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Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore | 
| Author: Neale Martin
Publisher: FT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 95978
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 0131357956
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.8342
EAN: 9780131357952
Publication Date: July 6, 2008
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Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
80% of new products fail. Billions of advertising pounds are wasted every year. Even "satisfied customers" abandon companies at the drop of a hat. How can this be? How can so many brilliant marketers and product developers be failing so thoroughly? Here's how: they've focused their vast resources almost exclusively on the conscious mind, but it's the unconscious mind that controls 95% of human behaviour. In Habit, Dr. Neale Martin presents powerful new research that reveals how the mind actually works and explains in practical detail the implications of this new science for marketers and product developers. You'll learn why 50 years of marketing theory is deeply flawed, how your customers' unconscious minds thwart your marketing campaigns, and how to identify what customers really want when they don't even know. Using Martin's techniques, you can not only avoid marketing and product failures: you can finally achieve the twin holy grails of marketing: higher customer retention, and greater long-term profitability.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
Don't ignore customer habits - change them! Neale Martin gives brand marketers a lot more constructive power. November 30, 2008
Marketers are often under the illusion that the things they do - the ads, the promotions, the product development - are the sole levers that will lead to success or otherwise. We often forget that the other player - the customer - has a few levers of their own. One of these levers is the "off lever" and by this I mean the propensity of consumers to switch off completely and run on habit.
Dr Martin really explored this when he was involved in alcohol counselling - and through his understanding of the mechanics of human habit he then stood back and looked at how consumers operate.
Put simply we generally run on habit. Having formulated a preferred brand, and the few underpinning rules or heuristics to support that decision, we then switch off unless something disrupts the pattern.
In the view of Martin some 95% of consumer decisions are hardly decisions at all: they're habitual patterns. You reach for the familiar peanut butter without actually reading the label. That's how branding works really well.
But it is also how new brands, and new line extensions and new ideas can founder really badly. If you launch a better peanut butter - and it tests really, really well in sensory research, and in the focus groups they love that new pack! alas, in the supermarket it dies a quiet death, along with 80% of other new launches. Somehow the new launch has failed to break those consumer habits.
Shoppers behave, metaphorically, like supertankers. They can't steer nimbly to new offers and new ideas. They're set on the course of well established habits.
Neale Martin explores this in great depth (I must add, he cites the work of New Zealand based Alastair Gordon, and of myself - we've worked in this territory together: Alastair really introduced me and many others to the science of heuristics,) and in conclusion delivers for readers a four step programme to behavioural marketing: looking at the way we can "train" consumers to break their habits.
This introduces entirely new ways that you might consider for your next round of brand research and long-term strategy.
- First, we look at context and habit formation - the way consumers develop their routines.
- Next he suggests methods of training consumers - giving them the opportunity to repeat, easily, some new behaviour.
- The next two steps consist of reinforcement and the offering of cues - to retrigger the new habits.
In breaking things down this way, Neale does us the favour of showing us how the customer experience doesn't follow the hoary old AIDA model whereby advertising and awareness drive everything (a model developed in the 1890s, maybe it is just a little superceded) but rather follows a rather more personal chain of events from discovery, trial, learning and habit formation.
For that reason the book, while deceptively simple and well written, is quietly provocative. Neale Martin is more than a theoretician too: his work in the mobile phone market has resulted in a quite revolutionary marketing approach by North American player Sprint. The design of their entire system revolves around developing in their customers some powerful habits that work for the customer, but certainly bring greater loyalty (and I suppose profits) to Sprint.
This is well worth a read. I concur that habit is a force that marketers ignore: what Dr Martin establishes quite clearly is that we ignore this force at our peril.
Must read for all marketers and managers November 23, 2008
Takes a simple premise, most of our customer purchase behavior is done on autopilot, and goes about explaining why so much of our marketing ideas don't work. Makes sense, is readily applicable, and a great read.
Give it a 6th star! November 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
You will yellow pen this book to death! Plan on buying a second just to have a clean copy. Page after page has insightful behavioral understanding that marketers have not necessarily ignored, but are only learning about now thanks to the evolution of modern scans. Today, can we see and understand the way we receive and react to stimuli. In HABIT, Neale Martin has brought us to the new science of positioning to the way the brain works. This book is for anyone in business or human sciences.
 After reading this book one will definitely be reminded that selling one product at a time is not the ONLY way to go. October 19, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book was kind of good. It was certainly better than OK, but it didn't set my world on fire. Its message is something any marketer should consider. However, I wasn't particularly impressed with the author's writing ability. Some of the chapters were overly technical. Some of the points made are arguably bunk. And I didn't think the chapters flowed from 1 to 13.
What I got from this book is that marketers can sell to customers one product at a time (and waste their time and money). Or they can sell to the customer the first time and let the customer habitually buy the product on autopilot thereafter. Some call this "Customer Loyalty Marketing." It would be nice if there really was a way to do the second way exclusive of the first. But I don't think it can be done.
If you are a stock trader trying to make a buck playing with stock, then you can read books that advocate Technical Analysis. And you can read books that advocate Fundamental Analysis. Each book will probably say their way is better. However, in reality, the most successful traders are ones who use both ways to analyze stocks. I mention this because I think the best marketers are the ones who have marketing plans that involve selling one product at a time and also involve creating purchasing habits in their customers. By the way, the book's title probably should have been PURCHASING HABITS, and not just "Habit."
The instant book being reviewed seems to promote the idea that marketers are wasting their time selling one product at a time. And it does this without writing a clear easy-to-follow set of chapters that do not build upon each other. As a result, I don't buy into the author's message. However, after reading this book one will definitely be reminded that selling one product at a time is not the ONLY way to go. 3.7 stars!
PS. Take a look at the Search Inside feature Amazon provides for this book. There you can examine the Table of Contents and get a better feel for what this book covers.
It's automatic September 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This short and useful book's Big Idea:what we do is automatic. People take decisional shortcuts because it makes their lives easier. They are unaware of even doing so. What's this mean for business and marketing? With a customer or clinet, toss out the consultant idea of doing a satisfaction survey---it only reminds them that they have options and interurpts the automatic decision making, elevating your service to the attention of the "executive" mind. Reinforce at the right times: salepeople entertain before the prospect makes a purchase and thus the prospect thinks if I buy, then the good stuff stops so they don't. The timing of the conditioning is ,well, the cart before the horse. Always be honest and protect the brand. Customers are constantly scanning to see if you do. Appeal to emotions. Facts and benefits get you no where. There is lots more. A good book for shaping how you look at selling and business development.
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