Riani Kenyon is a caffeinated Zillennial who is hopelessly addicted to The Sims 4 and binge-watches her latest anime obsession when she’s not busy bopping to early 2000’s K-pop. Beyond being a nerd, she has worked on initiatives for the UN Academic Impact and the UK Model WHO, and also explored politics while interning at the House of Commons.


People expect products and services that feel made for them

Personal Worlds

Great Expectations

The ‘new year, new me’ mentality routinely sees people worldwide set goals around mental health and physical prowess. Indeed, 49% of Americans aged 26-41 are seeking to improve their mental wellbeing in 2023, and among Britons who intended to make resolutions for the new year, 53% aimed to do more exercise. 

Forbes

YouGov

 However, it’s often the case that attempts to form healthy habits fail just a few weeks into January – the 19th, more specifically (a.k.a. Quitter’s Day), according to research from fitness app Strava. 

Inc.

 This problem is due to the ‘effort paradox’, wherein our brains love the idea of effort but we are resistant to forming healthy habits in reality. 

The Conversation

 But unhealthy habits? Oh, we love those!

It’s all too easy to fall into the rabbit hole of scrolling on TikTok or binge-watching YouTube videos, taking time away from the health-focused goals we set for ourselves. With sophisticated algorithms feeding us cat video after cat video, it can seem that it’s harder to break bad habits than it is to form new ones. But where does loyalty lie in all of this? With loyalty being the holy grail for brands – framed as an active desire to re-interact with brands and products – what’s the difference between easy, habitual relationships and strong loyalties? After all, although 76% of people around the world consider themselves loyal to one or more brands, just 23% say they have a brand they’re unwaveringly loyal to simply because they love and trust it. By contrast, 39% stay loyal to their favourite brands due to regular discounts, incentives, and rewards. 

Emarsys

 about addiction and dopamine, specifically explaining how damaging it is for marketers and journalists to misinterpret and miscommunicate addiction. This belief came from his studies in experimental psychology and psycholinguistics, which morphed into quantitative narrative analysis. Toward the end of his undergraduate career, he moved towards neuroscience, and after graduation, got into behavioural pharmacology, sparking interest in studying drug abuse.

A subsequent career move saw him become a professional student at the University of Chicago so that he could stick around and do courses on neurology. However, he was very interested in consciousness, and that led him to 

 research into sea slugs. Llinas noticed these creatures have a brain only when they detach from the rock, and when they reattach themselves, they eat their brain. This phenomenon inspired McCandless to delve into spatial navigation, specifically when people move their heads in space and interact with signals in their environment. After studying consciousness, he looked at recovery from anaesthetics (specifically ketamine) during his master’s degree. Here, he learned about dopamine neurons that are linked to motivation and addiction by analysing processes of logic that lead towards or away from rewards or punishments. This accumulation of knowledge inspired him to apply these neuroscientific theories in a business context around consumer behaviour.

In this Thought Leader report, McCandless walks us through the pitfalls of mistaking habitual purchases with loyalty and how brands can reframe their marketing approaches by understanding store navigation and cognitive navigation.

 with Kevin Perlmutter at Brandingmag, wherein you hinted at how companies may mistake habits for loyalty. Could you provide more detail about why you believe this?

I think that the word ‘loyalty’ is a loaded term. It plays to the vanity of brands and marketers because, of course, everybody wants to feel that their work is valued by the people that they're doing it for. But the word loyalty is loaded because there’s a spectrum – from the brand lover to the rabid sports team fan. People are ‘loyal’ to a brand because the thing they provide does what it needs to do. People aren’t going to put a toothpaste brand on a t-shirt and get into fights about which toothpaste is better. But marketers and strategists still like to talk about toothpaste in terms of loyalty.

Loyalty often manifests because people are just sticking to a brand – they don’t want to go out of their way to look for something new when what they’re using now is satisfactory. This is actually just a habit. Loyalty and habit are kind of the same thing if you look at them from a certain angle, but it’s a spectrum.

So, how can brands stand out when people are navigating a physical space and interacting with products in a world where anything can be bought online?

It really depends on the category you’re talking about. When you go into the online environment, depending on your imagination, things are a little bit more flat, so you can discover things that you might not have noticed in-store. On the other hand, in a store such as your local grocery, you've created a habit of navigating the store using signs versus what you see on the shelves. It becomes easier for you to ignore things that you might actually be interested in.

If you think of grocery shopping, in particular, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individual items available. But it only takes the average person between 30 and 40 minutes to complete their weekly grocery trip. People are extraordinarily accurate and predict exactly how much money they're going to spend within something like 1% of their actual outlay. They're shockingly good at it. You have a fraction of a second, at most, to lay your eyes on any one thing, right? Brands like to think that they can attract attention to themselves on the shelf by doing things that make a product look very interesting in isolation. But when you're talking about passing hundreds of thousands of products within half an hour, that negates how interesting a product is in isolation because there’s a funnel of attention.

One thing that is noticeable is the consistency with which a shopper’s rhythm changes to investigate an item when their internal model of what they're looking for is disrupted. In the structural sense of cognitive science, there’s a difference between ‘system one’ and ‘system two’ processing – very fast, intuitive, and instinctive processing versus deliberate, laborious, and cognitive processing. Those two engage different brain circuits, so there are different methods used to study those time scales of cognitive processes.

Does ‘system two’ processing often relate to values and morals?

It certainly factors into it, depending on how strong your values and your morals are. So, if you're thinking of the environmental impact, for example, you would be very motivated by that consideration. For someone who wants to buy a Prius because they’re concerned about the environment, there would be a decades-long process of continually reevaluating that purchase. Their internal monologue would probably be, ‘Oh, geez – now the news is telling me that the amount of resources required to mine those car batteries is damaging. The way that the car was constructed – by shipping parts around the world and then building part of it here and then shipping that whole thing – would be a heavy carbon footprint’.

Yes, and with the cost of living crisis, some people who want to make those sustainable choices don’t have the money…

The conversation around the cost of a product is very important but often gets neglected. It’s important to note that the out-of-pocket, dollar cost of a product is one thing, but the time and effort cost of determining which product to buy is another. There's only so much energy that people have to dedicate to a purchasing decision, and if it's going to cost them a lot more time and effort to obtain the product, then they might opt not to. It comes down to accessibility, which is determined by distribution and penetration, and Coca-Cola is a perfect example of that.

You mentioned that habit and loyalty lie along a spectrum. So, do you think brands should focus on creating habits rather than loyalty within their target audiences?

I think you have to recognise that habit is an overwhelming force, and unless you can break through that, you can’t establish loyalty. So, I think you have to focus on both. It doesn't matter how excited people are about your product, if they can't get their hands on it, then it won’t go well. Accessibility is a cognitive thing as well as a physical thing.

For example, Budweiser, Miller, and Coors dominate the beer market in the US because of distribution and penetration. Most households are familiar with all three of those brands and trust them all. Often, people aren’t even buying it for themselves. They’ll just grab some beer when their relatives come over for Thanksgiving, and the beer stack closest to the cash register wins – as long as it’s recognisable.

I think the word ‘loyalty’ is not doing anyone any favours. In terms of linguistics, we might think we understand what a word means, but there are nuances in the way that people understand words. For example, a toothpaste brand might decide to boost loyalty by adding new flavours – for example, a pumpkin spice latte seasonal range – but people don’t want to be surprised by their toothpaste. People could call that loyalty to mint toothpaste, but it’s actually just aversion to that experience. What it really comes down to is being realistic about who you are – whether you’re a hip-hop artist, luxury car manufacturer, or toothpaste brand. The chief concern should be not disappointing the customer through unnecessary surprises that give them a reason to switch.

Habit isn’t boring, and it sometimes beats excitement

Marketers would benefit from thinking really hard about whether they should foster excitement or focus on the habit of purchasing. For example, when Tropicana redesigned its highly-identifiable packaging, sales tanked because people would look for the original style, and when they couldn’t find it while scanning the shelves, they would pick up a competitor's product. 

The Branding Journal

 So, Tropicana lost a lot of customers because people couldn’t find them when they were looking at hundreds and thousands of products within their 30-minute shopping trips. The packaging didn’t look the way customers expected it to look, and in their rapid processing mindsets, the brand was overlooked.

I think people will continue to buy smaller quantities of essential items in brick-and-mortar stores when they can’t buy them online. But Amazon often has quality control issues, like with beauty and care products that have broken packaging and spill everywhere. I also expect physical stores to focus on products that you can’t see the quality of online – for example, the colour of lipstick, the size of a shirt, or a piece of art. These items that require up-close interaction will continue to be better off in physical stores. Online, you're gonna change brands or loyalties based more on convenience and availability. What you communicate effectively about your brand has to be desired by the consumer. If you want to have an advantage over your competitors, you need to be giving people something that's desirable and true, but also is one of the things that makes your product different from the competitor's product.

 of people around the world consider themselves loyal to one or more brands

 of people say they have a brand they’re unwaveringly loyal to simply because they love and trust it

 stay loyal to their favourite brands due to regular discounts, incentives, and rewards

Brand loyalty can be viewed as a spectrum, where on one end, people stick to a particular product out of habit because it’s satisfactory and familiar

This kind of purchasing is driven by fast, intuitive cognitive processes, with product availability having a big impact on a person’s decision to repeatedly choose a brand

Changes to a product and its packaging or any inconvenience for shoppers can easily impact perceived loyalty to a brand

Dr. Cyrus H. McCandless is a neuroscientist-turned-marketing expert who is the vice president of scientific discovery and innovation at Sentient Decision Science. His support and research on neurophysiology helped him win four federally-funded awards to further bolster his knowledge creation on behavioural and cognitive neuroscience.

Global

Shopping

Behavioural Sciences

In many sectors, customer loyalty is believed to be a make-or-break factor in the success of a business. But what differentiates loyalty from habitual purchases? We spoke to neuroscientist Cyrus McCandless to understand the spectrum of loyalty and habit when it comes to consumer-brand engagement.

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