Understanding habit formation is the foundation of many marketing and safety campaigns. In this article, we discuss the 4 rules of habit formation, and a couple of cast studies where they can be ethically applied to both your clients and your staff.
What are habits?
A habit is a small routine or behaviour that is normally triggered subconsciously and repeated regularly. Understanding how small habits work and be chained together can lead to major change. Let's take a look at the British Olympic Cycling Team.
Prior to 2003, the Cycling Team had a mediocre track record. In nearly 100 years they had only won a single silver medal in the Olympics and had never won the Tour de France. Their performance was so bad that one of the top bike manufacturers refused to sell bikes to them as they were afraid seeing the team using their bikes would hurt sales. However, things began to change when they hired Dave Brailsford as their new performance director.
Brailsford started a relentless commitment to a strategy known as ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’. He looked at everything he could think of that goes into riding a bike—if he could get many 1% improvements in every aspect it would aggregate into a significant performance increase.
They started making minor improvements to the bikes, started using biofeedback sensors on their riders and looked at the whole delivery chain. Riders were asked to wear heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature and different fabrics were tested in a wind tunnel to see which gave the least resistance. They tested for the best muscle gel, and got a surgeon to teach their staff how to wash their hands correctly to prevent illness. They determined the best mattress and pillows for their riders and even had the insides of their vans painted white to spot specks of dust that could interfere with the bikes.
As these small changes mounted, the results began to become apparent. Within five years, Brailsford's cycling team was dominating road and track cycling events internationally. In the 2008 Beijing Olympic games, the team won 60% of the gold medals available, and at the 2012 London Olympic games they set nine Olympic records and seven world records. The team went on to win the Tour de France five times in the following six years.
It's easy to underestimate how making small changes to your behaviour in one defining moment can lead to major change. We often try to convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action, but as we saw with the British Olympic Cycling Team, it was numerous small changes that led to massive success. Note that it might take a while before the benefits become apparent. It took the cycling team five years before their improvements resulted in their winning streak.
By adopting the same mindset as Brailsford, we can build habit changes to lead to similar performance increases for you, your brand and your marketing. Just a 1% improvement every day results in being 37 times better over a year!
The four laws of good habit formation
A habit is developed through four stages:
If any of the four stages are deficient in any way, it will not become a habit. Clear (2018) proposed four related laws of behaviour change, which can be used in order to develop good habits:
Habits can also work against you too. Understanding how they work will give you some insight how to break them. If you invert the above laws, you can start to break bad habits too. For example, if you remove yourself from sensing the cue, or make the response hard, you can start to override the habit.
Applying the four laws to your brand
Everyone wants more sales, to win a gold medal or get ahead in their career. However, the people who succeed are those that focus on how to get there, rather than the reward itself. Instead of focusing on goals (for example, gaining more clients), focus on what steps you can take to reach that goal instead, such as tuning your systems to increase referrals. Your systems include hiring the right staff, updating your marketing campaigns and trying out new product ideas and recording the results of these mini experiments.
In addition to applying the four laws of habit formation to how you run your business, they can be applied to the design of your products and marketing too. Let's take a look at some examples applied to both.
Starting with the cue, the most obvious cue is one that attracts your attention, which is why adverts tend to be large, bright, loud, and as eye-catching as possible. Conversely, negative actions (such as cancelling a membership/account on a website) tend to be hidden. In the workplace, consider asking employees to remove distracting applications and phones. Make sure important tasks are prominent instead.
The second law is make it attractive. Explain the benefits of your products in a clear and compelling way. Make sure you choose the correct words that make your product beautiful in the client's mind, and consider personalising it if possible. Can you use the clients first name and their occupation to make your product feel like it's just for them? Also consider highlighting social norms – people are easily swayed by the crowd and many will purchase something if they feel it helps them associate with a desirable social group more.
The third law is make it easy. Amazon have kept asking themselves how they can make ordering and shipping easier since they were founded in 1994. What barriers can you remove for your clients to be able to better access your services? Ask this question again and again.
When it comes to the workplace, remove ambiguity from performing tasks by streamlining the process and providing prominent guidance where appropriate.
The fourth law is make it satisfying. The speed of getting the reward is critical – people need to get an immediate sense of satisfaction, even if it's in a small way. If possible, augment it with some surprise or delight as well. Can you bring some satisfaction during the process too? In the workplace, celebrate good habits and give encouragement throughout the day—this will help motivate your staff.
Apply all four of these levers, and the likelihood of a given behaviour goes through the roof. Watch out for expecting tangible benefits immediately though—we often expect a linear improvement every time we try something new, and when we don't see it we get disappointed and demotivated. Lots of small changes have to compound over time to create an avalanche of good results.
Conclusion
Understanding the four laws of behaviour change gives a good grounding in both how to market to your clients and implementing organisational change for your brand. It also makes your more aware of the subconscious decisions that affect your everyday life. To become a leader in your market, keep making those small changes and it will eventually pay off.