Why Do People Buy?

To answer that question is the holy grail of copywriting.  Understanding what motivates buyers then replicating those triggers in writing has been the goal of professional marketers for decades.  Problem is, there isn’t just one thing.

Among the many elements that contribute to positive buying behavior are:

• Price
• Stage of life
• Familiarity
• Place in the buying process
• And others

But would you believe that habits also play a major role in why we buy?  Our own mundane, semi-unconscious buying habits can be one significant bundle of clues as to how we purchase and why.  This is a primary part of major business’s marketing intelligence and you may find it worthy of adding to your own target audience analysis.

“Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a ‘predictive analytics’ department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them,” reports Charles Duhigg, author of “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.”

Why?  Because our personal and business lives leave a clue trail that marketers can follow.  What’s more, when we buy habitually, we do so with hardly a thought.  Duhigg goes on to explain:

“An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began putting their rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.

“While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less.”

If your customers have ingrained buying behavior that causes them to react in specific ways without thinking, you’d be smart to (1) counteract those behaviors or (2) play to them so you could alter the results.

Can You Use the Information to Make Positives Changes?

Whether you’re a one-man-show or employed by a prominent conglomerate, what can you actually *do* with the data you collect?  If you can outline the habit loops within the behavior and identify the buying cues, you can use the information you uncover to make positive changes in your copywriting that will produce greater conversions.

Really?  Yes really.

Here are some real-life examples.

Paul O’Neill overhauled Alcoa and boosted the value of its stocks by relentlessly attacking one habit.  Once he changed a particular worker safety obstacle (got them to stop doing without thinking first), the cascade effect was a companywide transformation.

Proctor & Gamble (P&G) misread the buying cues when doing research for their Febreze product and the results were simply miserable come launch time.  However, once they went back to the drawing board and retained a better understanding of their particular customers’ buying behavior, they doubled sales within 2 months.  How?  In part, by understanding the habit loops that lead to customers feeling rewarded.

Huh?

There are 3 parts to habitual behavior (referred to as the habit loop):

►   Cue – This is what triggers the behavior.  For example, when someone comes to an ecommerce site, they may automatically look to the search box instead of the banner at the top of the page or your navigation bar. If you’re listing your specials or differentiating factors (such as free shipping) in the banner area, your customers could be overlooking them completely.

There’s no way you, on your own, will counteract this behavior, but you can play to it by listing your differentiating factors near the search box.

►   Routine – This is what happens after the trigger (cue) has been engaged. For example, once someone lands on your ecommerce website and automatically looks to the search box, the next step may be to type in what they are shopping for instead of clicking to categories in the navigation bar.

►   Reward – The reward is to find what they are looking for on the search results page.  Since this is the reward, you might look into placing messages/copy on this page that will help guide visitors’ attention to what you want them to see.

This is just the tip of the ice burg.  Habitual buying is truly fascinating.  I’ve purchased Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business” and can’t wait to read it all the way through.  In the meantime, you can bet I’ll be busy outlining habit loops and opting to provide better rewards for my visitors and my conversion rate.

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