Have you ever watched people walk into a bathroom over the course of a regular work day? I have. How about the recurring weekly staff meeting? Ever notice how people sit in their “assigned seats” every time?
Ovid and Aristotle were talking about “habits” long before behavioral psychology came to be. What’s interesting about their observations of human behavior is that not much has changed since 25 BC. I mean, yes, we have more sophisticated neuroscience to explain our behaviors, but at the core, our instinctive and habitual behaviors haven’t change a whole lot.
Habit drives a lot of consumer choice. We have consumers – lots of ‘em – on camera – in stores – telling us, “well, I always come here…it’s just a habit I guess.” They don’t even necessarily think about which store to go to. It’s an unconscious, habitual decision: I go here for groceries, here for napkins, here for appliances, and here for aspirin. So if we understand the habits, we can redirect the choices, and get your brand into the consideration set.
The process of finding and pressing the proper buttons to get into the consideration set is to understand “reasoned choice,” not the unconscious type above, but the subconscious influencers of how people think about things. The good news is, most reasoned choice behavior is the result of the importance of social acceptance to the individual’s emotional satisfaction. So, much of what we decide is the result of status seeking or managing our downside.
At heart, we’re all just status-ticians. Give me the most (+) with the least (-) and I’m in. Who says we’re not good at math?
