The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Chapter 7 opens with Andrew Pole, a statistician for Target whose job it was to track and predict consumers’ spending habits. Target’s leaders sought to increase its marketing to pregnant women, who represent a high-spending sector of the American population. Although Target already collected a significant amount of data on each individual customer, including address, marital status, age, and career, it was still difficult to determine just who among Target’s shoppers was pregnant. To address this gap, Pole and Target’s other researchers learned to track a woman’s spending habits to determine if she was pregnant. For example, Target learned that pregnant women buy higher amounts of vitamins, lotions, and cotton balls.

Alan Andreasen, a UCLA visiting professor in 1984, investigated why consumers alter their spending habits. His findings pointed to major life events, such as marriage, having a baby, divorce, a new job, or a recent move, as drivers for such chance: “What he discovered has become a pillar of modern marketing theory: People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event” (191).

Duhigg moves to the American music industry for his second case study. In 2003, OutKast released the song “Hey Ya!” Although the tune was catchy and promised to be a smash hit, both the record company and radio DJs across the country struggled to convince the American public to love the song. The reason, they determined, was that “Hey Ya!” sounded too different from other music, meaning listeners only wanted to hear it infrequently. DJs learned to play “Hey Ya!” sandwiched between two more familiar-sounding songs. Duhigg calls this practice the “Familiarity Loop,” where companies sandwich an unfamiliar product between two familiar products. He provides the example of butchers attempting to sell organ meat to American consumers during World War II, when consumers could not easily access choice cuts of meat. When these organ meats were churned, encased, and repackaged into something familiar, Americans learned to eat them.