Habits are started by the setting, not by intentions. So the reminder has to live where the product is used, attached to something the customer already does.
Email reminders live in the inbox. Nobody checks their inbox at the bathroom sink at 10pm, which is when the night cream needs to be used. The cue has to be where the moment is.
Wendy Wood and David Neal describe habits as learned tendencies to repeat past responses, set off by features of the setting that have gone along with the behavior before: a place, the action just before it in a sequence, particular people Published. The setting starts the behavior directly; the goal doesn’t have to be in mind. A good cue ties your product to something that already happens every day in the right place: brushing teeth, making coffee, filling the dog’s bowl, putting on shoes.
Procter & Gamble’s Febreze is the best-known story of a product saved by a cue. It launched in the US in 1998 as a way to remove bad smells, and sold poorly. P&G’s researchers found that the people who most needed it had stopped noticing the smells in their own homes, so nothing prompted them to use it. The relaunch tied Febreze to the end of cleaning a room, as a finishing touch, and gave it a pleasant scent to make the moment feel done. Sales took off Reported. The story was reported by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times Magazine in 2012; it rests on P&G’s account and his reporting, not on a published study, but the lesson fits the research: the product needed a moment, not a benefit.
A benefit is a reason. A cue is a moment. Customers need the moment.
Much of the popular writing on cues, bowls and plate sizes comes from Brian Wansink’s lab. More than a dozen of his papers were retracted, and he resigned from Cornell in 2019 after the university found research misconduct including data falsification, so none of that work is used in this guide Reported.
This is one chapter of Used, Not Bought, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.