What if you could design marketing campaigns and products that customers can't help but come back to again and again? That's the power of understanding the psychology behind habit-forming products.

The Hooked Model: Breaking Down the Addiction Formula

"Hooked" by Nir Eyal examines how major tech companies create addictive products and distills these techniques into a practical framework. While not all products need to be habit-forming, understanding these principles can significantly enhance your marketing effectiveness.

The framework consists of four components: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment. Companies that apply this framework ethically—with a genuine focus on improving users' lives—tend to achieve more sustainable success.

Step 1: Triggers - The Starting Point of Engagement

Before we engage with any product, we need a trigger that initiates the behavior.

External triggers place information in our path that prompts action. These include:

• Paid advertising

• Invitations to join or participate

• Media coverage

• Email notifications and alerts

Internal triggers connect with our emotions and experiences. Common emotions that marketers can address include:

• Boredom

• Frustration

• Fear of missing out (FOMO)

• Desire for connection

When developing your marketing strategy, consider how your messaging can tap into both external visibility and internal emotional states.

Step 2: Action - Removing Friction Points

Once triggered, the user needs to take action. In "Hooked," Eyal references the work of B.J. Fogg, a Stanford University professor and behavior science expert known for his book "Tiny Habits." Fogg's influential behavior model explains: "B=MAP: Behavior (B) happens when Motivation (M), Ability (A), and a Prompt (P) come together at the same moment."

Key factors affecting ability to act include:

• Time required

• Financial cost

• Physical and mental effort

• Disruption to existing routines

• Social acceptability

Successful marketing removes these barriers and simplifies the path to action. When evaluating your campaigns or product design, look for ways to eliminate friction and make the desired behavior as effortless as possible.

Step 3: Variable Rewards - The Secret to Sustained Interest

Predictable products eventually bore users. We're naturally drawn to novelty and unexpected positive outcomes.

This explains why:

• Social media feeds keep us scrolling to see what might appear next

• Email notifications draw immediate attention

• Limited-time offers create urgency

Pinterest exemplifies this by showing partial images at the bottom of each screen, enticing users to continue scrolling to reveal more content.

For your marketing to maintain engagement, build in elements of variability and discovery. Just ensure that these rewards align logically with your product and the action taken—misalignment will cause engagement to drop.

Step 4: Investment - Making Users Committed

The more users invest in a product, the more likely they'll continue using it rather than switching to alternatives.

This investment can take many forms:

• Time spent creating content or building an audience on a platform

• Data stored in a system

• Learning curve and training completed

• Relationships established within a network

In the B2B space, companies become deeply invested in financial and business management software through employee training and data centralization. The significant effort required to migrate and retrain staff creates a powerful disincentive to switch.

When designing your marketing ecosystem, consider how you can encourage valuable user investment that increases the product's worth over time.

Ethical considerations for marketers and business owners

Master the art of mixing triggers, actions, variable rewards, and user investment, and you have the foundation for a successful product. But knowing this framework also reveals how companies might manipulate consumer behavior.

We should approach these techniques with ethics in mind. Before implementing habit-forming strategies, ask yourself:

1. Would you use your own product?

2. Will it genuinely improve your customers' lives?

Putting it into practice

Understanding the psychology behind habit-forming products transforms how you view technology and marketing. You'll start recognizing these patterns in the digital products you use daily and can thoughtfully apply them to your own marketing efforts.

For deeper insights, "Hooked" is worth the five-hour investment. Once you grasp this framework, you'll never see digital engagement the same way again.

Remember: The most successful products don't just capture attention temporarily—they create positive habits that genuinely enhance users' lives.

Before you go, I want to share a new direction: from Design Buddha to Brand Conductor

This marks the final edition of "Obviously Good" as Design Buddha evolves into Brand Conductor. Next week you'll receive the first issue of "The Conductor's Notes" – your weekly guide to orchestrating authentic marketing in an AI-driven world.

Why the change? Business is still all about human relationships, and it’s important to connect that with both the value and impact of technology. As AI transforms marketing, businesses need guidance on maintaining their authentic voice while leveraging these powerful new tools. Brand Conductor and The Conductor's Notes will focus on this critical intersection, providing practical insights on balancing human wisdom with technological capabilities.

I'm excited to continue this journey with you.

Your free subscription will automatically transfer – no action needed – but it will now come from [email protected]

Visit the new site here