Ouch.
That's the cry of marketers everywhere if they take Dr. Neale Martin's doctrine as gospel. The addiction counselor turned marketing PhD (what ideal qualifications!) makes this sledgehammer statement in his thought-provoking and quite fascinating new book Habit:
95% of what consumers do
is pre-programmed behavior
impervious to marketing.
Uh, better update the ol' CV.
Still, this comes as a chance for vindication for FOPs and everyone here at Surprise Central. As Dr. Martin explains:
"We refer to the part of the brain where conscious, cognitive processing occurs as the executive mind. We call the region of the brain responsible for unconscious processing the habitual mind.
"To take a customer away from a competitor, you must break the customer's existing habits by first getting him to consciously think about the product."
"To take a customer away from a competitor, you must break the customer's existing habits by first getting him to consciously think about the product."
Here comes the good part...
"For all its remarkable abilities, the executive mind has the limitation of being able to consciously able to focus on only one thing at a time. If the mind perceives a situation as novel, the executive mind focuses on the problem. Novel situations activate and focus the executive mind."
And what, pray tell, can be more novel, more focusing, more habit-breaking than...
...well, you-know-what.