The Power of Habit – Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

[40] best-selling toothpaste for more than Pepsodent was eventually outsold by Crest, which featured fluoride-the first ingredient in toothpaste that actually made it effective at fighting cavities.

[41] A decade after Hopkins’s ad campaign Peter Miskell, “Cavity Protection or Cosmetic Perfection: Innovation and Marketing of Toothpaste Brands in the United States and Western Europe, 1955-1985,” Business History Review 78 (2004): 29-60.

[42] Studies of people who have successfully H. Aarts, T. Paulussen, and H. Schaalma, “Physical Exercise Habit: On the Conceptualization and Formation of Habitual Health Behaviours,” Health Education Research 3 (1997): 363-74.

[43] Research on dieting says Krystina A. Finlay, David Trafimow, and Aimee Villarreal, “Predicting Exercise and Health Behavioral Intentions: Attitudes, Subjective Norms, and Other Behavioral Determinants,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 32 (2002): 342-56.

[44] In the clothes-washing market alone Tara Parker-Pope, “P&G Targets Textiles Tide Can’t Clean,” The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 1998.

[45] Its revenues topped $35 billion Peter Sander and John Slatter, The 100 Best Stocks You Can Buy (Avon, Mass.: Adams Business, 2009), 294.

[46] They decided to call it Febreze The history of Febreze comes from interviews and articles, including “Procter & Gamble-Jager’s Gamble,” The Economist, October 28, 1999; Christine Bittar, “P&G’s Monumental Repackaging Project,” Brandweek, March 2000, 40-52; Jack Neff, “Does P&G Still Matter?” Advertising Age 71 (2000): 48-56; Roderick E. White and Ken Mark, “Procter & Gamble Canada: The Febreze Decision,” Ivey School of Business, London, Ontario, 2001. Procter & Gamble was asked to comment on the reporting contained in this chapter, and in a statement said: “P&G is committed to ensuring the confidentiality of information shared with us by our consumers. Therefore, we are unable to confirm or correct information that you have received from sources outside of P&G.”

[47] The second ad featured a woman Christine Bittar, “Freshbreeze at P&G,” Brandweek, October 1999.

[48] The cue: pet smells American Veterinary Medical Association, market research statistics for 2001.

[49] So a new group of researchers joined A. J. Lafley and Ram Charan, The Game Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation (New York: Crown Business, 2008).

[50] Rather than rats, however An overview of Wolfram Schultz’s research can be found in “Behavioral Theories and the Neurophysiology of Reward,” Annual Review of Psychology 57 (2006): 87-115; Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, and P. Read Montague, “A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward,” Science 275 (1997): 1593-99; Wolfram Schultz, “Predictive Reward Signal of Dopamine Neurons,” Journal of Neurophysiology 80 (1998): 1-27; L. Tremblya and Wolfram Schultz, “Relative Reward Preference in Primate Orbitofrontal Cortex,” Nature 398 (1999): 704-8; Wolfram Schultz, “Getting Formal with Dopamine and Reward,” Neuron 36 (2002): 241-63; W. Schultz, P. Apicella, and T. Ljungberg, “Responses of Monkey Dopamine Neurons to Reward and Conditioned Stimuli During Successive Steps of Learning a Delayed Response Task,” Journal of Neuroscience 13 (1993): 900-913.

[51] he was experiencing happiness It is important to note that Schultz does not claim that these spikes represent happiness. To a scientist, a spike in neural activity is just a spike, and assigning it subjective attributes is beyond the realm of provable results. In a fact-checking email, Schultz clarified: “We cannot talk about pleasure and happiness, as we don’t know the feelings of an animal… We try to avoid unsubstantiated claims and simply look at the facts.” That said, as anyone who has ever seen a monkey, or a three-year-old human, receive some juice can attest, the result looks a lot like happiness.

[52] The anticipation and sense of craving Schultz, in a fact-checking email, clarifies that his research focused not only on habits but on other behaviors as well: “Our data are not restricted to habits, which are one particular form of behavior. Rewards, and reward prediction errors, play a general role in all behaviors. Irrespective of habit or not, when we don’t get what we expect, we feel disappointed. That we call a negative prediction error (the negative difference between what we get and what we expected).”

[53] Most food sellers locate their kiosks Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (New York: Bantam, 2006); Sheila Sasser and David Moore, “Aroma-Driven Craving and Consumer Consumption Impulses,” presentation, session 2.4, American Marketing Association Summer Educator Conference, San Diego, California, August 8-11, 2008; David Fields, “In Sales, Nothing You Say Matters,” Ascendant Consulting, 2005.

[54] The habit loop is spinning because Harold E. Doweiko, Concepts of Chemical Dependency (Belmont, Calif.: Brooks Cole, 2008), 362-82.

[55] how new habits are created K. C. Berridge and M. L. Kringelbach, “Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure: Reward in Humans and Animals,” Psychopharmacology 199 (2008): 457-80; Wolfram Schultz, “Behavioral Theories and the Neurophysiology of Reward,” Annual Review of Psychology 57 (2006): 87-115.

[56] “wanting evolves into obsessive craving” T. E. Robinson and K. C. Berridge,