‘Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior‘*
Catullus, the Roman love poet was the first great blogger of the love/ hate/love thing- in his case it was addressed to a young lady called Lesbia, who may have been- for him -hors de combat anyway, but that’s another story.
For marketeers, the equivalent of Lesbia is habit.
My, do marketing folk like a well established day-in, day-out piece of behaivour- an autopilot fix that we can’t do without, and if most people are are doing it or want to do it, then it’s a short satisfying jog to big volume, brand heaven. In this Nirvana will be found all the usual suspect high penetration, high frequency giants
But what if there is no habit established already?- ‘So what does a wheel do exactly?’ asked the caveman. It’s actually not so exciting to get an MP3player if you haven’t gone up a rudimentary learning curve in digital music and have no access to some MP3′s. There may be a wonderful new category opportunity just in front of you- but if only you can find the postioning moonletters to uncover the white space and a marketing idea to light the blue touch paper of consumer familiarity. Smnirnoff Ice was an overnight $ 1 billion success that actually took 10 years.
On the other hand, what if existing behaivour is so ingrained it’s difficult to establish innovative variations even when you can show a benefit. So called low interest categories dominate here: toothpaste, canned foods, margarines and spreads. The marketplace is littered with the shipwrecks of interesting bids to subvert a competitor with a subtle habit shift that didn’t quite succeed- herbs from the freezer, liquid coffee concentrate, or in the case of yogurt liqueurs didn’t come close to succeeding.
So Habit- I hate and I love you, but I gotta have you.
*’I hate and I love. Why do I do it, perchance you might ask?
I don’t know, but I feel it happening to me and I’m burning up.’
