Let’s say you’ve built the next big thing. You’re ready to take on the world and make billions. Your product is amazing and you’re convinced you’ve bested the competition. As a point of fact, you know you offer the very best solution in your market. But here’s the rub. If your competition has established stronger customer habits than you have, you’re in trouble. The cold truth is that the better product does not necessarily win. However, there’s hope. The right strategy can crowbar the competition’s users’ habits, giving you a chance to win them over. To understand how to change customer habits, we first need to understand what habits are and how they take hold. Simply put, habits are behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. Research shows almost half of what we do, day in and day out, is driven by these impulsive behaviors. Consider just about any product you find yourself using without thinking and you’ll find a hook. Do you sometimes check your phone without really knowing why? Hook. Ever opened Facebook or Twitter to do just one thing only to find yourself scrolling and tapping 30 minutes later? Hook. Have you ever found yourself unable to stop playing a game like Candy Crush Saga or Angry Birds? Hook, hook, and more hooks. [Read: Are EVs too expensive? Here are 5 common myths, debunked] Hooks have four basic parts: a trigger, action, reward and investment. User habits are valuable precisely because they do such a good job of keeping competitors out, making it exceptionally difficult for a new company to shake users from their existing routines. Here are the four ways fledgling products can win over users from the competition and successfully migrate them from one product habit to another.
Though it’s excruciatingly simple, understanding Hauptly’s first principles yield big results. Removing steps between the user’s recognition of a need and the satiation of that desire is at the core of all innovation, from the cotton gin to the iPhone. Products that can shuttle customers through the four steps of the hook more quickly than competitors, stand a good chance of winning them over to new routines. For example, take the corporate collapse of Blockbuster at the hands of Netflix. Customers could watch the same movies at relatively similar prices from either movie rental company. Yet, the ease of having a film always ready to watch, versus needing to drive to a store to pick up the flick, delivered the reward faster. The ease of satiating the need and passing through the hook more quickly made all the difference. Movie enthusiasts migrated their habits to Netflix and Blockbuster subsequently filed for bankruptcy. For example, take Snapchat, the massively popular messaging app, which 77% of American college students say they use every day. The company is rumored to have turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer by Facebook, conceivably prompted by Mark Zuckerberg’s fear of losing his grip on college kids’ habits. But why do so many users impulsively open Snapchat instead of Facebook? For many people, Snapchat is more rewarding. Whereas using Facebook involves scrolling through a cluttered newsfeed of ads, posts from distant acquaintances, and messages from tragically uncool relatives, Snapchat delivers pure high-octane excitement. A defining Snapchat feature is that messages sent through the app can self-destruct — the receiver has just a few seconds to view the image before it’s gone. Facebook posts stay on the Net forever, whereas Snapchat gives users more freedom to share with, shall we say, indiscretion. In a recent survey, 14% of users admitted to sexting on Snapchat. Though the study found that sharing pics of naughty bits doesn’t occur often, it is one example of what makes the app more enticing. The ability to share spontaneous (and often embarrassing) images without fear they’ll linger on the web generates more interesting messages for the receiver and therefore increases the likelihood of using the app. If a user was to receive two messages simultaneously, one a message on Facebook and the other on Snapchat, it’s the more rewarding app that gets clicked. Every few years, a new way of engaging customers becomes possible. What I call an “interface change,” reshuffles the deck of user behavior and creates new opportunities to form habits. For example, successive interface changes occurred with adoption of the personal computer, then widespread Internet connectivity, then mobile devices, and now the coming of wearables. Each created an opportunity to shift customer behavior out of existing routines and into new, more frequently used interfaces. For example, though Microsoft Office is still the world’s most popular productivity software, the suite has come under attack by rivals such as Google and Apple who each removed a major barrier to start using their software by making it free and easy to use. When Google Docs first launched, it provided a fraction of the functionality offered by Office. But at the time using Office required downloading and paying for the software while Google Docs provided immediate entry. Over time, learning how to use Google Docs, creating new files, and inviting others to share those documents online, all made leaving difficult. The more the product was used, the more the habit took hold. This article originally appeared on Nir & Far. Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir blogs at NirAndFar.com. Get a complimentary Indistractable workbook here.
