, you might think your brain has a little envelope in it somewhere where red circles are stored separate from red squares and green circles. But that’s not how it works in reality. The concept of red and the concept of circle are stored in different areas of the brain. When you hear the term, your subconscious brain sorts through all the colors, not blue or green or yellow, but red, and also sorts through all the shapes, not triangle or square or rhombus, but circle, and brings back an image of a red circle almost instantaneously. Through this process, it’s sorting through tons of information and concepts, all the things it is not looking for, until it finds what it is looking for. An interesting thing about the term red circle is that it has some other concepts that are tied to it, making it more complex. For example, what is the difference between a red circle and a green circle? When you think of the two together, you likely thought very quickly of a traffic light. Red means stop and green means go. So the colors themselves are associated with this as well as the shapes. Your brain has gotten into the habit of considering stopping at the color red, no matter how it’s presented. And that is important to know. This is an automatic process that happens. Red is also tied to all sorts of things, some of which I’ve already mentioned in this episode. Campbell’s soup, Coca Cola and Macy’s all use red in their logos. And your brain knows the difference almost immediately. It knows how to sort and make decisions and will choose some things and ignore others. Out of these rules of out of habit.
The Percentage of Habitual Purchases
Melina Palmer: And speaking of those decisions out of habit, do you have a guess for the answer to my question from earlier, of what percentage of purchases are habitual? I gave you a few examples of scenarios that could make it so. A purchase is considered a habit, but you probably still think a lot of what you’re doing is conscious choice when you’re at the store or shopping online. Am I right? You think I’m exaggerating, and I get it. Your conscious brain doesn’t want to admit that it doesn’t have control. It wants to think it’s running the show. But in reality, 95% of all buying decisions are habitual. That’s right, 95%. And this gets at, the heart of the problem of most marketing, advertising and brand positioning out there. Far too many companies and brands are focusing on the 5%, the new and different, and getting people to consciously make a decision and change, then working on being in the 95% of habitual purchases. And yes, the strategies are completely different. Before this episode is up, I’m going to tell you when you should use each and give you some tips on exactly how you do that. So be sure to stick around through the whole episode. And if you have not yet gotten your free download? Now is a good time to do so. Go ahead and visit thebrainybusiness.com/21 to download and print your copy. I’ll wait.
00:15:00
How Long It Takes to Form and Break Habits
Melina Palmer: Welcome back. Okay, before I say anything else about how a brand would use habit to its advantage, I need to tell you more about how habits are formed on an individual level, what habits really are, and how and where to interject for the most impact. Both if you are wanting to change your own, quote, bad habits, or looking to incorporate this into your messaging. So first things first. What is a habit? The official definition is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. And I mentioned the numbers at the beginning of the episode. But even before that, if I had asked you the question of how long does it take to make a habit and how long does it take to break a habit, you likely would have come up with an answer somewhere between 21 and 30 days, am I right? But where did that come from? How did that number come to be? And if that is truly the case, how come so many of us still struggle to eat right, exercise, not procrastinate, and a whole host of other bad habits? It’s because, unfortunately, that information is completely wrong and has been taken out of context since the insights were published nearly 60 years ago. Did you ever play telephone when you were a kid, where one person will whisper something into someone’s ear, and then they whisper what they heard into the next person’s ear, and they go around the circle until the last person announces what they heard? And it’s usually completely different than what the original words were. And everybody ends up laughing because it’s silly and random and ridiculous? Well, that’s pretty much what happened here. Maltz, a plastic surgeon in the 1950s, had noticed that it took about 21 days for his patients to get used to their new noses or to stop having phantom limb syndrome after having a leg or an arm amputated. And so when he published his book, Psycho Cybernetics, it included this information about habits. Well, sort of. What it actually said was these and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to gel. Did you hear the key term in there that so many missed in that telephone game? You probably missed it when I said it there, making it clear how this whole misconception happened. He said it requires a minimum of about 21 days. A minimum. That means it will always take longer than that. 21 days is the earliest you could expect a change to start to gel, to use his term, not the magic number that if you make it to three weeks you’re in. But that doesn’t sound as exciting to the brain and it quickly took fire with the wrong information. No matter what you hear, that is not a fact. It was never a fact and it’s being proven to be quite wrong.
The Problem with “Universal Truths”
Melina Palmer: Unfortunately, this is availability again. Episode 15 of this podcast. If enough people say it, the brain believes it and claims it as a universal truth that is hard to unlearn. Even after I have told you this, that 21 days is not the magic number for making or breaking a habit, and the upcoming study I’m about to reference has more information about that. And now you know it isn’t true, but your brain is still going to believe it. Your brain still holds this as a truth and the subconscious doesn’t want to give it up. It has a habit of using this point of reference, even though there are mountains of evidence proving it wrong. For example, how many people have given up coffee or sugar or swearing for Lent, or for more than 30 days for any other reason, only to find themselves right back in their old ways, even after they were good for such a long time? It’s because we have not truly understood habits properly and attacked them wrong.
The Truth About Habit Formation
Melina Palmer: So, getting back to the number of days it takes to change a habit, I’m sure you want me to give you a new magic number to replace 21 in your mind, and I feel like I need to prepare you for this. I’m going to tell you something now, and no matter how I prep you, you’re going to hate it.
00:20:00
Melina Palmer: Your subconscious is going to scream at you about how wrong it is. It’s going to go against what you want to hear and accept. But I want you to try and push through that to really hear what I have to say, okay? And know that these are results from scientific studies and research from many, many smart and amazing people over many years. Just try and remember that when I tell you what I’m about to tell you. Okay? All right, here goes. A 2009 study from the European Journal of Social Psychology found the average number of days it took to form a habit. In their case, it was eating fruit at lunch or running 15 minutes a day, things like that. The average number they found for forming a habit was 66. That wouldn’t be so bad, right? This is where framing can kill you. And check out episode 16 for more on that. You hear an average and think, great, that’s the number. Your brain assumes something when it hears the word average, but there are more questions you need to ask to really understand. And you know how much I love questions. If you have listened to episode four of this podcast, questions and answers, one of the questions you need to ask here is the range of days included in coming up with that average. An average of 66 days, when the total number of days ranged from 64 to 68, would be pretty solid evidence that that is a true average and something that you can predict behavior off of. I’m guessing you know that that’s not what we have here. The actual number of days ranged from 18 to 254 days. Wow, that is a big range. Which means the average doesn’t tell you anything at all. What this can tell you is that we approach habit changing all wrong. And while I’ve been referencing some big items here like sugar, I’m trying to stay away from addiction, which is a similar concept, but different than habits per se. Addiction has an entire avenue of study directed to it, and it’s very complex. Addictions are, like I said, they’re kind of like habits, but they’re much more difficult to change. And it has a different composition in the brain. And the case of messaging or branding, it can be relevant, but I’m just not going to dig into it much here.
The Four Phases of Habits
Melina Palmer: If I can say that we’ve been attacking habits wrong, that means there must be a right way, right? The good news is a lot more is being found out about habits, how they work, and what drives them, which can make it easier to know how to start or break them, which is exciting. Here’s what has been found and discovered. You can either take notes or you can download that free download the worksheet on the website at thebrainybusiness.com/21 to help you through this, because there are some really concrete steps here and it can be helpful to work through it. Okay, essentially, all habits are made up of four phases, cue craving, response, and reward. And yes, I’m going to break each one down for you and give you some examples of how they work. There are many articles and links in the show, notes for you to check out if you would like to do any additional reading, including two books, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear. I have referenced them throughout the episode, and again, there are a lot of articles in the show notes for you. You likely know, especially if you’re an avid listener of this podcast, that the human brain is driven by rewards. Whether it’s dopamine, oxytocin, or endorphins. Our brains are constantly seeking out rewards. It’s seeking them out and wants as many of them as possible. So this is why step four in the cycle of habits is so important. The reward habits form because your brain is trying to find predictable ways to get rewards.
00:25:00
Melina Palmer: Makes sense, and that is where the cue comes in. A cue is a signal to the brain that there is a reward around, and that instantly leads to a, craving. You want the thing not because of the thing, but because of the reward the brain will receive. And as we know, cravings can be hard to ignore. It can quickly become all your conscious brain can focus on, because remember who’s running the show. And until you respond to that craving and do something about it, most often giving the brain the thing it wants so it can earn its reward, it will keep nagging and nagging at you. When you give in to the craving and the brain gets the reward, you have a double whammy, because you just reinforced the original cue to make it even more powerful the next time. Even if you swear that this is the last time you’re going to give in to the particular craving, once you hear it laid out like this, it’s probably painfully obvious, a total smack my head moment. And, that should be a hint that we’re getting at the right path. The subconscious knows what it does. And when you say you do this and it says, yeah, I do that, it’s usually a pretty good sign. The thing we have done wrong in addressing habits in the past is to try and change the response, the actual habit, the thing you do to respond to the craving. But this is not where the real habit is formed. If you want to change a habit or start a new one, the cue and reward phases are where it’s at, because that is what’s driving the behavior. Craving and response are pretty easy to identify and likely why we focus on changing those parts. So I’m not going to dig too deep into those. Instead, let’s look at the cue and reward to identify your own habit. Start with the craving response space to figure out what you want to change. Either stop doing or start doing for ease. Let’s go with wanting to stop doing something. In the case of Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, it was his chocolate chip cookie habit. He wanted to stop craving and then giving in and eating chocolate chip cookies. So he started digging into the possible cues to isolate them. Cues can be almost anything, and they can vary from one person to the next. For example, the golden arches of McDonald’s may be a cue for someone who loves fast food, but just be background images for someone else. It all depends on what will provide your brain with the reward it seeks. The good news is, cues have been found to fall into one of five location, time, emotional state, other people, and an immediately preceding action to get at the cue. For his chocolate chip cookie habit. Every time Duhigg craved a chocolate chip cookie from the work cafeteria, he listed out the cues from each category that could have led to the craving by asking himself the following to get at location. The question is, where am I? His answer my desk. Next for time is a similarly easy question. What time is it? His answer on this particular entry was 03:36 p.m. then what is your emotional state? Answer board who else is around? No one. And finally, what action preceded the urge? Or you could have asked, what’s the last thing you did before you noticed the urge or craving? In this case, it was answered in email. And that’s it. Simple. He kept a log of potential cues for a while until a pattern emerged in one of the categories. In his case, it was the time of day. The craving would usually come between three and 04:00. Great. That’s one item identified. Okay, I know I said I wasn’t really going to get into cravings, but this one thing is important before we get to rewards. The thing to know about a craving is that you aren’t craving the thing you’re craving, but rather the reward it provides. So maybe you aren’t craving a chai tea latte, but you are craving the energy rush from the sugar. The craving is just the way the brain knows it can get that flood of reward it’s seeking out, and many different things can trigger a certain response. For example, as I mentioned on the herding episode,
00:30:00
Melina Palmer: oxytocin can be released when you kiss your significant other, when you socialize with a friend, or sing out loud in the car, or eat a piece of chocolate. If your brain only wants the oxytocin because it wants as much of it as it can get, you can theoretically find a replacement for the craving and the cue that triggers it by circumventing the bad craving and swapping it out with something that is better for you.
Understanding Rewards and Changing Habits
Melina Palmer: Okay, on to rewards. In the rewards category, you have to ask yourself, what is the reward my brain is seeking? In the case of a chocolate chip cookie, it’s easy to think it’s the surface item. I just want a cookie because they taste good. But it’s never that simple, right? As I hinted at in the cravings section, rewards are complicated. And there are actually many possible rewards tied to a cookie, including relief to hunger, in which case an apple or broccoli would do the trick. Or the energy from sugar. So black coffee or tea could replace that. Or the sweetness in which studies have shown putting a dab of artificial sweetener on your tongue can help with that urge or socialization. Is the cookie an excuse to see other people and engage where they happen to be? That is, the cafeteria or Starbucks. Or maybe it’s a break from work, so you could go for a walk or get up and stretch to fight the boredom. So he experimented with the rewards, similarly to how he tracked the potential cues. One day when he got the craving, he ate a cookie. The next time, had an apple, then a cup of coffee, then went for a walk, then chatted with colleagues. And over time, he realized that what he was really craving was the oxytocin that’s released during socialization, which I talked about on episode 19 about herding. Now, he knew the cue, the time of day, and the reward. His brain wanted socialization with colleagues, so he started to attack it head on every day. At 3:30, he got up from his desk and went to find a colleague to chat with for about ten minutes. It wasn’t immediately, but he said eventually the habit became going to find a friend. At 3:30, instead of going to get a chocolate chip cookie, he now gets up absentmindedly at 3:30 and finds someone to chat with. And that has now become the habit. And the cookies are a long forgotten craving of the past. One quick note on responses before I move on the response the actual habit can only occur if you’re able to do it. I know this sounds dumb, but bear with me. I work from home, which means all the snacks and bad foods of the world surround me. We’ve got little kids in the house. As long as those snacks are in the house, I know I have the potential to go grab them whenever I get a craving. But what if they’re not in the house? For me, soda is a terrible habit. Oh, Man, I love soda. Doctor Pepper is my drink of choice, though Cherry Coke can stand in when needed. I, over the years, have had several times where I’ve stopped drinking soda for years. And then I let a couple creeps back in when I get stressed. So I have new cues and triggers, and before I know it, I’m drinking soda every day like it’s going out of style. I start buying it and keeping it in the house. Bad idea. And feel like I can’t stop. So one easy thing to do is to not let it be in the house. If I find myself craving a soda, it isn’t as easy as walking the 27 steps to the kitchen anymore. Instead, I have to get the keys in my wallet, put on shoes, get in the car, drive to the store and buy one. It’s a lot more inconvenient, meaning it’s less likely to be a, potential response. And I don’t really crave it anymore. I remember how delicious it is, but my brain doesn’t queue for it the same way. And I can replace it with a different response that can give my brain the reward it’s looking for. Hopefully a healthier one. One other crazy brain trick before I move on is word choice.
00:35:00
Melina Palmer: Let me get back to my soda example. Let’s say I’m out at an event which happens a lot, and someone offers me a soda. They have a can of Doctor Pepper right there within my grasp. My brain starts to crave it and I can feel the change. But I have this very high on my conscious awareness, so I know I’m not going to take it. There are two responses I’m going to share with you, and they have a huge difference in changing behavior and sticking to a plan. So try to get into the state of your own desire to change, whether it’s Doctor Pepper, chocolate chip cookies, or wasting time on Instagram during the work day. And think about how you would naturally respond when someone offers you the thing you’re trying to stay away from. So if someone offers me the soda, and I know I’m not going to take it, I can say either, no, I can’t drink soda, or the very subtle difference of no, I don’t drink soda. In case you missed which word was different in the two scenarios, and there was only one word different. In the first example, I said can’t, and in the second, I said don’t. They’re basically the same word, right? Only two letters different. But remember how the brain associates it knows the implication of each. And the results of this simple change are amazing. Can you guess which one works better? I can’t is not your choice. It is instead a restriction. You really want to, but you can’t. Sad face it undermines your personal power. On the other hand, I don’t is empowering. This was your choice. It affirms the choice you made and makes you feel determined, full of willpower. Really the opposite of I can’t. And the difference is huge. One study around eating found that when half were instructed to say, I can’t eat candy and the other half said, I don’t eat candy. When asked to pick their thank you gift of either a chocolate bar or a granola bar, 64% of those who said I don’t went with the granola bar and only 39% of the I can’t ers chose that healthier option. In an even more amazing and extreme case in a study about working out, female participants were told to think to themselves at the times when they thought they might lapse on the program either an I don’t or an I can’t statement whether they were wanting to skip the gym or eat donuts as a snack or whatever it is. They would say I don’t skip workouts or I can’t skip workouts. Over the ten days, the participants had to check in and report whether the strategy was working or not, and they were sticking to the plan. At the end, eight out of the ten women with the I don’t approach were still in the program successfully. Eight out of ten, the I can’t group, only one in ten made it all the way through. So when trying to change your personal habits and when you start to feel you might slip on that cue craving reward loop, remember that you should be confident that you made this choice and confidently say, no, I don’t do that. It’ll make a big difference.
Personal Habit Change Example
Melina Palmer: Now that you know how habits are formed and have some tricks for how to change them, let me give you an example of a way I recently used this method to fix a bad habit I had during the work day. I tend to get distracted easily and I have a lot of potential notifications on my phone. As a solopreneur, I need to be on top of those notifications. It’s important that I answer emails, social media questions and other items promptly because that impact my brand. So I had many, many notifications and alerts set up on my phone and that is the default setting, which, as you learned from last week, takes effort to change. So my phone would buzz constantly with notifications. A few weeks ago, my husband pointed this out to me and suggested that potentially all the notifications coming through was making everything take longer. So obvious when he points it out, of course, and he recommended I go in and turn off the notifications. I’m also one of those people that hates seeing that little red circle with the number of emails I have waiting or any other sort of alert. So having those hanging over my head just drives me crazy. You start to feel like you can’t live without them. What if I don’t get those notifications. What will happen?
00:40:00
Melina Palmer: That’s the craving. Your brain wanting that reward. You feel like you need to answer every email the second it comes in, or at least see what it is. And what if someone’s asking a question on Instagram or mentions me in a tweet? The truth is, I can check it every couple of hours or a couple times a day and it will be fine. Now that the cue is gone, I don’t look at my phone as much. I can work for longer stretches without being interrupted, and I’m more productive. Sure, I get bored and I want to check it every so often, but I know I can tell myself I don’t check my accounts outside of the scheduled times I’ve set aside and feel empowered to wait.
Habitual Buying Decisions in Business
Melina Palmer: Okay, before I wrap up this episode, I promised I would tell you about ways to use this in your messaging and how it can differ if you are the market leader already, the thing being bought habitually, or if you are trying to break into that cycle. Let’s say you’re the head of marketing for Cheerios. Things are good. A lot of people buy Cheerios. You have a significant percentage of people who buy Cheerios for breakfast, either for themselves or for their kids. Moms feel this is a healthy, convenient breakfast, and it’s on their to buy grocery list every week. The habit is almost out of cereal. Time to get more Cheerios. Not we need more breakfast options, and they aren’t looking for a replacement. They know that their breakfast of choice is Cheerios. So that’s what they get when in the cereal aisle. They don’t even look at other options. It’s Cheerios all the way. Those, are the people who buy your cereal habitually, and you don’t really want to mess with that. It’s good to think of cues to trigger cravings for Cheerios, like putting boxes of Cheerios near the bananas or near the milk, for example. Find other ways to get people who already want Cheerios to associate more things with Cheerios. But what if you started to notice all the other flavors of cereal out there? In a world where people can choose Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, how can you compete? You need to do something before you get squashed out by these sugar bombs. We won’t let people move away from Cheerios to a completely different brand. You say, we will stop this before it gets to be too much of an issue. And then you come out with Frosted Cheerios, Chocolate Cheerios, Fruity Cheerios, Cinnamon Cheerios, Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. Any cereal out there and you find your way to add it to a Cheerio flavor. Boom. And to not dilute the Cheerios yellow box, all the flavors match the colors of the cereals you’re competing with to make it really clear what you’re doing. And you’re going to give coupons for all the new flavors to the loyal customers who are buying Cheerios regularly in case they’re also getting, another brand of a sweet cereal too. Seems logical enough, right? Here’s the problem. You’ve interrupted their habitual sequence. That person who only considered Cheerios and nothing else has now been introduced to having chocolate cereal in the morning, or frosted or cinnamon or whatever. They might never have tried those other brands before, but now that they’ve had their horizons opened up, tried something new and liked it potentially more than the Cheerios they were having every day before, because, you know, sugar, they’re more likely to try the originals of other cereals. After all, if Frosted Cheerios are an attempt to be sort of like Frosted Flakes, maybe Frosted Flakes taste even better. You’ve potentially shot yourself in the foot by turning your habitual buyer into someone who likes to experiment with breakfast cereals, and they might never come back to you. This is why, as the brand leader, you don’t want to do too much to shake things up or rock the boat. Coca-Cola has a different strategy than Pepsi, and if you’re Jones Soda or some other off brand, you need to use coupons and different strategies to try and interject your brand into the mix when that cue or craving starts.
Case Study: Jones Soda
Melina Palmer: I mentioned Jones Soda, which a lot of the listeners might not be familiar with. They’re a bottling company in the Seattle area with many traditional flavors like Cola and lemon lime, but they also come out with weird flavors like turkey and gravy at Thanksgiving, which sounds repulsive but apparently was so popular within its initial launch, it sold out within 2 hours.
00:45:00
Melina Palmer: They went on to make all sorts of random flavors for various holidays, from Valentines and Easter to Hanukkah and Halloween, and they donate a portion of their proceeds to various charities. They got a large cult following for being so different and unique, but it’s hard to get people to try brands other than Coke or Pepsi since they’re so dominant. So they managed to get an exclusive deal with the then named Quest Field and were the only soda served for Seahawks games for three years. They put special player images on the bottles and got a lot more people to try Jones, and I’m sure they got some people to have Jones be their soda of choice. They were able to interject themselves when they knew there would be a queue. Say you’re eating something salty. You now get a craving for soda. That sugar that you want to have to wash it down with. You’re in a confined space and the only option available to you is Jones Soda. Maybe you wanted a Coke or a Pepsi, but the only way that you can get to that reward is to buy the soda, the sugar that happens to be available. They were able to break in by being different, showcasing why they’re different than the big brands with a, kitschy personality and finding a way to make it so people would have to try their soda or choose no soda at all. They also had a deal for a few years with Alaska and Horizon Airlines as, the only soft drink served on board. While they will never overturn Coke or Pepsi, they’ve been able to carve out a nice niche for themselves and built a solid brand. When you’re not the market leader, you need to try a little harder, put in some hustle, and fight to break through the habitual buying cycle. But if the market leader tries to respond in kind, it could actually damage their space in the market. The habits of your current and potential customers are important to consider when building out your strategies. This means everything from queues and rewards to your percentage in the market. And because this is so complex, I’m sure you can appreciate that there are many, many more examples I want to provide with tips and tricks for using the habitual buying sequence to your advantage in your business. And because this is already getting to be a pretty long episode, I’m making it in into a two part series. We’ve also had a, lot of foundations episodes in a row. So next week’s episode is going to step back out of foundations and into the power of habit and how you can use it to your advantage in your business. It’s going to be awesome and you will not want to miss it. So if you’re not yet subscribed to the podcast, now would be a great time to do so. In the podcast app you’re listening to just tap that little subscribe button. It takes half a second, but it will ensure that the episodes get right to you when they come out and you don’t miss anything. And if you’re listening to the full episode on YouTube, you can also subscribe to the channel to get all the episodes when they come out on Fridays, as well as any exclusive content I put on the YouTube channel and there is a link in the show notes. I appreciate you taking the time to listen and for subscribing. It means so much to me and I truly appreciate each and every one of you. So that’s it for episode 21, but it’s more of a to be continued as we will expand even more on habitual buying, messaging and branding strategies next week. And don’t forget to download your free worksheet at thebrainybusiness.com/21 to keep you company during the week. And while you’re there, check out the show notes to go back to all those episodes I mentioned during this episode to help you really brush up on the concepts and be ready to go next week. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.
00:49:45
Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Brainy Business podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
Absolutely, I can help you with that! Here is the updated transcript with new chapter headings and corrected speaker labels, ready to be posted to Canvas:
The Habitual Mind: Unlocking the Secrets of Habit-Driven Buying Decisions
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 21 of The Brainy Business, understanding the psychology of why people buy.
Announcer: This Behavioral Economics Foundation’s episode is focused on habitual buying. Ready? Let’s get started. You are listening to The Brainy Business podcast, where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to The Brainy Business podcast. Habits are a crazy thing, and they are so much more powerful than most people realize. This episode is going to dig way deeper than the old 21 days to make a habit philosophy that you’ve probably heard once or twice. And while I wish I could claim that this was all strategy to have episode 21 be about habits, it was just a happy coincidence. In this episode, I’m going to really break this down for you and make sure it’s super applicable for you and your business, including the different strategies you should use if you’re the market leader versus someone trying to break into the market, because those strategies are very, very different.
First Five-Star Review
Melina Palmer: But before we get to that, it’s time for a shout out. I’ve mentioned before that the United Kingdom is the country with the second highest number of downloads coming in before Canada. Surprisingly, and I am so excited to say that The Brainy Business podcast has received its first five star review from the UK. Well, at least this is the first one I’ve been able to see. So if you have left a review, and I maybe haven’t seen it yet, I apologize. As I’ve said in the past, I can only see reviews in the US from my iTunes because it’s different by country. Podkite lets me see some countries, which allowed me to start incorporating Canada into my review shoutouts mix, and it should also be mixing in different platforms like iTunes as well as Android and things like that. And now it shows a review from the United Kingdom, which is so exciting. As I have also said before, Podkite doesn’t pull the name of the person who’s leaving the review. So I don’t know who left this for me and I can’t actually give you a shout out. So I’m reading it here with the hopes that you will let me know who you are and I can give you a proper shout out on a future episode. You can either send me an email melina@thebrainybusiness.com or reach out on social media where you can find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere. The review is titled Psychology of Marketing and reads. It is an awesome podcast. You learn marketing from psychology points of view. The podcast is very entertaining and informative. A lot of information provided for an active learner though you learn the fundamentals by just listening to the podcast. There’s a new podcast every Friday. I enjoy listening while driving from and to work. I start to enjoy driving in busy roads so I would have the time to listen to an entire episode and I would strongly recommend it. That’s awesome. I appreciate that the podcast has made your commute better, my UK friend. I have actually had someone here in the states comment that she has missed her exit on the freeway on two separate occasions because she was so engrossed in the content which made me laugh. If you listener have a funny story about listening to the podcast, definitely share it with me. I love hearing from all of you. And similarly you can either email melina@thebrainybusiness.com or shout out on social media where you can find me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as the brainybiz. And thank you again to everyone who has rated and left a review on the podcast. I appreciate you so much. What about you? Have you subscribed, rated or left a review? It’s super easy to do and subscribing means you’ll never miss an episode. They download automatically onto your device, which is awesome, and you get them right when they come out. You just tap the subscribe button in whatever app you’re listening on, and right there you can see the stars if they’re not yet filled in. I would also appreciate you considering giving them a tap. Hopefully you feel five stars is appropriate and you can also click to leave a review if you feel like it. And if you do leave a review, keep a listen out on a future episode where you will probably hear me give you a shout out and a link in the show notes.
00:05:00
Melina Palmer: That’s just my way of saying thank you. I know it’s out of the norm and what you do all the time to leave a review, and it takes a lot of dedication to be willing to do that. So if you do, for everyone who’s done it already, thank you so much. And if you choose to do so, I would really, really appreciate it. And it helps other people to find and see if it’s a podcast they’re going to want to listen to. So on their behalf, I thank you as well.
Where to Find Show Notes
Melina Palmer: And now that I have mentioned the show notes a couple of times, I just want to make sure you know what they are and where to find them. I’m probably not going to mention them again, but know that anytime you think, ooh, I should make a note of that so I can look it up later. Check the show notes because I have anticipated those needs and I link everything there. There are tons of great links in there for you. You can find the show notes within the podcast app you’re listening to, or by visiting thebrainybusiness.com/21 because this is episode 21. In addition to the links to those who get shoutouts in the episode, you will also find links to any referenced articles or relevant studies in case you want to dig into those, as well as any past episodes that are mentioned. I tend to bring up quite a few of those that way. They’re really easy to find and listen to again, or for a first time if you are just joining us, in which case, welcome. And because this is a foundational episode, there is a free worksheet available for you to download on that same page of the website, thebrainybusiness.com/21. Just click on the image near the top of the page. You can download it now and follow along as you listen, or grab it later if you’re out and about whenever you get it. No, it will help you reinforce and apply the lessons of habitual buying into your business and life, which is why you’re here.
How Habits Work
Melina Palmer: Okay, now that we’ve got all that out of the way, let’s talk about habits. When you hear the word habit, you likely think of bad habits, but you have a lot more good habits than bad ones. Way more, actually. You just aren’t consciously aware of the vast majority of them. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, or have heard me speak, or been to a workshop, you know that the subconscious brain does about 99% of the brain’s processing, and if you remember, it does this using rules of thumb it has created over time. Those rules guide all sorts of behaviors, from how you brush your teeth and drive a car to how you respond to bright lights and how you buy things at the grocery store. So if 99% of decisions are made using these automatic rules based on the way things have been done in the past and what has worked, clearly a lot of the buying decisions you and your customers make must be done automatically, which is also known as habitually, right? Do you have a guess as to what the percentage is to help you out? Let’s imagine some scenarios. You’re at the grocery store and have a long list of items to get one of the items on the list is soup. When you get to the soup aisle, are you looking for red cans or blue cans? And without me telling you, did you already know which soups I was talking about just by the colors? What about soda? If you drink cola, are you looking for again red or blue? And even if you don’t drink soda, do you know the name of the brand that is blue and the one that’s red? And which one would you get if you were going to splurge and have a soda? Sorting by color is a form of habitual purchasing. You are looking for a specific brand and your subconscious is going to look for and buy it automatically. Along those same lines, here’s another example. It’s time to upgrade your phone. Do you even consider another brand? Or if you have an iPhone, are you looking for the next best iPhone? Or if you have a Samsung, are you looking for the new Samsung? Even with infrequent purchases, the place you go and look is based on habits. Say you’re looking for a new dress or a back to school clothes for the kids. What store would you go to? Let’s say it’s Macy’s.
00:10:00
Melina Palmer: I’d be willing to bet if you saw an ad for Macy’s in August, or even just their logo or drove by one that you’ve been to a lot, or someone mentioned the mall with the store you prefer to shop at, you might instantaneously think all right, I need to add school clothes shopping to the to do list. Maybe I can get off early on Thursday. And did you see what happened there? It was so subtle, but it was an association in the brain that triggered an action or a desire to take an action. M that is essentially all a habit is. It’s been broken down into a four step process which we have all pretty much approached completely wrong in trying to change habits over the years, by the way.
The Brain and Associations
Melina Palmer: But before I break that down for you and unlock the secrets of how habits work, I’m going to give a little reminder of how the brain works as a whole. Some of this is a refresher from episode one, unlocking the secrets of the brain, and I would also recommend checking back to episode 15 on availability. And don’t worry, there are links in the show notes to both of those episodes. The human brain essentially works on many, many associations. When I say the words red circle, you might think your brain has a little envelope in it somewhere where red circles are stored separate from red squares and green circles. But that’s not how it works in reality. The concept of red and the concept of circle are stored in different areas of the brain. When you hear the term, your subconscious brain sorts through all the colors, not blue or green or yellow, but red, and also sorts through all the shapes, not triangle or square or rhombus, but circle, and brings back an image of a red circle almost instantaneously. Through this process, it’s sorting through tons of information and concepts, all the things it is not looking for, until it finds what it is looking for. An interesting thing about the term red circle is that it has some other concepts that are tied to it, making it more complex. For example, what is the difference between a red circle and a green circle? When you think of the two together, you likely thought very quickly of a traffic light. Red means stop and green means go. So the colors themselves are associated with this as well as the shapes. Your brain has gotten into the habit of considering stopping at the color red, no matter how it’s presented. And that is important to know. This is an automatic process that happens. Red is also tied to all sorts of things, some of which I’ve already mentioned in this episode. Campbell’s soup, Coca Cola and Macy’s all use red in their logos. And your brain knows the difference almost immediately. It knows how to sort and make decisions and will choose some things and ignore others. Out of these rules of out of habit.
The Percentage of Habitual Purchases
Melina Palmer: And speaking of those decisions out of habit, do you have a guess for the answer to my question from earlier, of what percentage of purchases are habitual? I gave you a few examples of scenarios that could make it so. A purchase is considered a habit, but you probably still think a lot of what you’re doing is conscious choice when you’re at the store or shopping online. Am I right? You think I’m exaggerating, and I get it. Your conscious brain doesn’t want to admit that it doesn’t have control. It wants to think it’s running the show. But in reality, 95% of all buying decisions are habitual. That’s right, 95%. And this gets at, the heart of the problem of most marketing, advertising and brand positioning out there. Far too many companies and brands are focusing on the 5%, the new and different, and getting people to consciously make a decision and change, then working on being in the 95% of habitual purchases. And yes, the strategies are completely different. Before this episode is up, I’m going to tell you when you should use each and give you some tips on exactly how you do that. So be sure to stick around through the whole episode. And if you have not yet gotten your free download? Now is a good time to do so. Go ahead and visit thebrainybusiness.com/21 to download and print your copy. I’ll wait.
00:15:00
How Long It Takes to Form and Break Habits
Melina Palmer: Welcome back. Okay, before I say anything else about how a brand would use habit to its advantage, I need to tell you more about how habits are formed on an individual level, what habits really are, and how and where to interject for the most impact. Both if you are wanting to change your own, quote, bad habits, or looking to incorporate this into your messaging. So first things first. What is a habit? The official definition is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. And I mentioned the numbers at the beginning of the episode. But even before that, if I had asked you the question of how long does it take to make a habit and how long does it take to break a habit, you likely would have come up with an answer somewhere between 21 and 30 days, am I right? But where did that come from? How did that number come to be? And if that is truly the case, how come so many of us still struggle to eat right, exercise, not procrastinate, and a whole host of other bad habits? It’s because, unfortunately, that information is completely wrong and has been taken out of context since the insights were published nearly 60 years ago. Did you ever play telephone when you were a kid, where one person will whisper something into someone’s ear, and then they whisper what they heard into the next person’s ear, and they go around the circle until the last person announces what they heard? And it’s usually completely different than what the original words were. And everybody ends up laughing because it’s silly and random and ridiculous? Well, that’s pretty much what happened here. Maltz, a plastic surgeon in the 1950s, had noticed that it took about 21 days for his patients to get used to their new noses or to stop having phantom limb syndrome after having a leg or an arm amputated. And so when he published his book, Psycho Cybernetics, it included this information about habits. Well, sort of. What it actually said was these and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to gel. Did you hear the key term in there that so many missed in that telephone game? You probably missed it when I said it there, making it clear how this whole misconception happened. He said it requires a minimum of about 21 days. A minimum. That means it will always take longer than that. 21 days is the earliest you could expect a change to start to gel, to use his term, not the magic number that if you make it to three weeks you’re in. But that doesn’t sound as exciting to the brain and it quickly took fire with the wrong information. No matter what you hear, that is not a fact. It was never a fact and it’s being proven to be quite wrong.
The Problem with “Universal Truths”
Melina Palmer: Unfortunately, this is availability again. Episode 15 of this podcast. If enough people say it, the brain believes it and claims it as a universal truth that is hard to unlearn. Even after I have told you this, that 21 days is not the magic number for making or breaking a habit, and the upcoming study I’m about to reference has more information about that. And now you know it isn’t true, but your brain is still going to believe it. Your brain still holds this as a truth and the subconscious doesn’t want to give it up. It has a habit of using this point of reference, even though there are mountains of evidence proving it wrong. For example, how many people have given up coffee or sugar or swearing for Lent, or for more than 30 days for any other reason, only to find themselves right back in their old ways, even after they were good for such a long time? It’s because we have not truly understood habits properly and attacked them wrong.
The Truth About Habit Formation
Melina Palmer: So, getting back to the number of days it takes to change a habit, I’m sure you want me to give you a new magic number to replace 21 in your mind, and I feel like I need to prepare you for this. I’m going to tell you something now, and no matter how I prep you, you’re going to hate it.
00:20:00
Melina Palmer: Your subconscious is going to scream at you about how wrong it is. It’s going to go against what you want to hear and accept. But I want you to try and push through that to really hear what I have to say, okay? And know that these are results from scientific studies and research from many, many smart and amazing people over many years. Just try and remember that when I tell you what I’m about to tell you. Okay? All right, here goes. A 2009 study from the European Journal of Social Psychology found the average number of days it took to form a habit. In their case, it was eating fruit at lunch or running 15 minutes a day, things like that. The average number they found for forming a habit was 66. That wouldn’t be so bad, right? This is where framing can kill you. And check out episode 16 for more on that. You hear an average and think, great, that’s the number. Your brain assumes something when it hears the word average, but there are more questions you need to ask to really understand. And you know how much I love questions. If you have listened to episode four of this podcast, questions and answers, one of the questions you need to ask here is the range of days included in coming up with that average. An average of 66 days, when the total number of days ranged from 64 to 68, would be pretty solid evidence that that is a true average and something that you can predict behavior off of. I’m guessing you know that that’s not what we have here. The actual number of days ranged from 18 to 254 days. Wow, that is a big range. Which means the average doesn’t tell you anything at all. What this can tell you is that we approach habit changing all wrong. And while I’ve been referencing some big items here like sugar, I’m trying to stay away from addiction, which is a similar concept, but different than habits per se. Addiction has an entire avenue of study directed to it, and it’s very complex. Addictions are, like I said, they’re kind of like habits, but they’re much more difficult to change. And it has a different composition in the brain. And the case of messaging or branding, it can be relevant, but I’m just not going to dig into it much here.
The Four Phases of Habits
Melina Palmer: If I can say that we’ve been attacking habits wrong, that means there must be a right way, right? The good news is a lot more is being found out about habits, how they work, and what drives them, which can make it easier to know how to start or break them, which is exciting. Here’s what has been found and discovered. You can either take notes or you can download that free download the worksheet on the website at thebrainybusiness.com/21 to help you through this, because there are some really concrete steps here and it can be helpful to work through it. Okay, essentially, all habits are made up of four phases, cue craving, response, and reward. And yes, I’m going to break each one down for you and give you some examples of how they work. There are many articles and links in the show, notes for you to check out if you would like to do any additional reading, including two books, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear. I have referenced them throughout the episode, and again, there are a lot of articles in the show notes for you. You likely know, especially if you’re an avid listener of this podcast, that the human brain is driven by rewards. Whether it’s dopamine, oxytocin, or endorphins. Our brains are constantly seeking out rewards. It’s seeking them out and wants as many of them as possible. So this is why step four in the cycle of habits is so important. The reward habits form because your brain is trying to find predictable ways to get rewards.
00:25:00
Melina Palmer: Makes sense, and that is where the cue comes in. A cue is a signal to the brain that there is a reward around, and that instantly leads to a, craving. You want the thing not because of the thing, but because of the reward the brain will receive. And as we know, cravings can be hard to ignore. It can quickly become all your conscious brain can focus on, because remember who’s running the show. And until you respond to that craving and do something about it, most often giving the brain the thing it wants so it can earn its reward, it will keep nagging and nagging at you. When you give in to the craving and the brain gets the reward, you have a double whammy, because you just reinforced the original cue to make it even more powerful the next time. Even if you swear that this is the last time you’re going to give in to the particular craving, once you hear it laid out like this, it’s probably painfully obvious, a total smack my head moment. And, that should be a hint that we’re getting at the right path. The subconscious knows what it does. And when you say you do this and it says, yeah, I do that, it’s usually a pretty good sign. The thing we have done wrong in addressing habits in the past is to try and change the response, the actual habit, the thing you do to respond to the craving. But this is not where the real habit is formed. If you want to change a habit or start a new one, the cue and reward phases are where it’s at, because that is what’s driving the behavior. Craving and response are pretty easy to identify and likely why we focus on changing those parts. So I’m not going to dig too deep into those. Instead, let’s look at the cue and reward to identify your own habit. Start with the craving response space to figure out what you want to change. Either stop doing or start doing for ease. Let’s go with wanting to stop doing something. In the case of Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, it was his chocolate chip cookie habit. He wanted to stop craving and then giving in and eating chocolate chip cookies. So he started digging into the possible cues to isolate them. Cues can be almost anything, and they can vary from one person to the next. For example, the golden arches of McDonald’s may be a cue for someone who loves fast food, but just be background images for someone else. It all depends on what will provide your brain with the reward it seeks. The good news is, cues have been found to fall into one of five location, time, emotional state, other people, and an immediately preceding action to get at the cue. For his chocolate chip cookie habit. Every time Duhigg craved a chocolate chip cookie from the work cafeteria, he listed out the cues from each category that could have led to the craving by asking himself the following to get at location. The question is, where am I? His answer my desk. Next for time is a similarly easy question. What time is it? His answer on this particular entry was 03:36 p.m. then what is your emotional state? Answer board who else is around? No one. And finally, what action preceded the urge? Or you could have asked, what’s the last thing you did before you noticed the urge or craving? In this case, it was answered in email. And that’s it. Simple. He kept a log of potential cues for a while until a pattern emerged in one of the categories. In his case, it was the time of day. The craving would usually come between three and 04:00. Great. That’s one item identified. Okay, I know I said I wasn’t really going to get into cravings, but this one thing is important before we get to rewards. The thing to know about a craving is that you aren’t craving the thing you’re craving, but rather the reward it provides. So maybe you aren’t craving a chai tea latte, but you are craving the energy rush from the sugar. The craving is just the way the brain knows it can get that flood of reward it’s seeking out, and many different things can trigger a certain response. For example, as I mentioned on the herding episode,
00:30:00
Melina Palmer: oxytocin can be released when you kiss your significant other, when you socialize with a friend, or sing out loud in the car, or eat a piece of chocolate. If your brain only wants the oxytocin because it wants as much of it as it can get, you can theoretically find a replacement for the craving and the cue that triggers it by circumventing the bad craving and swapping it out with something that is better for you.
Understanding Rewards and Changing Habits
Melina Palmer: Okay, on to rewards. In the rewards category, you have to ask yourself, what is the reward my brain is seeking? In the case of a chocolate chip cookie, it’s easy to think it’s the surface item. I just want a cookie because they taste good. But it’s never that simple, right? As I hinted at in the cravings section, rewards are complicated. And there are actually many possible rewards tied to a cookie, including relief to hunger, in which case an apple or broccoli would do the trick. Or the energy from sugar. So black coffee or tea could replace that. Or the sweetness in which studies have shown putting a dab of artificial sweetener on your tongue can help with that urge or socialization. Is the cookie an excuse to see other people and engage where they happen to be? That is, the cafeteria or Starbucks. Or maybe it’s a break from work, so you could go for a walk or get up and stretch to fight the boredom. So he experimented with the rewards, similarly to how he tracked the potential cues. One day when he got the craving, he ate a cookie. The next time, had an apple, then a cup of coffee, then went for a walk, then chatted with colleagues. And over time, he realized that what he was really craving was the oxytocin that’s released during socialization, which I talked about on episode 19 about herding. Now, he knew the cue, the time of day, and the reward. His brain wanted socialization with colleagues, so he started to attack it head on every day. At 3:30, he got up from his desk and went to find a colleague to chat with for about ten minutes. It wasn’t immediately, but he said eventually the habit became going to find a friend. At 3:30, instead of going to get a chocolate chip cookie, he now gets up absentmindedly at 3:30 and finds someone to chat with. And that has now become the habit. And the cookies are a long forgotten craving of the past. One quick note on responses before I move on the response the actual habit can only occur if you’re able to do it. I know this sounds dumb, but bear with me. I work from home, which means all the snacks and bad foods of the world surround me. We’ve got little kids in the house. As long as those snacks are in the house, I know I have the potential to go grab them whenever I get a craving. But what if they’re not in the house? For me, soda is a terrible habit. Oh, Man, I love soda. Doctor Pepper is my drink of choice, though Cherry Coke can stand in when needed. I, over the years, have had several times where I’ve stopped drinking soda for years. And then I let a couple creeps back in when I get stressed. So I have new cues and triggers, and before I know it, I’m drinking soda every day like it’s going out of style. I start buying it and keeping it in the house. Bad idea. And feel like I can’t stop. So one easy thing to do is to not let it be in the house. If I find myself craving a soda, it isn’t as easy as walking the 27 steps to the kitchen anymore. Instead, I have to get the keys in my wallet, put on shoes, get in the car, drive to the store and buy one. It’s a lot more inconvenient, meaning it’s less likely to be a, potential response. And I don’t really crave it anymore. I remember how delicious it is, but my brain doesn’t queue for it the same way. And I can replace it with a different response that can give my brain the reward it’s looking for. Hopefully a healthier one. One other crazy brain trick before I move on is word choice.
00:35:00
Melina Palmer: Let me get back to my soda example. Let’s say I’m out at an event which happens a lot, and someone offers me a soda. They have a can of Doctor Pepper right there within my grasp. My brain starts to crave it and I can feel the change. But I have this very high on my conscious awareness, so I know I’m not going to take it. There are two responses I’m going to share with you, and they have a huge difference in changing behavior and sticking to a plan. So try to get into the state of your own desire to change, whether it’s Doctor Pepper, chocolate chip cookies, or wasting time on Instagram during the work day. And think about how you would naturally respond when someone offers you the thing you’re trying to stay away from. So if someone offers me the soda, and I know I’m not going to take it, I can say either, no, I can’t drink soda, or the very subtle difference of no, I don’t drink soda. In case you missed which word was different in the two scenarios, and there was only one word different. In the first example, I said can’t, and in the second, I said don’t. They’re basically the same word, right? Only two letters different. But remember how the brain associates it knows the implication of each. And the results of this simple change are amazing. Can you guess which one works better? I can’t is not your choice. It is instead a restriction. You really want to, but you can’t. Sad face it undermines your personal power. On the other hand, I don’t is empowering. This was your choice. It affirms the choice you made and makes you feel determined, full of willpower. Really the opposite of I can’t. And the difference is huge. One study around eating found that when half were instructed to say, I can’t eat candy and the other half said, I don’t eat candy. When asked to pick their thank you gift of either a chocolate bar or a granola bar, 64% of those who said I don’t went with the granola bar and only 39% of the I can’t ers chose that healthier option. In an even more amazing and extreme case in a study about working out, female participants were told to think to themselves at the times when they thought they might lapse on the program either an I don’t or an I can’t statement whether they were wanting to skip the gym or eat donuts as a snack or whatever it is. They would say I don’t skip workouts or I can’t skip workouts. Over the ten days, the participants had to check in and report whether the strategy was working or not, and they were sticking to the plan. At the end, eight out of the ten women with the I don’t approach were still in the program successfully. Eight out of ten, the I can’t group, only one in ten made it all the way through. So when trying to change your personal habits and when you start to feel you might slip on that cue craving reward loop, remember that you should be confident that you made this choice and confidently say, no, I don’t do that. It’ll make a big difference.
Personal Habit Change Example
Melina Palmer: Now that you know how habits are formed and have some tricks for how to change them, let me give you an example of a way I recently used this method to fix a bad habit I had during the work day. I tend to get distracted easily and I have a lot of potential notifications on my phone. As a solopreneur, I need to be on top of those notifications. It’s important that I answer emails, social media questions and other items promptly because that impact my brand. So I had many, many notifications and alerts set up on my phone and that is the default setting, which, as you learned from last week, takes effort to change. So my phone would buzz constantly with notifications. A few weeks ago, my husband pointed this out to me and suggested that potentially all the notifications coming through was making everything take longer. So obvious when he points it out, of course, and he recommended I go in and turn off the notifications. I’m also one of those people that hates seeing that little red circle with the number of emails I have waiting or any other sort of alert. So having those hanging over my head just drives me crazy. You start to feel like you can’t live without them. What if I don’t get those notifications. What will happen?
00:40:00
Melina Palmer: That’s the craving. Your brain wanting that reward. You feel like you need to answer every email the second it comes in, or at least see what it is. And what if someone’s asking a question on Instagram or mentions me in a tweet? The truth is, I can check it every couple of hours or a couple times a day and it will be fine. Now that the cue is gone, I don’t look at my phone as much. I can work for longer stretches without being interrupted, and I’m more productive. Sure, I get bored and I want to check it every so often, but I know I can tell myself I don’t check my accounts outside of the scheduled times I’ve set aside and feel empowered to wait.
Habitual Buying Decisions in Business
Melina Palmer: Okay, before I wrap up this episode, I promised I would tell you about ways to use this in your messaging and how it can differ if you are the market leader already, the thing being bought habitually, or if you are trying to break into that cycle. Let’s say you’re the head of marketing for Cheerios. Things are good. A lot of people buy Cheerios. You have a significant percentage of people who buy Cheerios for breakfast, either for themselves or for their kids. Moms feel this is a healthy, convenient breakfast, and it’s on their to buy grocery list every week. The habit is almost out of cereal. Time to get more Cheerios. Not we need more breakfast options, and they aren’t looking for a replacement. They know that their breakfast of choice is Cheerios. So that’s what they get when in the cereal aisle. They don’t even look at other options. It’s Cheerios all the way. Those, are the people who buy your cereal habitually, and you don’t really want to mess with that. It’s good to think of cues to trigger cravings for Cheerios, like putting boxes of Cheerios near the bananas or near the milk, for example. Find other ways to get people who already want Cheerios to associate more things with Cheerios. But what if you started to notice all the other flavors of cereal out there? In a world where people can choose Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, how can you compete? You need to do something before you get squashed out by these sugar bombs. We won’t let people move away from Cheerios to a completely different brand. You say, we will stop this before it gets to be too much of an issue. And then you come out with Frosted Cheerios, Chocolate Cheerios, Fruity Cheerios, Cinnamon Cheerios, Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. Any cereal out there and you find your way to add it to a Cheerio flavor. Boom. And to not dilute the Cheerios yellow box, all the flavors match the colors of the cereals you’re competing with to make it really clear what you’re doing. And you’re going to give coupons for all the new flavors to the loyal customers who are buying Cheerios regularly in case they’re also getting, another brand of a sweet cereal too. Seems logical enough, right? Here’s the problem. You’ve interrupted their habitual sequence. That person who only considered Cheerios and nothing else has now been introduced to having chocolate cereal in the morning, or frosted or cinnamon or whatever. They might never have tried those other brands before, but now that they’ve had their horizons opened up, tried something new and liked it potentially more than the Cheerios they were having every day before, because, you know, sugar, they’re more likely to try the originals of other cereals. After all, if Frosted Cheerios are an attempt to be sort of like Frosted Flakes, maybe Frosted Flakes taste even better. You’ve potentially shot yourself in the foot by turning your habitual buyer into someone who likes to experiment with breakfast cereals, and they might never come back to you. This is why, as the brand leader, you don’t want to do too much to shake things up or rock the boat. Coca-Cola has a different strategy than Pepsi, and if you’re Jones Soda or some other off brand, you need to use coupons and different strategies to try and interject your brand into the mix when that cue or craving starts.
Case Study: Jones Soda
Melina Palmer: I mentioned Jones Soda, which a lot of the listeners might not be familiar with. They’re a bottling company in the Seattle area with many traditional flavors like Cola and lemon lime, but they also come out with weird flavors like turkey and gravy at Thanksgiving, which sounds repulsive but apparently was so popular within its initial launch, it sold out within 2 hours.
00:45:00
Melina Palmer: They went on to make all sorts of random flavors for various holidays, from Valentines and Easter to Hanukkah and Halloween, and they donate a portion of their proceeds to various charities. They got a large cult following for being so different and unique, but it’s hard to get people to try brands other than Coke or Pepsi since they’re so dominant. So they managed to get an exclusive deal with the then named Quest Field and were the only soda served for Seahawks games for three years. They put special player images on the bottles and got a lot more people to try Jones, and I’m sure they got some people to have Jones be their soda of choice. They were able to interject themselves when they knew there would be a queue. Say you’re eating something salty. You now get a craving for soda. That sugar that you want to have to wash it down with. You’re in a confined space and the only option available to you is Jones Soda. Maybe you wanted a Coke or a Pepsi, but the only way that you can get to that reward is to buy the soda, the sugar that happens to be available. They were able to break in by being different, showcasing why they’re different than the big brands with a, kitschy personality and finding a way to make it so people would have to try their soda or choose no soda at all. They also had a deal for a few years with Alaska and Horizon Airlines as, the only soft drink served on board. While they will never overturn Coke or Pepsi, they’ve been able to carve out a nice niche for themselves and built a solid brand. When you’re not the market leader, you need to try a little harder, put in some hustle, and fight to break through the habitual buying cycle. But if the market leader tries to respond in kind, it could actually damage their space in the market. The habits of your current and potential customers are important to consider when building out your strategies. This means everything from queues and rewards to your percentage in the market. And because this is so complex, I’m sure you can appreciate that there are many, many more examples I want to provide with tips and tricks for using the habitual buying sequence to your advantage in your business. And because this is already getting to be a pretty long episode, I’m making it in into a two part series. We’ve also had a, lot of foundations episodes in a row. So next week’s episode is going to step back out of foundations and into the power of habit and how you can use it to your advantage in your business. It’s going to be awesome and you will not want to miss it. So if you’re not yet subscribed to the podcast, now would be a great time to do so. In the podcast app you’re listening to just tap that little subscribe button. It takes half a second, but it will ensure that the episodes get right to you when they come out and you don’t miss anything. And if you’re listening to the full episode on YouTube, you can also subscribe to the channel to get all the episodes when they come out on Fridays, as well as any exclusive content I put on the YouTube channel and there is a link in the show notes. I appreciate you taking the time to listen and for subscribing. It means so much to me and I truly appreciate each and every one of you. So that’s it for episode 21, but it’s more of a to be continued as we will expand even more on habitual buying, messaging and branding strategies next week. And don’t forget to download your free worksheet at thebrainybusiness.com/21 to keep you company during the week. And while you’re there, check out the show notes to go back to all those episodes I mentioned during this episode to help you really brush up on the concepts and be ready to go next week. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.
00:49:45
Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Brainy Business podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
