9. Behavioral Marketing^[1]: Becoming Your Customer’s Habit

^[1] Behavioral marketing has been used narrowly as a term to describe tracking behavior on web sites, but that function is more commonly referred to as behavioral targeting. In this book, behavioral marketing refers to a broad range of marketing activities designed to elicit specific behaviors leading to habit formation.

Increasing competitive intensity seems to be one of the few constants in today’s business environment. Customers are inundated with thousands of brands, many more thousands of advertising messages a day, and an ever-changing landscape of brick-and-mortar and electronic distribution channels. Creating a sustainable competitive advantage in this environment is increasingly difficult because everybody is fighting for the same piece of real estate—a position in the executive mind of customers. But as we have seen throughout this book, they are fighting the wrong fight on the wrong battlefield.

The real fight for customers is taking place in their unconscious, habitual minds. I call this process behavioral marketing, which seeks to make purchase and repurchase so automatic that customers do not have to think. To win this battle, companies need to approach the process of winning and keeping customers from a behavioral perspective. Although attitudes, emotions, and beliefs play a role in purchase and usage, their impact is limited to early stages of habit formation.

Creating a universal process for customer habituation across industries is impossible, but several components of habit formation can serve as a blueprint. Let’s break this into two parts: habit formation and habit maintenance.