Brand Habits
You need good brand habits to build a brand.
Brand building has one thing in common with fitness and financial wealth creation – both need consistency over a long duration of time.
We solve this in our personal lives by building habits.
Habits form because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit
What if we used the same approach to create organizational habits?
Marketing and brand building is about consistency, so why not create good habits that you and the team can use to build your brand.
Instead of looking at short-term campaigns and sprints that are disjointed in their objectives, why not develop brand habits. Small, simple and consistent actions you can take as a brand that will add up to something significant in a few years time.
Building a brand is like going to the gym. It’s important, but not always urgent on our list of tasks.
“Individuals have habits, groups have routines. Routines are the organizational analogue of habits”.
Geoffrey Hodgson
Charles Duhigg describes keystone habits as those that over time transforms everything. A brand habit can be considered a keystone habit because of its power to transform a business, the work culture, customer experience and product quality.
What you can do to build a brand habit:
Take a stock of where your brand stands today, how you see it, how your customer sees it and how your employees see it? Are they all in alignment? Where do you want your brand to go in 5 or 10 years time?
Habits are reward loops that is triggered by a cue. A routine follows and there is a reward at the end of it. This reward creates the craving for the habit to become a loop.
Do you want to establish a clear brand identity and personality? Make a routine to infuse this identity and personality into every brand communication.
Your brand is targeting a specific audience and a specific need? Build a set of routines for different teams/members to continuously engage with them at different stages of the customer lifecycle.
Questions to ask yourself for creating brand habits:
- What are the cues for your employees and teams that triggers a routine?
- What are the sequence of steps you want codified and committed to muscle memory? How will you build the muscle memory for your teams?
- What reward can you design at the end of it that turns them into habit loops?
The difference between great brands and the average ones is the consistency with which they articulate, reinforce and demonstrate their brand values.
Good brand habits are the secret to their consistency.
Brand habits can also be used outside of the company, in your marketing and advertising.
Habits to drive customer adoption and influence customer behaviour.
Habits are so strong that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense
Case Study: How Pepsodent changed consumer behaviour to become one of the most sold products in the world
In the 1940s, only 7% of America brushed their teeth regularly. In a decade since the first Pepsodent ad, that number had changed to 65%.
Claude Hopkins was asked to take over the struggling Pepsodent brand. The first change he made after studying the market was to link brushing with the vanity of looking good.
While it wasn’t factually correct, he convinced people through the ads that a thin film, which naturally occurs and which toothpaste has no major effect on, is the cause for bad looking teeth. Pepsodent was then positioned as the solution to a beautiful smile.
The cue then became beautiful teeth every time someone looked in the mirror. That led to more people brushing their teeth. To make this a habit, Pepsodent then added a mint flavour which left a refreshing feeling in the mouth. The brains then started to crave that sensation.
Case Study: How changing the focus from bad smell to rewarding with a pleasant fragrance transformed Febreze
P&G almost killed this product before it went on to become a hit. They spent tons of money developing the cleaning product, but a lack of resonance in marketing almost cost them.
It was initially positioned as a product that removed bad smells for people who smoked or had pets at home. But it turned out that these people were so used to the smell, they didn’t feel the need to remove the bad odour.
When they tried this product with a new target audience, the ones who spent time cleaning and keeping the houses tidy, the initial response from them was lukewarm. But when they dug deeper into the habits of this persona, they found the insight they were looking for.
Febreze added fragrance to their cleaning product and the reward of a fresh smell at the end of a cleaning chore turned it into a habit. People were then using Febreze just for the smell, even when there was no cleaning needed.
Operant conditioning is the idea that a person’s behavior is modified by its consequence. People strive to do things that make them feel rewarded.
There are however dark sides to the use of such powerful psychological techniques. The fast food we eat today has been designed to keep to trigger cravings and that has led to unfortunate consequences of obesity and other health problems.
5 Brand Habits you should build
- Create brand identity guidelines and follow them in all your communication
- Establish a brand voice and tone and filter every message through it
- Brand values don’t change often. Align your teams to it. Reinforce often.
- Evaluate and refine your brand positioning. Let it influence your marketing and product decisions.
- Weigh all strategic and tactical decisions you or the teams make against your brand values.
