Hooked

Hooked shows you how some of the world’s most successful products, like smartphones, make us form habits around them and why that’s crucial to their success, before teaching you the 4-step framework that lies behind them.

What makes the iPhone the most profitable product in the history of the world? How come 1 out of every 7 humans on this planet is on Facebook? What makes these products so much more successful than others?

The answer, Eyal says, is that they make us form habits. We don’t just view these products as tools we sometimes use, they have quickly become an integral part of our day. We use them multiple times a day and feel like we can’t live without them.

Sure you might say, I get that. Habits are powerful and hard to break, we know that, but how does that power translate to products? Nir mentions 3 things:

Because habits are tough to break, we usually become very loyal and long-time customers of the companies that sell habit-forming products. I got my first iPhone in 2010. I haven’t had another kind of phone since. Nuff’ said. Habit-forming products also gain an advantage over the competition, because in order to replace the habit they create, a competitor’s product would have to be a lot better to make us break our habit and replace it with a new one. Lastly, customers of habit-forming products are not very sensitive to price changes, because of 1 and 2, which means the creators can charge a premium and increase prices as they go, without losing a lot of business.

Think about these points for some of the things you’re using on a daily basis, and you’ll see that’s the way these products got you hooked.

I’m not going to reveal Nir’s entire 4-step model here, but I do want to highlight one point that stood out for me. Your product will in some way reward the user, for example a Dropbox user is less worried about losing her data. However, these rewards must change over time, in order to remain effective. Studies with mice have shown that the mice were most eager to get the reward every single time when the reward itself changed – even if it meant there was no reward sometimes. That’s why the Facebook newsfeed is so addictive (here’s a great way to remove it, by the way). You keep on scrolling down, because there might be something great in there. Might. You don’t know, and sometimes you end up scrolling for 10 minutes, without finding anything that gives you that little dopamine hit. But sometimes you find the funniest video of all time. That’s what keeps it exciting.…