5 Secrets to Building Customers' Habits

From a company that led the way--still relevant today

This is part 2 of a 2-part series on innovation and habit change.

In last week’s post I warned you: Changing your customers’ habits is one of the toughest challenges in business. Humans are programmed to do what they’ve always done and many a “great idea” has been crushed by inertia. But habits must change for a startup or almost any new product to succeed.

All of us are living examples of successful product launches through new habits. We’ve got homes full of gadgets that we didn’t grow up on. We eat new foods, start hobbies, download new apps, and read a LOT of books about changing our habits. We do want to improve our lives, and we are willing to change our ways if we can get some help in the process…

Lessons from the Biggest Habit Builder

I started my marketing career at Procter & Gamble, a nearly 200-year-old company that has probably created more product categories—and billions more habits—than another other business on the planet. Rituals like brushing your teeth with toothpaste, using a hair conditioner, applying deodorant, and putting disposable diapers on a baby are all habits popularized by P&G products and marketing.

I started at the company in the late 1990s on a business unit charged with creating new categories of cleaning products. Our group launched wild successes, including Swiffer and Febreze—as well as a few failures like Dryel (home dry cleaning kit) and Fit Fruit & Vegetable Wash (my brand, a natural soap for produce). We had access to brilliant PhDs who spent their days studying how to create consumer habits. I sat next to them in focus groups, took careful notes, and continued to apply their learnings over the years. Now I’m sharing them with you. It’s not an exhaustive list, and there are certainly many ways to execute them, but now you can benefit from what we learned from over a century of success…

1. Reduce Barriers

Habit change is hard because your customer must consciously behave differently. We humans hate this, so your job is to make the new habit as easy as possible to take up. And it’s got to be done at each stage of the adoption process. Early on, your marketing messages must clearly communicate the 10x way your product is superior and worth the effort. Early on for Febreze, the key was communicating that it eliminates odors for good. Recently, Canva became a multi-billion-dollar company by making it dead simple and cheap to create assets for company marketing.

To further improve your odds of success, look for (and promote) ways that your new product will reduce the work and steps that the customer has to take. With our recruiting solution, Hearty, we share how our CTO screens initial job candidates so your CTO doesn’t have to. Slack gained traction because it vastly reduces inter-company email.

To get people to the next stage—Trial—look specifically for ways to reduce the risk of wasting money. This is where free samples and free trials are most successful. In the software world, we’re seeing a movement toward Product Led Growth, where individual employees buy software with their company credit cards. As this spreads internally, the enterprise sales team approaches corporate purchasing and says, “Look, 100 of your company’s teams are already using, loving, and buying our software. Let’s make a (risk-free) deal.”

And once the product is in customers’ hands, improve the odds of their Repeat use and purchase by helping them out along the way. Software companies do this by watching initial users and sending frequent tips via email, and tapping into their customer success teams for hand-holding.

2. Provide a Link to the Familiar

Instead of creating a completely new habit, you can win by tweaking a current habit. For example, most of us have gotten into a recycling habit by adding a bin next to the trash. When throwing something away, we drop it in one bin or the other. This idea is prominent in Atomic Habits by James Clear, who suggests we start a new habit by coming up with a link to a current one—e.g., “Before I take a shower each morning, I’m going to do 50 sit-ups.”

Some everyday product categories found success in this way. P&G got people to add a cap of Downy in the washing machine along with the Tide. Nicorette was launched as a chewing gum because many smokers already use gum frequently. The first iPhone looked like a mini desktop display. At our influencer marketing company, we sold our product as a media campaign, with consumer impressions as the deliverable. Big brands were in the longstanding habit of buying all other media this way, and they didn’t know how to value the Likes and Followers that our competitors sold.

In software, we see this with the UX/UI of the apps we use every day. There’s a reason that so many websites, buttons, menus, colors, and feature names are the same—users are more comfortable with things they already know how to use.

3. Encourage Frequent Use

Non-scientific studies suggest that it takes doing something new 26 times before it becomes a habit. Your numbers may vary, but there’s no doubt that customers must get their reps in for a change to stick. You’re familiar with this in the badges that every software product seems to be using today. Sure, it’s a somewhat cheesy, overdone tactic to get a badge for frequent use of your Peloton machine or beer-logging app, but it works!

With software, you can also reward and remind people of your product by programming automated messages triggered by user behavior. I’ve recently been impressed by Grammarly, which sends a weekly email showing how much you wrote last week and what productivity percentile you’re in compared to their other users. It reminds me of the product, reinforces its value, and gets my competitive pride juices going. (99-percentile, baby!)

4. Actively Engage the Customer

The more senses and forms of engagement that are used in a new product, the more chances for a habit to take hold. Peloton found success by putting test units staffed with sharp salespeople in malls. Seeing, feeling, trying, and hearing directly about the product was much more powerful than a video on a website.

And the more we’ve bought into a habit change, the higher the chance we’ll follow through. Carol Berning, one of our amazing P&G PhDs, led research showing that when you ask customers, “How do you think you’ll use this?” they will consume 50% more of the product. These people created a connection in their minds and planned for behavior change, and tended to follow through. You should ask this magic question to every new user of your product. It doesn’t matter what they say, and you don’t need to know. Just. Ask. The. Question.

5. Provide Social Reinforcement

As social creatures, we humans usually look at each other for shortcuts to success. The more we see others doing something, the more interested we are in trying that product, building the habit, and bragging about it. Monkey see, monkey do.

When people do things together they tend to stick with it. They get encouragement from each other, enjoy the bonding process, and don’t want to look bad by bailing out. This is the secret to success behind Alcoholics Anonymous and Weight Watchers.

Have you noticed that nearly every software company now has an annual client event? Special invitations, keynote speakers, and partner booths create a multi-day ritual where users of the product come to learn about how they can get more out of the software. Going to these events is like mass indoctrination into a cult you can’t quit. Oh, and your company is paying to send you to their marketing show. See you at Dreamforce!

Social reinforcement has become the biggest opportunity for growth since my days at P&G. Thanks to social media, we are more connected in more ways than ever before. Social media allows people to come together in communities for mutual support. It also provides a way for your customers to share (and thus reinforce their habit with) your product.

In writing this post, I dusted off some documents that I haven’t looked at in decades. A lot has changed since then. We’re spending our time and money on digital habits that sounded like sci-fi back then. But what’s fascinating to me is that these same tips that helped categories like detergent and deodorant take off are just as valuable in a world of mobile apps and B2B software. The stuff we buy and use keeps changing, but our human programming is the same. If you study the program, you can find a way to win. Just make sure you’re using it for good…

Bob Gilbreath is a 2x-exit entrepreneur and co-founder of Hearty, a curated matchmaking service that combines top software developers with early-stage, venture-backed startups.