The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (55 page)

7.7
buying different brands of beer
It’s difficult to make specific correlations between types of life changes and specific products. So, while we know that people who move or get divorced will change their buying patterns, we don’t know that divorce always influences beer, or that a new home always influences
cereal purchases. But the general trend holds. Alan Andreasen, “Life Status Changes and Changes in Consumer Preferences and Satisfaction,”
Journal of Consumer Research
11, no. 3 (1984): 784–94. For more on this topic, see E. Lee, A. Mathur, and G. Moschis, “A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Life Status Changes on Changes in Consumer Preferences,”
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
36, no. 2 (2007): 234–46; L. Euehun, A. Mathur, and G. Moschis, “Life Events and Brand Preferences Changes,”
Journal of Consumer Behavior
3, no. 2 (2003): 129–41.

7.8
and they care quite a bit
For more on the fascinating topic of how particular moments offer opportunities for marketers (or government agencies, health activists, or anyone else, for that matter) to influence habits, see Bas Verplanken and Wendy Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,”
Journal of Public Policy and Marketing
25, no. 1 (2006): 90–103; D. Albarracin, A. Earl, and J. C. Gillette, “A Test of Major Assumptions About Behavior Change: A Comprehensive Look at the Effects of Passive and Active HIV-Prevention Interventions Since the Beginning of the Epidemic,”
Psychological Bulletin
131, no. 6 (2005): 856–97; T. Betsch, J. Brinkmann, and K. Fiedler, “Behavioral Routines in Decision Making: The Effects of Novelty in Task Presentation and Time Pressure on Routine Maintenance and Deviation,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
28, no. 6 (1998): 861–78; L. Breslow, “Social Ecological Strategies for Promoting Healthy Lifestyles,”
American Journal of Health Promotion
10, no. 4 (1996), 253–57; H. Buddelmeyer and R. Wilkins, “The Effects of Smoking Ban Regulations on Individual Smoking Rates,” Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series no. 1737, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne, 2005; P. Butterfield, “Thinking Upstream: Nurturing a Conceptual Understanding of the Societal Context of Health Behavior,”
Advances in Nursing Science
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, ed. W. D. Crano and M. Burgoon (East Sussex, U.K.: Psychology, 2001); R. Fazio, J. Ledbetter, and T. Ledbetter, “On the Costs of Accessible Attitudes: Detecting That the Attitude Object Has Changed,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
78, no. 2 (2000): 197–210; S. Fox et al., “Competitive Food Initiatives in Schools and Overweight in Children: A Review of the Evidence,”
Wisconsin Medical Journal
104, no. 8 (2005): 38–43; S. Fujii, T. Gärling, and R. Kitamura, “Changes in Drivers’ Perceptions and Use of Public Transport During a Freeway Closure: Effects of Temporary Structural Change on Cooperation in a Real-Life Social Dilemma,”
Environment and Behavior
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and Social Psychology
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Science
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American Journal of Preventive
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Journal of Environmental Psychology
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Health Psychology
23, no. 2 (2004): 126–31; H. C. Triandis, “Values, Attitudes, and Interpersonal Behavior,”
Nebraska Symposium on Motivation
27 (1980): 195–259.

7.9
before a child’s first birthday
“Parents Spend £5,000 on Newborn Baby Before Its First Birthday
,” Daily Mail,
September 20, 2010.

7.10
$36.3 billion a year
Brooks Barnes, “Disney Looking into Cradle for Customers,”
The New York Times,
February 6, 2011.

7.11
Jenny Ward, a twenty-three-year-old
The names in this paragraph are pseudonyms, used to illustrate the types of customers Target’s models can detect. These are not real shoppers.

7.12
profile their buying habits
“McDonald’s, CBS, Mazda, and Microsoft Sued for ‘History Sniffing,’ ”
Forbes.com
January 3, 2011.

7.13
ferret out their mailing addresses
Terry Baynes, “California Ruling Sets Off More Credit Card Suits,” Reuters, February 16, 2011.

7.14
forecasted if a tune was likely to succeed
A. Elberse, J. Eliashbert, and J. Villanueva, “Polyphonic HMI: Mixing Music with Math,”
Harvard Business Review,
August 24, 2005.

7.15
thirty-seven times throughout the month
My thanks to Adam Foster, director of data services, Nielsen BDS.

7.16
Listeners didn’t just dislike “Hey Ya!”
My thanks to Paul Heine, now of
Inside Radio;
Paul Heine, “Fine-tuning People Meter,”
Billboard,
November 6, 2004; Paul Heine, “Mscore Data Shows Varying Relationship with Airplay,”
Billboard,
April 3, 2010.

7.17
make “Hey Ya!” into a hit
In fact-checking communications, Steve Bartels, the Arista promotions executive, emphasized that he saw the fact that “Hey Ya!” was polarizing as a good thing. The song was released and promoted with another tune—“The Way You Move”
—
that was the other big single from OutKast’s two-disc release
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
. “You want there to be a reaction,” Bartels told me. “Some of the smarter [program directors] looked at the polarization as an opportunity to give the station an identity. The fact that there was a quick turn-off reaction, to me, doesn’t mean we’re not succeeding. It’s my job to convince PDs that’s why they should look at this song.”

7.18
they stayed glued
Stephanie Clifford, “You Never Listen to Celine Dion? Radio Meter Begs to Differ,”
The New York Times,
December 15, 2009; Tim Feran, “Why Radio’s Changing Its Tune,”
The Columbus Dispatch,
June 13, 2010.

7.19
the superior parietal cortex
G. S. Berns, C. M. Capra, and S. Moore, “Neural Mechanisms of the Influence of Popularity on Adolescent Ratings of Music,”
NeuroImage
49, no. 3 (2010): 2687–96; J. Bharucha, F. Musiek, and M. Tramo, “Music Perception and Cognition Following Bilateral Lesions of Auditory Cortex,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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Trends in Cognitive Sciences
9, no. 12 (2005): 578–84; S. Brown, M. Martinez, and L. Parsons, “Passive Music Listening Spontaneously Engages Limbic and Paralimbic Systems,”
NeuroReport
15, no. 13 (2004): 2033–37; Josef Rauschecker, “Cortical Processing of Complex Sounds,”
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
8, no. 4 (1998): 516–21; J. Kaas, T. Hackett, and M. Tramo, “Auditory Processing in Primate Cerebral Cortex,”
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
9, no. 2 (1999): 164–70; S. Koelsch, “Neural Substrates of Processing Syntax and Semantics in Music,”
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
15 (2005): 207–12; A. Lahav, E. Saltzman, and G. Schlaug, “Action Representation of Sound: Audiomotor Recognition Network While Listening to Newly Acquired Actions,”
Journal of Neuroscience
27, no. 2 (2007): 308–14; D. Levitin and V. Menon, “Musical Structure Is Processed in ‘Language’ Areas of the Brain: A Possible Role for Brodmann Area 47 in Temporal Coherence,”
NeuroImage
20, no. 4 (2003): 2142–52; J. Chen, V. Penhume, and R. Zatorre, “When the Brain Plays Music: Auditory-Motor Interactions in Music Perception and Production,”
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
8, 547–58.

7.20
a cacophony of noise
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Psychology of Music
32, no. 1 (2004): 5–22; G. Berns, C. Capra, and S. Moore, “Neural Mechanisms of the Influence of Popularity on Adolescent Ratings of Music,”
NeuroImage
49, no. 3 (2010): 2687–96; David Hargreaves and Adrian North, “Subjective Complexity, Familiarity, and Liking for Popular Music,”
Psychomusicology
14, no. 1996 (1995): 77–93. For more on this fascinating topic of how familiarity influences attractiveness across numerous senses, see also G. Berns, S. McClure, and G. Pagnoni, “Predictability Modulates Human Brain Response to Reward
,” Journal of Neuroscience
21, no. 8 (2001): 2793–98; D. Brainard, “The Psychophysics Toolbox,”
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Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
20, no. 6 (2008): 941–51; J. Kable and P. Glimcher, “The Neural Correlates of Subjective Value During Intertemporal Choice
,
”
Nature Neuroscience
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Neuron
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Nature
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
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Journal of Neuroscience
27, no. 2 (2007): 308–14; D. Levitin and V. Menon, “Musical Structure Is Processed in ‘Language’ Areas of the Brain: A Possible Role for Brodmann Area 47 in Temporal Coherence,”
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49, no. 3 (2010): 2687–96; Adrian North and David Hargreaves, “Subjective Complexity, Familiarity,
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