It's a brief that we've all seen many times across many sectors - a desire to create a habit in consumers. Be it eating fruit and veg, drinking water, reading a particular newspaper, taking a probiotic drink, etc, we're challenged to create a daily habit in consumers' routines.
Habit-forming equates to frequent communications, but we've often searched for an insight into how long we need to communicate for. How long does it take for someone to form a habit, and therefore how long should we keep up the pressure?
A favourite response to this has been 21 days. This magic number appears in many a Google search against the subject. What's handy about 21 days is that it's a friendly number to the media planner. Three weeks is pretty do-able for the majority of media plans, especially TV.
However, new research shows that this convenient number is not the planning shortcut we might have hoped. This post at PsyBlog describes the findings, but the main points are:
- The average length of time for a habit to form is 66 days.
- There's huge variance according to what habit someone is trying to get into (from 18 to 254 days in the habits studied).
- Habit-forming is a curved function, progress towards automaticity (you do it without thinking) is faster earlier on and then slows down.
- Missing a day here and there doesn't destroy the habit formation.
Suddenly a TV strategy is looking a little pricier.
How does this help communications planning? Well, it gives us some scope of the length of the process, against which we can consider how difficult and disruptive against current routine the habit we are trying to encourage is. It also would suggest that the early stages are the most important (something we might have already thought, in fairness). Perhaps an approach of more directly eliciting behaviour in the early days, moving to a more arms-length reminder strategy later on would bear fruit.
But it sure ain't as simple as three weeks of telly.
-- Alex